The Meridian Archive
MER
November 1999
The Drive, Underwater

The Drive, Underwater

Closed mid-October 1999 · On stands late October 1999

The Front

Two Programs, One Future

QuarkXPress holds its near-monopoly on magazine layout as Adobe's coming InDesign challenge is discussed on the production floor for the first time

Index of the Season's Turn

Numbers of early autumn — Beanie Baby resale prices still holding above retail nationwide, the closing tick on the season's hottest tech IPO, scalper premiums on the Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate, and the harvest yield on this year's corn crop

The Essay

The First Approved Word

Sertraline became, this year, the first FDA-approved drug for post-traumatic stress disorder

The Foreign File

The Long Way Round

A dispatch on a European capital's transit strike, filed by the magazine's rotating correspondent, arriving a week after the strike's own resolution

The Feature Well

The Understudy

A profile of a veteran actor with a national touring musical company, based out of a regional theater circuit through the Midwest and South, who has gone on for the lead in six cities this season to sold-out houses, scalper markups, and a small cult following that trades bootleg tapes of her performances — recognized everywhere on stage, nowhere off it

The City

The Drive, Underwater

Hurricane Floyd flooded the FDR Drive and closed city schools on September 16th

Kendra's Law

Kendra's Law was signed on August 27th, after Kendra Webdale's death, establishing court-ordered outpatient treatment for the severely mentally ill

The Back

Forty Names

A photography review of John Harris's Still Passing By, documenting forty cyclist deaths in city traffic this year

The West Wing

NBC's The West Wing premiered September 22nd

The Names You Don't Know Yet

A dispatch on Silicon Alley's autumn IPO season — twenty-six-year-olds newly worth eight figures on paper, the etiquette of turning down free equity at a friend's company, and a magazine industry realizing, a full year after everyone else, that it now competes with a browser for advertising