The Prescription Economy
Closed mid-March 1994 · On stands late March 1994
The Front
The Cash-Pay Practice
An anonymized item on the East Side's cash-pay diet-doctor economy and its casualties, folded into a general sociology piece rather than built around any single practitioner
The Meridian Index
March's small numbers — the average condo association fee increase, the price of a decent bottle of Champagne before the first spring engagement season, the price of a decent umbrella after the first real storm
The Essay
The Doctor Nobody Certifies
The unlicensed edges of the city's weight-loss and energy-supplement trade, and the patients who prefer a diagnosis that flatters them
The Foreign File
The Border That Isn't Drawn Yet
A dispatch on the diplomatic sessions redrawing what a post-Soviet map is allowed to mean
The Feature Well
The Scale in the Waiting Room
A reported piece on the culture of the East Side weight-loss practice — the waiting room, the receptionist's discretion, the patients who return
The Man Who Never Stopped Playing
A long profile of Ellis Marsh, an octogenarian bebop pianist still keeping a Tuesday set at a Village club decades past his radio-era peak — commissioned as the definitive piece on a generation of American musicians the reissue labels haven't found yet
The City
Subject: A walk through the blocks between Park and Fifth where the cash-pay practices cluster, told through the buildings rather than the doctors
The Back
Books: A review of the season's diet and self-help publishing cycle · Art: A notice on a Midwestern estate sale · Film: A dispatch on the spring repertory calendar