August Standing Still
Closed mid-July 2001 · On stands late July 2001
The Front
The Meridian Index
Consecutive days above ninety degrees so far this summer; average speed on the Long Island Expressway eastbound on a Friday afternoon; new SUV registrations, year over year; the retail price of a beach umbrella, adjusted for a decade of inflation
Field Notes: July
All-Star break box scores, a national run on window-unit air conditioners, back-to-school circulars arriving a full month early, a lull in Congress as the recess empties the capital
The Essay
The SUV Nation
A vehicle built for terrain most owners never drive becomes the decade's default family car, and the argument over why says more about the decade than the terrain
The Foreign File
Dispatch from Portadown
A stringer's report from the annual marching season, Drumcree's standoff between an Orange lodge and a nationalist neighborhood settling, for one more July, into its familiar choreography of barricades and waiting
The Feature Well
The Beach Read Machine
A profile of the publishing industry's summer blockbuster machinery — the six-figure paperback launch, the airport-rack placement fees, the authors who now write to a beach-season calendar
The City
Fire Island, Late July
The ferry lines at Sayville and Bay Shore, a season at its most crowded and least self-conscious, and the wooden boardwalks that pass for streets
The Back
A Cooler, Sadder Machine
A review of the early summer's robot-boy prestige picture, now settling into second-run houses, and short notices on the season's beach fiction