THE MAGAZINE READER

VANITY FAIR'S ARAFAT AIR SCOOP

T.D. Allman got aboard Yasser Arafat's plane on just 10 minutes' notice, and spent the dizzying 40 hours that followed in four Arab countries where the PLO leader was alighting like a proconsul. Among Allman's observations (in the February Vanity Fair):

Arafat is bald under his kaffiyeh, and he has a full beard -- it's just that cameras make him look unshaven. Aboard his flying command center are two fax machines, a modem and a backup pilot ready to take over from a suddenly errant one. "I can tell you that I will never, under any circumstances, be taken alive," Arafat told Allman, as they teased and poked at one another on the plane rides. They didn't talk much substance, but Allman sketches in the issues here and there.

In the end the telling memento, for Allman, is his host's calling card, which reads simply: Yasser Arafat. No address, no phone. From this and the whirlwind shuttle, Allman takes away, unsalted, a "revelation" about Arafat's nomadic condition. "It was the exhausting realization, far more exhausting than lack of sleep, that wherever we went next, it wouldn't be home. For the first time in my life, I sensed what it must be like to be a man without a country."

The concessions George Shultz wrested from Arafat last month must have made the Palestinians a hot commodity. Arafat's resident intellectual presence, Edward W. Said, the Palestinian-American scholar at Columbia, is profiled in this week's New York (Jan. 23).

Born to privilege in Jerusalem, educated in posh schools in Cairo and Massachusetts, an Episcopalian who serves on the Palestine National Council, Said (say Sa-yeed) is portrayed as a reluctant but dedicated activist for the Palestinian cause -- and like Arafat, as a man without a country. "Always a gentleman, yet always a stranger," Dinitia Smith writes, "he in some ways never quite seems to belong."

In that respect, Said's Jewish friends point out, he has much in common with Jews. But in his constant U.S. television appearances, Said is ready to pronounce a "moral difference" between acts of Palestinian and Israeli terrorism: "Far more Palestinians -- by a ratio of 100 to 1 -- have been killed by Israelis than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians."

Babies and Bottom Line(r)s

The influence of magazines can take unexpected forms.

When the appropriate-country-living bimonthly Harrowsmith decided to begin mailing copies in transparent plastic polybags (the ones that have New Yorker subscribers, among others, up in arms), the magazine needed an environmentally correct solution. Your common polybag isn't biodegradable, and survives somewhere for hundreds of years.

Harrowsmith eventually found a starch-based plastic that decomposes quickly, and launched the new bag last summer. One subscriber, Rocky Mountain Medical Corp., was especially impressed. It turns out (according to the January/February Harrowsmith) that the Colorado disposable-diaper manufacturer had been looking everywhere for a biodegradable plastic to serve as a liner for its otherwise all-natural diaper, which breaks down in a landfill in a few years. And there it was.

Too bad the 30 million disposables that modern parents process every year will be around a good while longer -- in landfills and on store shelves: So far, the new biodegradable diaper is a third more expensive than your ordinary incorrect diaper. Interested parties can call Rocky Mountain at (800) 344-6379.

Say It Ain't So, Joe

This is no time to bring up the next political campaign, but the show goes on. Campaigns & Elections, which harbors essential reading for the permanent campaign community, has a January/February cover on "The Redistricting Sweepstakes" in 1991, with a state-by-state roundup of likely winners and losers.

In Iowa, for instance, which stands to lose a seat, one congressional district may draw a showdown between two Republican incumbent showmen, former radio farm program host Jim Ross Lightfoot and former actor Fred Grandy. In Massachusetts, meanwhile, Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II represents the district most likely to be eliminated, but does the state political hierarchy dare?

Also in this issue: highs and lows of campaign '88; an interview with columnist Jack Germond; and best of all, ads peddling political services and other things -- like "Clairol and Bristol Myers Host ... The Fresh-Up Lounge for Members of the Press at the 1989 Presidential Inauguration." For a year's worth (seven issues) send $29.95 to Campaigns & Elections, 1835 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20077.

Corporate Help for the Homeless

The lead story in Legal Times this week (Jan. 16) has a startling first sentence: "Corporate America has come rushing to the aid of Mitch Snyder and his advocacy group, the Community for Creative Non-Violence." If you've sat up in your seat, you can relax. As Jonathan Groner reports, IBM, Time, AT&T and others have found common cause with Snyder in his dispute with a Baltimore sculptor, James Earl Reid, over rights to a work of art CCNV commissioned. Corporate control of the art it commissions could turn on the outcome of this unusual Supreme Court copyright case, the scene for which is ably set here.

Artful Matches

Art & Antiques regularly mismatches writers and subjects, to wonderful effect. It asks people of broad interests but no special expertise to talk about the art that intrigues them. Take the January issue: Novelist Alice Adams ("Second Chances") reflects on Frida Kahlo, the artist best and perhaps most unfairly known as the wife of Diego Rivera, while novelist Larry Woiwode ("Born Brothers") looks through the eyes of the ornery painter Grant Wood at the territory they explore on the page and canvas both -- the upper Midwest.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.