March 1986
In This Issue
Explore the March 1986 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Richard Avedon's Imagined West
A New Route to Equality
The Serpent and the Rainbow
South Light
Rat Man of Paris
America in Europe
The Irrepressible Churchill
The Beetle of Aphrodite
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
A Day at a Time
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Acrostic No. 8
The Puzzler
Notes: The Category Crisis
Washington: The Curse of the Six-Year Itch
In the coming midterm elections a venerable political pattern threatens Republican control of the Senate
The Ussr: Atari Bolsheviks
Moscow’s ambitious campaign to “computerize" the Soviet economy is off to a slow start
The Gambia: Signs in the Wilderness
Once admired for her skill with sign language ,a laboratory-bred chimp must now adapt to the jungle—or die
Early Admissions
Contributors
What Can Become of South Africa?
On South African television recently, Atlantic contributing editor Conor Cruise O’Brien put forward a scenario about the future of the country which drew this response from a former high South African diplomat: “That thing is my nightmare. ...” The “nightmare ” is joint U.S.—Soviet military intervention to depose the apartheid regime. This shocking result, O’Brien writes, is where the political dynamics generated by the “incipient civil war" in South Africa may be leading. The South Africa that O’Brien evokes for us here is at once grimmer and more ambiguous than the place depicted on our71screens—a country in which the cause of justice is championed by “a political movement whose sanction, symbol, and signature is the burning alive of people in the street. ”
Meanwhile
The Weather Watchers
In the United States every year the weather claims 700 lives and does billions of dollars’ worth of damage. But forecasting is getting better
The Pacific
Selective Perjury
Joseph Conrad and Lady Ottoline Morrell
Ring Resplendent
The Revival of the Haute Couture
