The Reprise
Closed mid-June 1999 · On stands late June 1999
The Front
The Meridian Index
Weeks a single film held the No. 1 box-office slot; toy-aisle Beanie Baby resale premiums over retail; the average age of a Little League umpire; barrels of oil imported daily; the number of America Online start-up CDs mailed to a single household in a calendar year
Field Notes: June
Federal Reserve governors debating a rate move, Wimbledon seeding gossip, the first wave of summer-camp drop-off traffic on the Merritt Parkway, a national uptick in home-plate collisions blamed on a new sliding rule
The Essay
The Franchise Economy
A single summer tentpole's opening-weekend gross has become a national economic indicator in its own right, reported the way unemployment numbers once were
The Foreign File
Dispatch from Pristina
A stringer's report from the first weeks of KFOR's entry into Kosovo, as NATO peacekeepers move into a province still smoking from the campaign that ended it, and the first columns of returning refugees pass checkpoints going the other way
The Feature Well
The Bean Counters
A profile of the resale economy that has grown up around a beanbag toy nobody in the industry predicted, tracked through a Michigan collectors' convention and a set of parents doing math they didn't expect to be doing
The City
Bryant Park After Dark
The seventh summer of the park's outdoor film series, lawn chairs and wine bottles claiming ground before six, a crowd that treats a rerun as a civic occasion
The Back
Shagged Again
A review of the summer's second Austin Powers picture, and a short note on the paperback reissue racks now crowded with spy-parody tie-ins