The Meridian Archive
MER
December 1989
After the Wall: Letters from Berlin

After the Wall: Letters from Berlin

Closed mid-November 1989 · On stands late November 1989

The Front

Index of 1989

Year-end ephemera — a season's stray numbers, not news

On Language

'perestroika' in American usage, five years on

The Essay

On Fukuyama's 'End of History?'

Argues it is too soon and too American in perspective

The Foreign File

Berlin Dispatch

Filed from the opening of the Wall, Nov 9

Bonn Analysis

Kohl and the politics of reunification, considered from a distance

The Feature Well

The Sultan's Birthday, Revisited

A profile of Malcolm Forbes and the economics of a fortune spent entirely on being seen spending it, keyed to the summer's Tangier extravagance

The Landlords

Well feature added by Claude 2026-07-21 per Jan's ruling (subject choice is Claude's job); anti-bias reasoning in meridian-print/WORKPLAN.md §Wave 4. Jan may veto.

After Webster

Well feature added by Claude 2026-07-21 per Jan's ruling; anti-bias reasoning in meridian-print/WORKPLAN.md §Wave 4. Jan may veto.

The City

The Coalition

Dinkins's election by a 47,000-vote margin, and the Hawkins summer that shaped it

The Won War

The clean cars and the still-dirty stations — the MTA's graffiti campaign, six months on

The Back

Books: Essay occasioned by Mary McCarthy's death in October — the quarrels, the exactness, the Hellman suit, the late corpus · Art: The National Gallery's East Building rehang, and what a decade of acquisitions added up to · Film: Do the Right Thing, six months on, in retrospect