December 16, 1961

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WHY WE’RE LOSING LAOS

In this musical-comedy kingdom the West has backed, the wrong prince for the last time. Now the Communists are an easy coup away from taking over, and in the wings the U. S. Marines may be preparing for another Korea By Peter C. Newman15 min

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO DRIVE A BUICK TO MOSCOW

WE ENTERED RUSSIA from Finland one fine morning early last summer, down a spruce and pine-lined road, not unlike many of the scenic roads of northern Ontario. At the border there was a wooden gate, like the barrier at a railway crossing, and a few soldiers with rifles.

The human body is better than anyone thought

ON A DAY IN May in 1931, a high-domed Harvard physiologist named Prof. D. S. Lyon took a long, hard look at the athletic world's runners and jumpers and decided they'd gone about as far as they could go. Throwing down his calipers, he wrote in a scientific journal that it was beyond human capacity to jump higher than six-feet-nine or broader than twenty-six feet, to pole-vault higher than fifteen feet, or to run a mile in less than four minutes. By Trent Frayne14 min

A MECHANIC TELLS WHY WE SHOULD SCRAP 10-YEAR-OLD CARS

LAST SUMMER, I decided to quit driving my car on week ends on Ontario highways. The reason was cowardice — or prudence. I had become obsessed with the thought that I would be killed in a collision with an old car, which, in my imagination, swerved from the approaching lane of traffic and crashed into me head on.

Why hockey keeps getting faster . . . and gentler

WHEN THE Chicago Black Hawks eliminated the Montreal Canadiens in the semifinal series of the Stanley Cup playoffs last year, the unexpected defeat did not sit easily with the Canadiens' top brass. “That kind of hockey will set the game back fifty years." By Dink Carroll13 min

A TEN-DAY TRENCHERMAN'S TOUR OF WINNIPEG

UNTIL THIS FALL I seldom dined out in Winnipeg. where I live, and when I did I made for a Salisbury House and ordered a nip — which is to say that I went to one of a local chain of all-night short-order stands and ate a good hamburger. Those days are behind both Winnipeg and me.

FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT

WE’RE ARMING FOR THE WRONG WAR

I RECENTLY RETURNED to Ottawa after a 40,000-mile journey around the earth. In eleven key countries where the cold war is being fought I talked to people at many levels of responsibility, from the worried prime minister of Iran and the suave secretary-general of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, to the bow-backed driver of a Laotian cyclo, one of the three-wheeled bicycles that serve as taxis on the muddy streets of Vientiane.

BERTRAND RUSSELL CUTS A DISC: A ROGUES' GALLERY OF GREAT NAMES

ONLY A DAY after Russia exploded its thirty-megaton bomb and British newspapers warned of a possible fallout threat to milk I went along to hear Bertrand Russell. OM, FRS, the third Earl Russell, speak in a small recording studio in London.

December 21961