Molly Fischer on Mark Singer's “Mom Overboard!”

There are plenty of old magazine stories I love, but I also love old magazines themselves.

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February 26 & March 4, 1996

They're time capsules, perfectly preserved and bristling with ephemera. The listings, the reviews, the ads—when I page through the double issue of The New Yorker published in February, 1996, this is the stuff that conjures a period I just barely remember absorbing as a preteen reader. There are a lot of ads, too; the issue is thick with them. After all, this is the “Women's Issue,” and someone always has something to sell to women.

Such theme issues were a New Yorker staple between 1992 and 1998, when the magazine was edited by Tina Brown. Part of the pleasure of the cover-to-cover print experience is seeing a specific editorial perspective in all its obsessions and idiosyncrasies, and the Women's Issue is rife with Brown's. Her guiding principle, the high-low mix, is in full effect: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on Hillary Clinton; Daphne Merkin on S & M. There are portraits by Annie Leibovitz and a meditation on Princess Diana. Even before publication, the issue generated a celebrity mini-scandal by recruiting Roseanne Barr as an editorial consultant, and the outcry receives a response in its pages. (“Media watchers,” the TV critic James Wolcott writes, are in “crisis mode,” imagining a “rumba between Eustace Tilley and a TV icon.”)