The Empty Booth
Closed mid-July 1997 · On stands late July 1997
The Front
The Meridian Index: August
Days above 90 degrees logged so far this summer, the price of a beach share in Amagansett, the number of city pools open past Labor Day
Field Notes: The Beeper Generation
A short note on the pager's migration from doctor and dealer to teenager, and what it means that a family can now be reached anywhere but a restaurant
The Essay
The Tobacco Settlement's Fine Print
The proposed nationwide tobacco settlement reaches Congress this summer, and the essay asks what a number this large is actually supposed to fix
The Foreign File
Ho Chi Minh City, After the Name Change
A stringer's dispatch on a generation that has never known the war being asked to explain it to visiting Americans anyway
The Feature Well
The Air-Conditioning Century
A history piece on how central air remade the American summer, the office, and the movie theater, told through one Midtown building's cooling plant
What the Tabloids Won't Print
A media-criticism piece on the summer's photo-agency economy — what a celebrity photograph is worth, who takes the risk, and who buys the print — filed before the season's biggest story of that kind broke on the far side of an ocean
The City
Subject: A heat-wave dispatch from the city's public pools, read for what a free afternoon in water still buys a family in August
The Back
Books: A review of the summer's beach-read crop, taken half-seriously · Art: A gallery note on an outdoor sculpture installation · Film: The summer blockbusters, briefly and a little sourly