Comment by William Finnegan. The "Times "last month devoted, a front-page story to a police drug raid at the University of Virginia. The haul from the raid was modest-twelve small sandwich bags of marijuana, three bags of psilocybin mushrooms, a few tablets of LSD, some water pipes, twelve students arrested--but the...

The Talk of the Town Documented by Mark Singer. Talk story about the Smithsonian Insititution's preservation of an office from The New Yorker. Last summer, while we were still in our old offices, a group of curators from the Smithsonian came to tour the ancient beige hallways, and selected an office to preserve Pete Daniel, the curator of the...

The Talk of the Town Family Business by David Owen. Talk story about Albert Constantine & Son, on Eastchester Road in the Bronx, which sells supplies to woodworkers. The company is best known for its veneers. Woodworkers use veneers to add relatively interesting surfaces to relatively uninteresting pieces of wood. The most expensive veneer is Macassar ebony, from India. Veneers...

The Talk of the Town Poets by Amy Clyde. A talk story about a celebrity poetry reading at Tommy Tang's, a Thai-Californian restaurant in TriBeCa. Tel. (212) 334-9190...

Fiction Ask Sherman Strong by Ian Frazier. Parody of a newspaper column in which readers write in to ask the millionaire columnist for money. A series of insistent, shameless letters come from R.G., of Lake Forest, Ill., a self-described "chintzy little pointy-toothed advantage-taking ratty guts." George Abshire, of Sidney, Nebraska, writes, "I would never...

Fiction The Profumo Affair by Ethna Carroll. The narrator returns to Dublin for the funeral of her mother. She lives with her husband, a carpenter, in Detroit. Sorting out the contents of her mother's house, she remembers her childhood, when her father lived overseas, in Brisbane. She remembers a holy picture of the Sacred Heart that hung...

Annals of Place REINVENTING BALTIMORE by Anthony Hiss. ANNALS OF PLACE about Baltimore. With its 736,000 residents it ranks as the 12th-largest city in the U.S. It is a young city for a part of the world where many settlements reach back to the 17th cen. Though it was founded in the early years of the 18th...

The Theatre MOLOTOV COCKTAIL by Edith Oliver.

The Art World (The Art Galleries) by Adam Gopnik.

Reflections THE USES OF FORCE by Richard J. Barnet. potentially hostile acts of other nations, the mounting costs have contributed greatly to the growing need for foreign short-term capital to finance the deficit. The consequence is an increase in the leverage that other nations can exert on this nation's domestic policy choices. The US is operating at a...

The Sky Line by Brendan Gill.

Books by John Updike.

The Film File The Marrying Man by Michael Sragow. Vicki Anderson, Bugsy Siegel’s favorite saloon singer, is devastatingly attractive to Charley Pearl, the toothpaste heir. It’s lust at first sight; by the fourth time he marries her, it turns into love. For the farce to work, the audience would have to share Charley’s funny feeling. But Kim Basinger, as...

Poetry The Fair Hill by Seamus Heaney. Like a foulmouthed god of hemp come down to rut...

Poetry When by C. K. Williams. As soon as the old man knew he was actually dying, even...

Poetry Still-Life on a Matchbox Lid by Charles Wright. The heart is colder than the eye is...