The Club King's Acquittal
Closed mid-March 1998 · On stands late March 1998
The Front
Index of the Recess
Numbers of an early spring — Midwest floodwaters cresting along the Mississippi, farm-belt planting delays logged by county extension offices, and the days left before the Senate's own recess
The Auction Nobody Attends
A short note on the resale and collectibles trade moving from the classified page and the card table onto web auction boards, arriving in these pages a season after the sellers stopped needing a table at all
The Essay
The Surplus Nobody Trusts
The first projected federal budget surplus in a generation reaches Congress, and what a surplus does not repair about a decade's argument over what government owes
The Foreign File
Belfast, Waiting on the Language
A stringer's dispatch on the talks nobody will call a peace process until they're finished
The Feature Well
The Club King's Acquittal
Peter Gatien's federal acquittal and the fall of his club empire, told as the story of what survives a trial and what doesn't
The Writer Nobody Assigned Him
Julian Cross's profile of Marisol Rey, a Paterson-born fiction writer, argued onto the well on the strength of one story collection from a university press and pages of an unfinished novel nobody else had been shown
The City
Subject: A season of empty storefronts on the blocks the clubs used to anchor
The Back
Art: The Windsors' possessions sell at Sotheby's; Edward VIII's abdication desk fetches $415,000 · Books: A short review of a new royal-family history · Film: March's serious pictures, briefly