The Almanac Keeps Its Own Counsel
Closed mid-December 1992 · On stands late December 1992
The Front
A Glossary Examined and Found Wanting
The Times prints a list of purported Seattle slang for its grunge coverage; the words do not check out
The Line Nobody Reads
A new federal law requires 900-number services to post their price and lets a household block the calls outright
Field Notes: The Champagne Reorder
A count of corporate accounts that reordered White Star by the case in the first week of January, tallied without comment
The Essay
The Slow Thaw
Furniture, not forecast: what the last recession-shadowed winter felt like across the country's downtowns and office parks, argued without a single new data point
The Foreign File
London, Midwinter
A short dispatch on the mood in Whitehall corridors as the new European arrangements settle in; nothing dated, nothing declared
The Feature Well
The Corner Table
A profile of a Midtown headwaiter and the expense-account pecking order behind who gets which table at lunch
The City
Subject: A Park Slope brownstone bought right, the block association that made it right, and the public school the buyers are now fighting for
The Back
A Year Gone Platinum
A Back-section look at a record's displacement of the year's biggest-selling album, marked at its first anniversary
The Benefit Speech
A studio executive speaks publicly about his life for the first time, at a Los Angeles AIDS benefit
The Vanishing Comma
A profile of the magazine trade's copy departments, staffed thinner every year the desktop system replaces another paste-up hand, seeded by the copy chief's own worry about the craft outliving its usefulness