The Season Nobody Wanted to Cover
Closed mid-September 1998 · On stands late September 1998
The Front
The Meridian Index: October
The number of network hours devoted to Washington coverage this month, the average price of a Halloween costume, days until the World Series opener
On Language: 'Spin'
A short column on a word migrating from campaign jargon into ordinary dinner-table use over the course of one exhausting year
The Essay
The Home Computer Comes to the Kitchen
Household internet adoption crosses a visible threshold this year, and the essay treats the family computer as a piece of furniture worth arguing about, not a novelty worth marveling at
The Foreign File
Belgrade, Before the Winter
A stringer's dispatch on Kosovo's worsening conflict, filed as a warning nobody in Washington has bandwidth to read this particular month
The Feature Well
The Chain Bookstore Café
A feature on the superstore café as the decade's unlikely new public living room, and what it displaced to become one
The City
Subject: A dispatch from the outer-borough Halloween parade routes, the costumes read against a news cycle nobody at the parade can stop discussing
The Back
Books: A review of the fall's serious nonfiction list · Art: A gallery note on an autumn photography opening · Film: The fall festival pictures, briefly