What the Fund Held
Closed mid-January 1992 · On stands late January 1992
The Front
Field Notes
A season of layoff notices read as a genre; the euphemisms tracked across three industries
On the Word 'Restructuring'
Short column on corporate language entering ordinary speech, and the year-end bonus pool a floor of the same company somehow still finds
The Essay
The Weight of a Pension
What a defined-benefit promise actually is, legally, and how thin the wall around it turns out to be
The Foreign File
The Price of the Ruble
Russia liberalizes prices January 2, ending decades of state-set costs overnight — a stringer's notes from a bread line doing the new arithmetic
The Feature Well
What the Fund Held
Robert Maxwell's death at sea on November 5 and the draining of his companies' pension funds, uncovered in the weeks after
The Understudy
Profile of a touring-company swing five seasons into never getting the call, the $28-a-ticket road-show economics and the one Sondheim number she's never allowed to sing in front of a paying house
Crossing
Sana pitches and shoots a wordless photo essay of refugee columns moving out of Croatia through the winter; Nora runs it unglossed, three months before Bosnia's war turns the region into front-page American material, over the executive editor's insistence that a photo essay needs an argument underneath it
The City
Subject: Notes from a co-op board meeting, the winter agenda
The Back
Books: A biography of a robber baron, reviewed against the current news · Art: A survey of the winter's museum acquisitions outside New York — a Midwestern collection's new wing, a Southern museum's rehang · Film: A quiet January ahead of Sundance, the festival's early buzz titles