The Word for the Vote
Closed mid-January 1997 · On stands late January 1997
The Front
The Meridian Index: February
AOL sign-up discs mailed per subscriber household, average office-modem speed, minutes on hold with tech support
Five British Girls and a Number-One Single
A pop quintet marketed on nicknames rather than voices lands its debut atop the American charts, faster than the industry's own promotion machine expected
The Agency Consolidates
Word from the darkroom circuit: photo agencies are quietly buying up freelance archives, a tremor months ahead of any trade-press coverage of it — commissioned on Sana Farid's insistence over an editor's mild skepticism that it was a story at all
The Essay
What the Board Voted
The Oakland school board's December resolution recognizing Ebonics reopens the argument about what a dialect is owed in a classroom
The Foreign File
The Scheme Comes Due
Albania's pyramid investment schemes collapse, wiping out savings across the country and setting off street protests
The Feature Well
The City
The Gallery Moved West
Matthew Marks's 1994 opening on West 22nd Street is cited as the date the Chelsea gallery migration began, folded into a piece on SoHo's handoff to Chelsea rather than covered as news on its own
The Office Goes Electronic
The information superhighway arrives at the desk — AOL's disc in the mail, the flat-rate pricing rush of December
The Back
Books: A review of the season's language-and-linguistics titles · Art: The winter benefit circuit, briefly · Film: A dispatch from Sundance