The Writer Who Made It Up
Closed mid-June 1998 · On stands late June 1998
The Front
Index of the Handoff
Numbers of a season ending — sitcom finales aired, farewell parties thrown, the Seinfeld finale drawing 76 million viewers
On the Checking Desk
A short column on what fact-checkers actually do, timed to a bad month for the trade
The Bean Counter's Web
The overnight resale economy for Beanie Babies moving off card tables and onto crude web auction boards, arriving here a season behind the collectors' own newsletters
The Essay
The Writer Who Made It Up
The Stephen Glass fabrication scandal at The New Republic, and what it exposes about a profession's trust in its own desks
The Foreign File
Asuncion, Between Governments
A stringer's note on a transition the wires are calling stable before it is
A Ball Nobody at the Desk Was Watching
The World Cup opens to a country the size of a continent's worth of television sets, a sport this magazine has never quite known what to do with
The War After the War
Tomás Vega's dispatch on the security collapsing along Rwanda's western border, held two cycles after the room called Central Africa a closed subject since the genocide
The Feature Well
The Last Fare of the Night
A season with a Chicago cab driver profiled through one long shift, the fare wars with the new suburban liveries just starting to bite
The City
Subject: The largest taxi strike in city history, organized by the new NYTWA
The Back
Books: A review of a media-industry memoir · Art: Notes from a slow June in the galleries · Film: Two June releases, briefly noted · Television: A note on the new HBO half hour about single life in Manhattan, and the fashion pages already building a business around it