The Year-End Ledger
Closed mid-November 1997 · On stands late November 1997
The Front
The Meridian Index: December
Shopping days left until Christmas, the Dow's year-to-date gain, the number of dot-com IPOs priced this year
On the City: The Tree Lighting Crowd
A short column on the Rockefeller Center tree lighting as a national broadcast event with a very local, very cold audience standing underneath it
The Essay
The Decade Nobody Named Yet
A year-end essay arguing that the 1990s still lack a settled character in the way the '60s or '80s already had one by their own late stretch, and what that vacancy is doing to how the country narrates itself
The Foreign File
Zaire Becomes Congo Again
A stringer's dispatch on Mobutu's fall and Kabila's renaming of the country, filed as a postscript to a story most American readers had stopped following years earlier
The Feature Well
The Book Superstore Wins
A feature on the year the chain bookstore finally out-competed the independent on nearly every metric that used to be sentimental
The City
Subject: A late-autumn walk through the department-store window displays, read as the last version of Christmas advertising before the web catalogue starts pulling children's attention off the sidewalk
The Back
Books: The year's notable fiction, briefly ranked · Art: A gallery note on the season's museum blockbuster · Film: The awards-season openings, briefly