The New Yorker Magazine

September 11, 1989, the complete issue in exceptional shape, as-new and still sealed.

This issue features a wonderfully spare Eugène Mihaesco cover: a large, intent cat sits nose-to-glass before a small aquarium, staring at a solitary goldfish.

Here are a few highlights from this issue, with the entirety of the contents detailed further down:

William McKibben contributes “The End of Nature,” a substantial Reflections piece on the greenhouse effect and the rapidly accumulating scientific evidence that human activity is altering the earth’s atmosphere and climate. Muriel Spark recalls her Edinburgh childhood in the fiction “Bread, Butter, and Florrie Ford.” Andy Logan reports on the extraordinarily charged 1989 New York mayoral campaign, with David Dinkins challenging Ed Koch amid the aftermath of the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. Whitney Balliett remembers jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge, while Susan Orlean writes about the death of the magazine’s young popular-music critic Mark Moses.

The Complete and Utter Contents of This Issue

with grateful acknowledgment to Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

COMMENT

Ronnie Dugger — A remembrance of Texas Congressman Mickey Leland, chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger, killed when an airplane carrying him to the Fugnido refugee camp crashed into Tamsi Mountain in Ethiopia.

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Mike Cannell — “Gems” — A visit with Rick Prelinger, a thirty-six-year-old former Berkeley film student whose extraordinary private collection contains some 20,000 discarded educational, safety, and promotional films dating back to 1915 — what Prelinger regards as the “Dead Sea Scrolls of Americana.”

Thomas Vinciguerra — “Muttontown’s King” — The strange history of King Zog I of Albania and Knollwood, the sixty-room Long Island mansion he bought in 1951 with the intention of establishing his kingdom in exile there.

Peter Sikowitz — “The Wedding” — After twelve years together, a couple decides that a conventional wedding would be inappropriate and slips away to the Municipal Building for a civil ceremony, discovering considerable romance in doing things their own way.

FICTION

Muriel Spark — “Bread, Butter, and Florrie Ford” — Spark looks back at her richly populated early childhood in Edinburgh, recalling shops, relatives, neighbors, visitors, her English mother and Scottish-Jewish father, and a childhood in which she was very much a participant in the adult world around her. Memories include shopping trips that became geography lessons and seeing King George V and Queen Mary during a royal visit to Edinburgh.

POETRY

John Updike — “To a Box Turtle” — A poem beginning with the wonderfully exact image of a turtle as the size of a small, segmented skull.

James Schuyler — “Yellow Flowers” — A poem contemplating coreopsis, beginning with its “pie-wedge petals.”

REFLECTIONS

William McKibben — “The End of Nature” — A major examination of the greenhouse effect and the implications of humanity’s alteration of the atmosphere. McKibben traces the scientific understanding of carbon dioxide from Svante Arrhenius through the measurements of Charles Keeling at Mauna Loa and considers warming, rising seas, drought, agriculture, pollution, ozone depletion, acid rain, fossil fuels, population growth, biotechnology, wilderness and the increasingly difficult idea of a natural world untouched by human influence.

AROUND CITY HALL

Andy Logan — “Fighting the Power” — A report from the bitterly contested 1989 New York mayoral campaign. Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, seeking to become New York’s first Black mayor, leads Ed Koch in the polls as the city reacts to the killing of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. The piece encompasses Dinkins, Koch, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Rudolph Giuliani, Spike Lee, Mario Cuomo, and the racial and political tensions surrounding the Democratic primary.

OBITUARY

Whitney Balliett — Roy Eldridge — Balliett remembers the great jazz trumpeter, singer, and drummer Roy Eldridge, who died at seventy-eight, with reference to Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.

BOOKS

Lis Harris — A consideration of Sallie Bingham’s Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir.

Additional books considered include Geoffrey C. Ward’s A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, Rostislav Dubinsky’s Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State, John Haines’s The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, and William Pfaff’s Barbarian Sentiments.

POPULAR MUSIC

Susan Orlean — Mark Moses — A remembrance of Mark Moses, The New Yorker’s popular-music critic, who died during the summer at only thirty-two; he had begun writing for the magazine in 1988.

CARTOONS AND DRAWINGS

J. B. Handelsman — A man summons his wife into the yard: “Honey, would you come out here for a minute?”

Donald Reilly — A country-road sign promises, “Just Ahead—Fresh Fall Catalogues! Your choice $3.00.”

Lee Lorenz — One Stone Age cave artist watches another and laments, “Damn! There goes our funding.”

Roz Chast — “It’s Time To Treat Your Dog To Le Bon Chien,” introducing the first hamburger-flavored liqueur for canines.

Danny Shanahan — Batman peers through a maternity-ward window at his newborn infant, who is hanging upside down from a nurse’s arm like a bat.

Leo Cullum — An executive explains to an employee, “Every aggressive, controversial firm needs a lightning rod, Garvey.”

Robert Weber — A couple confronts the economics of romance: “O.K., the question is, how can we improve our relationship without spending more money.”

Anthony Taber — A tractor rolls through a field turning out replica scarecrows/farmers.

James Stevenson — A television viewer changing channels with his remote is transformed into a frog by the television set.

Victoria Roberts — At breakfast, a woman asks her husband, “And what, pray tell, is the ratio of flake to raisin this morning?”

Mike Twohy — “Death of a Salesperson” — A weary woman salesperson leans against a table at center stage.

Ed Fisher — One couple tells another, “We used to be old-fashioned. Now we’re postmodern.”

Michael Crawford — “Coffee-Table Kid’s Books” — An array of absurdly sophisticated coffee-table books intended for children.

William Steig — “Aperitif” — A man seated at a café table with a drink and cigarettes.

Jack Ziegler — “Harry Fent, Human Being” — A drawing of an ordinary man accompanied by an extravagantly comprehensive legalistic disclaimer explaining that he is purely a creation of the artist’s imagination and apologizing, finally, for providing the disclaimer in English only.

Bernard Schoenbaum — A man proposes in the language of corporate strategy: “Melody, I’ve targeted you for matrimony.”

Mort Gerberg — At a cocktail party, a woman tells a man, “Natalie tells me you’re the one who makes all the fog happen in ‘Phantom.’”

Charles Barsotti — A mounted woman announces, “Look, A Gold Card,” prompting a Mountie to declare, “Here We Will Build Our Mall.”

Mick Stevens — “Spud, An As Yet Undiscovered Moon of Neptune, Bides Its Time” — A tiny potato-like celestial body patiently orbits in space.

FASCINATING VINTAGE ADVERTISEMENTS

The back cover carries a vintage print ad for Russell Athletic, showing a woman relaxing in blue and pink sportswear beneath the line “You Want To Take Five. Take Five,” and promoting the company’s five-year guarantee on its cotton sweats.

Because this particular copy remains factory sealed, its interior advertisements have never been exposed for examination and are therefore deliberately not described here.