February 1998
In This Issue
Edward G. Shirley, “Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?”; Thomas Maeder, “A Few Hundred People Turned to Bone”; Kitty La Perriere, “The Thread of Time”; Lee K. Abbott, “All Things, All at Once”; and much more.
Articles
A Few Hundred People Turned To Bone
Medical researchers struggle to understand—and hope eventually to cure—a bizarre and little-known disease that slowly but inescapably turns its victims into masses of solid bone
When Is a Planet Not a Planet?
Arguments for and against demoting Pluto
Falling Water
Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
The sensational revelations of recent years about the Central Intelligence Agency almost obscure a larger point: The Agency is just no good at what it's supposed to be doing. So writes the author, a former CIA officer, who describes a corrosive culture in which promotion-hungry operatives collect pointless intelligence from worthless foreign agents. Reform, the author warns, may be impossible.
Special Intelligence
The roles of the CIA and the military may merge, in the form of "Special Forces," made up of data-analyzing urban commandos
Word Improvisation
Investigations of slang by the editor of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
Not Singing Too Much
A vocal performance by the pianist and songwriter Dave Frishberg is more like a series of witty asides
All Things, All at Once
He was recently separated from a wife he didn't understand. He was a father who tried to supply what children are said to have need of. But mainly he was a man wobbly in the departments that public moralists like to yatter about
The Thread of Time
Imagination often fails us when we try to understand a long-abandoned world
A Means of Transport
Building character in the Moscow metro
Inside Anatolia
Taking the road less traveled in Turkey, too, makes all the difference
A Star-Making Performance
Mesmer, the story of an eighteenth-century healer, still doesn't have a U.S. distributor. But Alan Rickman's acting in the title role is inspired.
A Thriller With Something on Its Mind
It tends to get lost in discussions of his teeth, but Martin Amis is teetering on the edge of profundity
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Letters
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