What Comes Through the Door
Closed mid-December 1989 · On stands late December 1989
The Front
Index of the Opening
Numbers of November — crossings, chisels sold, champagne prices in two currencies
On Language
'Wende' enters American copy; what the borrowed word carries
Sunday at the Cathedral
The December 10 protest at St. Patrick's — 111 arrested; written fast for the front of the book at the close (checked novel ch. 2)
The Presumptive Refugee
The Lautenberg Amendment grants Soviet Jews and designated minorities presumptive refugee status
The Essay
Witnesses, Withdrawn and Restored
The NEA pulls, then restores, the grant behind Nan Goldin's 'Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing'; what the reversal reveals about the funding of grief
The Foreign File
After the Checkpoint
The follow-up assigned in-house mid-November; staff writer, not the Bonn stringer. Lands competent and late; the piece the quarterlies quote is Harper's.
The Feature Well
The Cellist at the Wall
Profile of a face the Wall happened to; pitched mid-November
Transition
Dinkins assembles a government; City Hall between administrations
The City
The Club Admits
The New York Athletic Club admits its first women members, closing out the club-integration fight
The Back
Books: Review essay on the year's Eastern European fiction in translation · Art: The season's museum surveys outside New York; what money did in the regionals · Film: Roger & Me and the manners of ambush