"These things are not institutions," said founder and co-editor Thomas Beller. "They're always razor's edge things."

Ms. Yas and Mr. Beller decided to shut down the journal after multiple sources of funding pulled out. They hadn't expected issue 30 to be the swansong.

"The vibe of the last party," said Mr. Beller, "showed me that the magazine has had a lot of action around it. It's ending on a really good note."

"The Open City people were from an earlier time--the mid-'90s," said the novelist Sam Lipsyte, "the last time you really felt an understanding that the man was inherently bad. A distrust of the official discourse was what bound people together--and a distrust of hippies."

Mr. Lipsyte's first story in the magazine, "Shed," was an account of sodomy conducted with a hoe handle. It was commissioned by the late Robert Bingham, who joined Mr. Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck, Open City's co-founder, shortly after the journal's launch.

"I remember Bingham called me up and said, 'Don't sell out to the majors.'"

Mr. Lipsyte is one of a pair of writers most identified with the magazine. The other is the poet Dave Berman, leader of the indie rock band Silver Jews.

"We get two piles of imitators in slush," Ms. Yas said, "the Lipsytians and the Bermanites."

"I didn't expect that Open City would continue at all after Rob Bingham's death," said Mr. Berman. Bingham died in 1999 of a heroin overdose. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Pinchbeck decamped, and Ms. Yas, then the managing editor, joined Mr. Beller as co-editor.

"I feel a tremendous amount of admiration for Joanna for squeezing an extra decade out the magazine," Mr. Berman said.

For now, Ms. Yas is at work on an anthology of stories from the magazine. She and Mr. Beller will continue to publish Open City Books. (Their next title is The Smell of Pine, a novel by Lara Vapnyar.)

Novelist Jonathan Ames emailed to say that Open City was "the new Paris Review" for his generation of writers, "while also being McSweeney's before there was McSweeney's. It was and is a beautiful magazine."

"Open City has offered me shelter and encouragement, and I needed it!" Diane Williams, a contributor since the inaugural issue in 1991, wrote The Observer in an email. "They didn't let me down!

"Oh, this is very sad news!"

--Christian Lorentzen

"The City section was one of my favorite sections of the newspaper," said the novelist and essayist Thomas Beller by telephone from New Orleans, where he's currently teaching at Tulane University. "I'm quite upset about it as a reader."

Essayist and Vintage publicist Sloane Crosley called it "a legitimate loss, both literally and symbolically."

Since 1993, City had been a quiet, quirky presence within the larger local edition of the Sunday Times. Edited by Connie Rosenblum since 1997, City took a street-level view of the five boroughs that felt like a break from the multiple-front assault of status anxieties unleashed by the pre-recession Style, Real Estate, and Travel sections, and the various versions of the high-end style guide T.

Unlike its glammier sister sections, City was for smaller subjects like Adam B. Ellick's 2007 piece about the dumpling-making women of St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church or Jennifer Bleyer's last go 'round at the Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights from the same year. It was a place for Times reporters like Charlie LeDuff (now of The Detroit News) to flex more Joseph Mitchell–ish chops and bend his elbows once a week. But, most especially, it was a place for writers to wax poetic about life in New York City, to write personal essays that might not have found a home anywhere else. (This reporter, included.)

"My favorite part of the section is New York Observed," said The Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu, referring to the (usually) first-person essays in the section. "I like the scale of New York Observed. There was an appropriateness of scale that is rarer and rarer and as a result more and more precious."

Mr. Hajdu, who recently wrote an essay about Riverside Park, applauded the section's "absence of hype and zeitgeist," saying the editors tend to "ignore and even defy the buzz."

Essayist and novelist Phillip Lopate, who contributed to the section ever since Ms. Rosenblum brought him over from her previous section, Arts & Leisure, seemed to agree. "What I'm finding in newspapers in general and The Times in particular is that on the one hand you have the standard journalistic writing with its contemporary clichés. ... And then you have the entertainment pages in which The Times, playing catch-up, is more and more trying to sound hip. But they never can," he told The Observer. "So they fling around all these slang terms like 'the big kahuna'—that was in the paper yesterday. And, there's something a little bit coarse and vulgar about this attempt to wink-wink at the reader.

"The City section was something different," he said. "The prose style was on a higher level than that kind of excessively casual, 'We're all fascinated with rap stars' kind of writing. ... Part of the problem is, looking at it from a larger perspective, that The Times has so much talent in these slightly older editors. They're just so scared of a graying demographic that they keep wanting to get younger and hipper, so in a way, Connie is in an awkward place."

Ms. Rosenblum, whose book about the Bronx's Grand Concourse, Boulevard of Dreams, will be coming out in August, told readers of the NYTimes.com's Talk to the Newsroom what she looked for in 2008: "[W]e ask our writers and ourselves to use eyes and ears, to walk the streets of individual neighborhoods and see firsthand what's out there. This approach can yield rich rewards."

The result is pieces like this week's "Plot Twist at the Actors’ Temple" or "The Trouble With Trees". It may also explain why writers find themselves mourning the loss of the section. One of them, Thomas Pryor, will be hosting a "toast" to the section on May 4 at the bar 17: It's hard to imagine a  similar event in honor of, say, Escapes, which is also being folded into the larger Times.

"Where are we gonna find those pieces—those neighborhood pieces?" Mr. Hajdu wondered. "I'm not inclined to over-romanticize or glorify the mundane, but what you'd find there in unexpected quarters of the City were wonderful surprises."

Mr. Lopate, who has written profiles of architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable as well as numerous essays about Robert Moses, the AIA Guide, and other topics for City, calls those sorts of articles "urban sketches." He said that he and Mr. Beller, who has a Web site devoted to the genre, had once fantasized about putting together an anthology.

"The urban sketches are a noble form which has a long relationship to newspapers," Mr. Lopate said. "Connie was recruiting writers to stretch out and do things which were reflective. Of course, newspapers have very little room for that. They used to have much more room for it." In the past a writer like George Plimpton could dash off a Talk of the Town about a man talking to himself on an imaginary cellular phone for The New Yorker, but good luck getting something like that in print today.

"I think that writers of any age who are into quirky, slice-of-life pieces that used to run a lot more in Talk of the Town and still do occasionally, it kind of was the only game in town," said Jetpack Dreams author and City contributor Mac Montandon. "For a lot of people it was the first section of The Times they wrote for. For younger journalists, it's a huge loss."

In her Talk to the Newsroom chat, Ms. Rosenblum addressed those young journalists, saying, "We rely largely on a small (half a dozen at the peak) group of young or youngesh [sic] journalists, many of them not long out of journalism school, who have an interest in writing about city affairs and don't mind the ups and downs of the freelance life."

When the redesigned Sunday Metro section hits newsstands May 24, we'll see how much room is left for those writers and their work in The New York Times. Mr. Beller is hopeful that some of Ms. Rosenblum's formula will continue to find a home. "I think the importance of the City section is not that it's a stand-alone section but that it had an editorial mission distinct from the paper," said Mr. Beller, who's written about everything from lost gloves to his apartment for the section. "It's not about coverage, it's about the kind of pieces they ran."

"Its not The Southern Oracle," Ms. Crosley—who's written several of the New York Observed essays—emailed from Paris, referring to the last-chance entry from the children's film The Neverending Story. "There are other ways in. But the City's seat within The Times mimicked the very beat it covered. [I]t always maintained a neighborhood vibe."

"Who wouldn't be sad to see that go?" she asked. "It's like watching your favorite building get torn down."

With the advent of sophisticated new drugs (Maxalt, Zomig and the soon-to-emerge Amerge) and highly specific advice (like avoiding freshly baked bread), migraine sufferers may rejoice. But the miraculous medical technology brings with it a cloud: the slow, inexorable death of the migraine as social excuse.

Really, there is-was-no single ailment more perfectly suited to the demands of modern etiquette than this particular brand of headache, with its attendant crippling nausea.

Take this sample scenario. One shows up at a foolishly prearranged appointment: a "kickoff" party for one of the several hundred thousand film festivals about town, perhaps. One's host is late and-darting a glance at the assorted cell phones, sideburns and gleaming leather jackets-one realizes she simply lacks the strength to stay. And-what's this-aren't the lights a bit brighter, weirder than usual? Aha! The famous scintilla (the aurora borealis-like halos that foreshadow a migraine by approximately half an hour) have arrived. With triumphant urgency, one scribbles a note ( I feel a migraine coming on-nothing to do but knock myself out with codeine ) and escapes in a dramatic screech of taxi.

Later, of course-under the sheets, with the shades drawn-there is the thudding, righteous punishment, in the form of the actual headache. But it is worth it. Now that the condition has been established ( she gets horrible migraines ) the excuse-with its elegant, plastic interval-may be endlessly replayed, downplayed, played up, even when it isn't, strictly speaking, true (because who knows when it might become true?). A blissful reserve of uncommitted social space in which to maneuver!

A space that has, all of a sudden, shrunk tight as a vise. Yes, thanks to Glaxo Wellcome, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and those know-it-alls down at Merck in West Point, Pa., the perfect social excuse is no more. Isn't there something you can take for those? they'll say. And "they'll" be right. Pass the bread.

-Alexandra Jacobs

The Hair Menace

Everyone has his own take on why Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace turned out to be inferior to the other Star Wars films. So far, George Lucas has taken the heat for blowing $115 million on this exercise in suckhood. But perhaps Mr. Lucas is not the one to blame. Maybe it's … Sue Love.

Sue Love did the hair for The Phantom Menace . She began her film career in 1984, doing hair for the Rob Lowe rowing picture, Oxford Blues . Mr. Lowe sported an unflattering cut in that one similar to the coif that former New York Jet Mark Gastineau used to ruin football-player hair in the 80's. Weighed down by Mr. Lowe's droopy 'do and a slack script, Oxford Blues was no blockbuster.

A number of other projects since have fallen to the Sue Love Hair Curse. She did Charles Bronson's rat-hair cop cut for Death Wish III . It, like Oxford Blues , got no Oscar nominations and did not gross much in theaters. Other films that may-we repeat, may -have failed because of Ms. Love's hairstyles are Pascali's Island (1988), Carry On Columbus (1992) and The Fifth Element (1997). Is it cruel to note that, after Ms. Love did Sean Young's hair in the thriller A Kiss Before Dying , her career fell apart? In her pre-Sue Love days, Ms. Young had sexy roles in No Way Out and Blade Runner ; post-Sue Love, she played a man in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and appeared on The Howard Stern Show .

Ms. Love's power to destroy a film was tested by Braveheart , for which she gave actor-director Mel Gibson a hair style that could have been plucked from a fanzine for Eastern European metal bands: long and stringy in back, with a shortish, curly hair poof in front. Still, Braveheart won the Academy Award for best picture and best director in 1996. It seems that Ms. Love and Braveheart were a good match. You've heard of bad hair days? The Dark Ages was one long bad hair period.

The Phantom Menace takes place a long time ago, too, but Star Wars movies have a tradition of great hair. The original gave us Harrison Ford's frat-boy shag, Mark Hamill's homoerotic beach-boy mop, the blow-dried Humperdinckian sex appeal of Chewbacca … not to mention those Studio 54-ready cinnamon buns on Princess Leia's head.

The Phantom Menace is another story. Liam Neeson, as Qui-Gon, wears a variation of the Sue Love Braveheart cut. Mr. Neeson's hair style-ponytail in back and hair cascading down his shoulders-is a style favored by certain Midwesterners who play Christian-themed rock guitar with lots of distortion. Mr. McGregor, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, wears a spiky cut with a samurai-style pony tail on the back of his head and a rat tail hanging down to his nipple. This hairstyle- red hot in the suburbs in, oh, 1984-is now the preferred style of the 11-year-old soccer-crazed son of permissive parents from Minnesota or Kansas.

It looks as though Ms. Love barely styled the hair of young Jake Lloyd, who plays Anakin Skywalker. It is shaggy and one length all the way around. Maybe Ms. Love was pressed for time after the elaborate hexing of Mr. McGregor's and Mr. Neeson's heads. Or maybe she just plopped a Darth Vader helmet on Mr. Lloyd's head and gave him the Jedi Bowl Cut.

-Andrew Goldman

Publication Credits

All of the essays, reviews and reports included in this book originally appeared elsewhere. The author gratefully acknowledges the original publishers.

"On Not Saying I Love You" first appeared in Harper's Magazine , January 1993.

"The New Americana" first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , February 1988.

"Sleeping Through Breakfast" first appeared in Breakfast and What They Did With It: An Anthology of Writers in Their Twenties Encountering the First Meal of the Day , edited by Debra Spark and Thomas Beller, copyright 1993 by the author.

"Notions of Ass" first appeared, in somewhat different form, in Allure , June 1995, under the title "Tighter Buns in 10 Days."

"My Penis, My Self" first appeared in GQ , May 1995.

"I've Never Read T.C. Boyle" first appeared on "The Breakfast Table" section of Slate , December 21, 1998. Reprinted by permission.

"A Moveable Beast" first appeared in Imaginary Encounters With Ernest: 34 Writers in Their Twenties Spend Time With Hemingway , edited by Thomas Beller and Darcey Steinke, Grove Press, 1994.

"Justine Bateman Is a Scary Woman" first appeared in Rolling Stone , Oct. 28, 1989.

"A Week in Health-Spa Hell" first appeared, under the title "Ladies and Gentlemen … the Rock-Hard Male," in Esquire , January 1995.

"Against Air Conditioning" first appeared in Yankee , June 1991, and was reprinted in Reader's Digest , August 1991.

"My Dinner With Hitler" first appeared in The New Yorker , June 26, 1994.

"On Getting Drunk" first appeared in Harper's Magazine , April 1997.

"Liz Phair Is Not Amused" first appeared in Rolling Stone , Feb. 22, 1995.

"My First Boat" first appeared in Boating and Yachting , September 1995.

"Trashed in Europe" first appeared, in somewhat different form, under the title "Chug-a-Lug, Matey! 12 Hot Spots," in Loaded , May 1997.

"I Probably Should Have Driven Her to the Place" first appeared in Hidden Shames: Male Writers Express Regret Over How They Behaved When Their Girlfriends Had Abortions , edited by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Thomas Beller, St. Martin's Press, 1995.

"Cramps in the Airport" first appeared on Doodie.com, May 1998.

"Woody Allen Has a Cold" first appeared in In Flight Magazine , October 1998.

"She's Got Leaving On Her Mind" first appeared, under the title "Is She Dumping You? 13 Warning Signs," in Maxim , May 1997.

"Nope, I'm Not Gay" first appeared in Out , April 1997.

"The New, Improved S.A.T." first appeared in The New York Times , Op-Ed page, Jan. 19, 1982.

"She Dumped Me" first appeared in Marie Claire , August 1997.

" Housesitter to Mixed Nuts to Spanish Prisoner : The Later Films of Steve Martin" was commissioned (but not published) by American Film . Copyright 1998, American Film, Ltd.

"Selling the Boat" first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , September 1997.

"On Not Being Ironic" first appeared in Harper's Magazine , June 1994.

-Jim Windolf