Frienship

Throughout my childhood and adolescence and my 20s, my father, G. Roy Levin, played poker with the same small group every Thursday night in Plainfield, Vt. I remember coming downstairs and seeing them sitting at his kitchen table, intense and jovial under a haze of smoke. There was Andy Potok, the stepfather of my sister Bryna's best friend, Maya; Anita Landa, who had been one of my teachers in seventh grade; and Allen Soule, who ran a teenage group home down the road from my mother's house.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence and my 20s, my father, G. Roy Levin, played poker with the same small group every Thursday night in Plainfield, Vt. I remember coming downstairs and seeing them sitting at his kitchen table, intense and jovial under a haze of smoke. There was Andy Potok, the stepfather of my sister Bryna's best friend, Maya; Anita Landa, who had been one of my teachers in seventh grade; and Allen Soule, who ran a teenage group home down the road from my mother's house.

The snapshots of America are as simple as they are familiar: a mirrored skyscraper standing tall over a sleepy city, a shoe store on a busy street, a swimming pool and hot tub nestled behind a tract house. Each is but a snippet of a vast and complex nation, but taken together a picture begins to emerge of a people and a country, one seemingly so rich in many ways yet so needy in others. It was the America as seen through the eyes of Maxim V. Chikin and Aleksie Grinevich, two Soviet journalists who gained firsthand impressions of life in the United States while accompanying 11-year-old Tony Aliengena of San Juan Capistrano on his historic flight around the world.

Bill Clinton has dozens. Barbra Streisand has more than most people could ever dream of. And let's not even talk about Steve Spielberg and Jeff Katzenberg. * We're talking Friends. Good Friends. Close Friends. The kind you do lunch with and make deals with. The kind you go to gourmet-sushi benefits for, and disclose things to the press about.

Bill Clinton has dozens. Barbra Streisand has more than most people could ever dream of. And let's not even talk about Steve Spielberg and Jeff Katzenberg. * We're talking Friends. Good Friends. Close Friends. The kind you do lunch with and make deals with. The kind you go to gourmet-sushi benefits for, and disclose things to the press about.

Walt Disney Co. warned regulators Tuesday that an America Online-Time Warner merger would severely limit entertainment programming and urged that tough restrictions be imposed on the deal. Disney called on federal regulators to split the vast content and distribution holdings of the two into separate subsidiaries, or force AOL-Time Warner to provide its television and Internet rivals with nondiscriminatory access to their cable networks.

The snapshots of America are as simple as they are familiar: a mirrored skyscraper standing tall over a sleepy city, a shoe store on a busy street, a swimming pool and hot tub nestled behind a tract house. Each is but a snippet of a vast and complex nation, but taken together a picture begins to emerge of a people and a country, one seemingly so rich in many ways yet so needy in others. It was the America as seen through the eyes of Maxim V. Chikin and Aleksie Grinevich, two Soviet journalists who gained firsthand impressions of life in the United States while accompanying 11-year-old Tony Aliengena of San Juan Capistrano on his historic flight around the world.