The Meridian Archive
MER
June 1997
Forty-Two Million

Forty-Two Million

Closed mid-May 1997 · On stands late May 1997

The Front

The Category Gets Coarser

Maxim launches in the US; the piece that runs treats it as a symptom of the men's-magazine category broadly rather than reckoning with the magazine on its own terms

The Meridian Index: June

Graduation-week hotel rates in college towns nationwide, the price of a lakefront cabin rental for the Fourth, minor-league ballpark attendance on the season's first warm Saturday

The Essay

The Night Ellen Came Out

The lead character of a network sitcom comes out before roughly 42 million viewers; what a fictional disclosure changes that a real one, on a magazine cover, has not

The Foreign File

The Landslide

Tony Blair's Labour Party wins a landslide general election victory, ending eighteen years of Conservative government

The Feature Well

The City

The Marquee Returns

The New Amsterdam Theatre reopens after Disney's restoration, read as either a civic asset recovered or a corporate annexation of a public block

A Table on Spring Street

Keith McNally opens Balthazar in SoHo

The Pulitzer for an Uptown Premiere

Wynton Marsalis wins the Pulitzer Prize for Music for 'Blood on the Fields,' pegged to its Jazz at Lincoln Center premiere

The Back

The Cover Time Already Ran

Ellen DeGeneres comes out the same week as her character; Time's 'Yep, I'm Gay' cover runs first

A Silence in Concord

Michael Dorris dies by suicide in Concord, New Hampshire

Books

A review of the spring's fiction in translation