The Current Cinema by Terrence Rafferty.

Comment by Adam Gopnik. Comment about Magic Johnson testing postive for the HIV virus. The news was met by the country with shock and sadness but with more complicated emotions as well. Some AIDS activists, for example, expressed a certain mordant anger that, when so many people with AIDS were dying around us every...

The Talk of the Town Instrumental by Mindy Aloff. Talk story about the guitar maker Manuel Salvador and the musicologist and guitarist Hopkinson Smith. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a current exhibition called "The Spanish Guitar." Mr. Smith talks about Andres Segovia, whose own guitar, labelled "Manuel Ramirez, Madrid, 1912," is in the show. Mr. Salvador, touring the...

The Talk of the Town Accommodating by Susan Orlean. Talk story about a dry cleaner's store which hired Nat Freund, a tailor, after his position at Valetone's Cleaners ended. Writer notices that he had joined the staff of Manhattan Valet at the corner of 97th and Columbus Avenue, because a large sign in the window announced his presence. Gary...

Fiction Outlaw Love by Polly Frost. Courtney Millerton-Rodriguez, a schoolgirl, comes home in tears one day because a boy named Wilton Enright interrupted her report on minimizing water usage, by setting off a stink bomb. He left her a note saying, "Dear Courney Millerton-Rodriguez, You made me do this. When I see you handling...

Fiction William's Shoes by Lore Segal. Ilka Carl takes a trip to Greece and Turkey aboard the British cruise ship Ithaca. The cruise features two classy Greek women guides, Dimitra and Aikaterini, and three British lecturers, Prof. Charles Baines-Smith, Willoughby Austen, and the Rev. Martin Gallworth. Among her fellow passengers are an elderly couple named...

Letter from Berlin by Jane Kramer. The Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989. The young W. German writer, Wiglaf Droste, said that the first night was sentimental & cathartic, but after that there was "no dignity at all". Unification dates formally from Helmut Kohl's announcement of a ten-point "unity plan" in Nov., 1989...

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

Report from Aspen by Jeremy Bernstein. Tells about a controversy with the Environmental Protection Agency over a lead tailings site in the area of the Smuggler Mobile Home Park, a trailer court at the foot of Smuggler Mountain. The site was first found by a graduate student at Colorado State University named David Boon, when he...

Books BOOKS CHILDREN'S BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS by Faith McNulty. Next fall the children's book "Charlotte's Web", by E.B. White, will be forty years old. Writer takes this occasion to write a brief biography of E.B. White and to discuss his children's books...

The Film File Rambling Rose by Michael Sragow. A nineteen-year-old live wire named Rose (Laura Dern), an unconventional housekeeper and nanny, brings sexual electricity to an eccentric middle-class household in sleepy Depression-era Georgia. She throws herself at Daddy (Robert Duvall) and introduces thirteen-year-old Brother (Lukas Haas) to the mysteries of the female orgasm. By the time she leaves,...

The Film File The Butcher’s Wife by Michael Sragow. This slow-building, erratic, genial comedy has been promoted as an heir to “Ghost,” simply because it stars Demi Moore as a North Carolina clairvoyant. She misreads one of her own dreams, marries a New York City butcher (George Dzundza), and promptly falls for the psychiatrist across the street (Jeff Daniels)....

The Film File Year of the Gun by Michael Sragow. The subject of the not-so-innocent abroad receives a visually sharp, dramatically fuzzy treatment in the latest suspense film from John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate”). Andrew McCarthy plays David, an American reporter and would-be fiction writer secretly writing a novel on the Red Brigades while working for an English-language newspaper in...

Poetry Man On a Fire Escape by Edward Hirsch. He couldn't remember what propelled him...

Poetry Where to Begin by Sherod Santos. Where to begin? My earliest...