The Last Quiet Week
Closed mid-August 1998 · On stands late August 1998
The Front
The Meridian Index: September
The number of August heat-advisory days, the summer's average Hamptons rental price, weeks left before the World Series
Field Notes: The Home Page as Business Card
A short note on small businesses commissioning their first web pages this year, covered straight, the arrival read as overdue rather than novel
The Essay
The Home Run Chase and What It's For
McGwire and Sosa's assault on the single-season home run record fills the summer's sports pages, and the essay asks what a country wants from a record when it wants to stop reading about everything else
The Foreign File
Moscow, Counting the Rubles
A stringer's dispatch on the ruble's devaluation and a government default that empties currency exchange windows before the story reaches American front pages
The Feature Well
The Last Days of the Automat
A history feature timed to the closing of one of the city's last surviving cafeteria-style lunchrooms, read as the end of a whole way of eating alone in public
The City
Subject: A late-August dispatch on the city's outdoor movie screenings in the parks, the crowd's mood read against a Washington story everyone in line is already half-following on a transistor radio
The Back
Books: A review of late-summer fiction · Art: A gallery note on a photography survey show · Film: The last of the summer's releases, briefly