The Meridian Archive
MER
November 1994
The Plan That Died in September

The Plan That Died in September

Closed mid-October 1994 · On stands late October 1994

The Front

The Withdrawal

Howard Stern runs for governor of New York on the Libertarian ticket, then withdraws

The Outpatient Option

The Renfrew Center opens a New York outpatient eating-disorder treatment location — a service item on the new option itself, without a piece built on the magazine and fashion industries' own documented relapse rate

The Meridian Index

October's small numbers — the average World Series ad-page cancellation, subscription cancellations tied to strike coverage fatigue, the price of a decent umbrella by first frost

The Essay

The Plan That Died Without a Vote

The collapse of the Clinton Health Security Act, read for what killed it before the floor ever got a chance to

The Season That Didn't Finish

The players' strike cancels the World Series for the first time since 1904, and what a canceled ritual costs a city that organizes its autumn around it

The Law With a Name

The Violence Against Women Act is signed into law, the first federal statute to treat domestic violence as a crime warranting dedicated prosecution funding

The Foreign File

The Wire Nobody Answers

A dispatch filed in the intervention's first settled weeks

The Feature Well

The Strike Season

A reported piece on the empty stadiums during the strike's first weeks, told through vendors and ushers left without shifts

The City

The Street That Sold

Charlotte Street sales completed — the South Bronx recovery symbol

Twenty-Nine at Once

"Dirty Thirty" — twenty-nine officers of the 30th Precinct arrested in one coordinated action

The Million Mark

AOL passes one million subscribers

The Back

Survival, Plainly Stated

Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation reframes the drug's story from personality enhancement to bare survival

The Move to Chelsea

SoHo's dealers migrate to Chelsea, buying rather than renting their spaces

The Commercial-House Debut

Paul Beatty's Joker, Joker, Deuce is published by Penguin, his commercial-house debut

A Notice on the Season's Small Presses

A round-up of the fall's overlooked small-press fiction