A Nation of Rafts
Closed mid-July 1994 · On stands late July 1994
The Front
The Dingbat Interview
Ray Gun's Zapf Dingbats-set Bryan Ferry interview — an amused Front-section item on a rival magazine's design excess
The Alarm That Means Nothing
The car alarm as a broken window — noise read as evidence of an unpoliced city rather than a working deterrent
The Essay
Ninety Minutes on Every Channel
The O. J. Simpson Bronco pursuit preempts the NBA Finals on live television, and what the preemption itself said about what the audience was actually watching
The Foreign File
The Raft and the Policy
The Cuban balseros exodus and the wet-foot, dry-foot policy it produced
The Feature Well
The Waiting Room at the Coast Guard Station
A reported piece on the processing center handling that summer's raft arrivals, told through the intake officers rather than the policy
The City
The Manifest and the Grid
A City-section profile of a working bike messenger — the manifest, the bag, the grid, craft treated as subject
The First Face
RuPaul becomes the first face of MAC's Viva Glam, funding the MAC AIDS Fund
Twenty-Five Years On, Two Ways to March
A City piece on the Stonewall 25 anniversary march itself — the crowd, the route, the decade's change in the parade — with a televised panel fight mentioned only in passing
The Back
Books: A review of the summer's Cuba reportage in book form · Art: A notice on the season's benefit-print sales for AIDS research · Film: A dispatch on the summer's disaster-picture box office, filed the same week as the Bronco chase