The Second Set of Books
Closed mid-January 1999 · On stands late January 1999
The Front
The Last Run
Zip drives, ISDN lines, and office email are closing out the daily messenger economy; fewer bike runs are booked than a year ago
The Essay
The Number on the Envelope
An essay on the modern Wall Street bonus as a piece of American theater — the figure as a verdict on the year, spent before it's banked
The Foreign File
The Twelfth Currency
Six weeks into the euro, a dispatch on the trading-floor mechanics — dual pricing, conversion headaches, a common desk still thinking in marks and francs
The Feature Well
The Byline With No Masthead
Dez commissions the well's first piece from a writer whose only publication history is a personal website — no bio, no magazine credit, a link where a résumé would go — and runs it as prose, unremarked
The Back
Two Sets of Books
A theater-desk profile of Garth Drabinsky's fall from Livent, read as producerial hubris and Broadway-empire overreach