What the Bag Says, Quietly
Closed mid-January 1993 · On stands late January 1993
The Front
Field Notes: The Benefit-Committee Letterhead
A count of how many boldface names turn up on more than one charity dinner's letterhead this season
On Language: 'Downsized'
A column tracing the word from personnel-office euphemism to dinner-table verb
The Essay
The Discretion Economy
Status among people who can afford anything now runs on refusal, not display; furniture argument, no single case carrying it
The Foreign File
Geneva, a Quiet Season
A short dispatch on the trade talks nobody outside the building is following
The Feature Well
The Whiskey Nobody Wanted
A profile of Kentucky bourbon houses sitting on a decade of unsold aged stock, the deepest bargain in American drink and nobody buying it yet; Charlie's own idea, pitched over dinner and assigned inside a week
The City
Subject: A nylon backpack becomes the season's anti-status object, legible only to the class of reader who can price the discretion
The Back
The Winter List
A Back-section round-up of the season's quieter novels, none of them the one everyone is discussing
The Comeback Single
A Back-section note on a veteran singer's unexpected return to the charts, the industry's oldest surprise played out again