The Meridian Archive
MER
March 1996
What the Plows Missed

What the Plows Missed

Closed mid-February 1996 · On stands late February 1996

The Front

Index of the Storm

Inches recorded, school days lost, the price of a shovel on the second morning

The Paper Learns to Type Itself

nytimes.com launches on the Web, folded here into a longer meditation on electronic publishing

The Forty-Million-Dollar Minute

What sponsors paid for thirty seconds during Super Bowl XXX, and what that number says about a country spending its way out of a recession memory

The Essay

The Future of Print Itself

What survives of the reading habit as publishing migrates onto screens

The Foreign File

Sarajevo's First Quiet Winter

A stringer's dispatch from a city testing whether the Dayton peace will hold through a second postwar winter

The City

Subject: The blizzard of 1996 and which streets got cleared first

The Back

A Room Made to Empty Itself

Remembering the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, dead this winter at thirty-eight

The Soundtrack Outsells the Movie

A note on Waiting to Exhale's platinum soundtrack, and the year film studios started treating the album as the real release