The Soft Landing
Closed mid-March 2001 · On stands late March 2001
The Front
The Meridian Index
Consecutive Federal Reserve rate cuts since January; brackets correctly filled out in the office pool, national average; the median signing bonus rescinded from a graduating class of computer-science majors; tax-season extensions filed electronically for the first time
Field Notes: March
Spring training box scores, a national uptick in home-equity-line applications, the first cherry-blossom forecasts out of the capital, office pools running the bracket on a shared spreadsheet instead of a photocopied sheet
The Essay
The Pink Slip Spring
A hiring boom that defined a decade reverses itself in a single quarter, and the layoff notice returns to office life as a genre with rules of its own
The Foreign File
Dispatch from Tetovo
A stringer's report on the ethnic-Albanian insurgency spreading out of the hills above a Macedonian town, an aftershock of the Kosovo campaign two years gone that the peace agreements never quite settled
The Feature Well
The Network Chef
A profile of a cable-television cook building a national following out of a basic-cable slot, and what his rise says about an audience that now watches food the way it watches sport
The City
The Tasting Menu, Everywhere
A short survey of the small-plates, chef's-choice format spreading from a handful of downtown rooms into neighborhood restaurants that used to run a standard menu
The Back
The Cannibal Returns
A review of the winter's highest-grossing thriller, now arriving on home video, and short notices on the spring's design and gardening books