Harper's Magazine: C/D

Anyone interested in Lapham's Quarterly? The inaugural issue comes out this fall. $60 for 4 issues is a little steep, but I took the plunge.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

-----
States of War
Volume 1, Issue 1
will be available Autumn 2007

Featuring an introductory essay
by Lewis H. Lapham

and new commentaries by
preeminent historians and writers.

Other featured authors in “States of War” include:

Queen Elizabeth I
John Mueller
Pope Urban II
Shakespeare
Bertran De Born
Napoleon
Tecumseh
Mark Twain
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Julia Ward Howe
W.H. Auden
Mary Jemison
Ulysses S. Grant
Yamamoto Tsuenetomo
Tim O'Brien
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Homer
Tacitus
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov "Lenin"
Saint Augustine
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sultan Selim I
General George S. Patton
Richard Nixon
Leo Tolstoy
Ryszard Kapuściński
e e cummings
George Orwell
Osama bin Laden
Albert Einstein
Herodotus
and dozens more...
--------------------

About Lapham's Quarterly

LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY sets the story of the past in the frame of the present. Four times a year the editors seize upon the most urgent question then current in the headlines - foreign war, financial panic, separation of church and state - and find answers to that question from authors whose writings have passed the test of time. The method assumes that profound observations of the human character and predicament don't become obsolete. An issue addressed to the glory of military empire might open with the writings of Homer, proceed to contributions from Thucydides, Tacitus, and Marie de Medici, move forward in time to passages from the works of Dante and Shakespeare, come nearer to the present with the notations of Twain and Freud and Virginia Woolf, eventually arrive at the table talk of Adolf Hitler and the faith-based initiatives of President George W. Bush.

Abridged rather than paraphrased, none of the texts in Lapham's Quarterly will run to a length longer than five or seven pages, some of them (a love lyric, the recipe for Queen Mab pudding, a cure for the Bubonic Plague) to no more than five or seven paragraphs; literary narrative and philosophical commentary as well as letters, diaries, speeches, maps, charts, landscape painting, photographs, bills of lading, writs of execution.

The necessity of an undertaking along the lines of Lapham's Quarterly stands as proven by the all-too-numerous instances of an historical consciousness gone missing from broad sectors of the American mind. Within the wind tunnels of our high speed electronic media, the data shreds or blows away, and the time is always now. Not only do we lose track of our own stories (what happened yesterday, last week, three months ago), our elected representatives forget why sovereign nations go to war. As a consequence we have before us the catastrophe in Iraq, as well as a plurality of fellow citizens who don't know how or when or by whom they were given a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.

In answer to the problem of disappearing context, Lapham's Quarterly discovers in the uses of history both a natural resource and an applied technology. Some things change, others don't, but absent a knowledge of which is which, where then do we find our bearings in the gulf of time, and how do we not become orphans, marooned on the islands of the dream-ridden self?

Cicero framed the thought as an aphorism, "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in junk science, totalitarian politics, and quack religion. The general states of amnesia cannot sustain the promise of individual freedom or the practice of democratic self-government. A knowledge of history arms us with our best weapon against the will to ignorance and the joys of superstition, makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton once called "the arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Yeah, tell me how it is! I thought the price was a little prohibitive.

This month's issue is depressing.

Issue of Harper's that is. Only thing I know that's depressing about Lapham's Quarterly is the price.

did you read the naomi klein thing about the new "disaster economy"? good but damn did that thing seem to go on like 3 pages longer than was really necessary.

I just finished reading this month's issue a few minutes ago. The Klein article was maybe a tad too long, but after finishing an issue of the New Yorker it didn't seem too bad. I actually read the Klein article the night before the news about the banning of Blackwater in Iraq came out, which was weird.

The Congo article was really, really good, I thought.

HAHAHAHA the Klein thing is a whole book....I mean, the article was adapted from her whole book, Friedman Sucks Balls in a Lockheed-Martin Exurb.

lapham is too turgid for me, doubt i'll get the quarterly.

The days...lapham away with a new JOEK Quarterly! Text to 2553 for your FAVORITE extended essays!

HAHAHAHA the Klein thing is a whole book

well der, but believe it or not an adapted essay from book can go on for too long. The problem was that she wrote it too well. It made its point clearly and concisely, and then went on for a few more pages after that.

By the way,

Oh, and I guess Blackwater is back in business in Iraq:

From the NYT:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 21 — American diplomats today resumed travel in Iraq in convoys escorted by Blackwater USA, the private American security contractor, less than a week after the Iraqi government banned the company following a shooting in which at least eight Iraqis were killed.

I'm not even through the Readings section yet, but this month's issue is already a winner for the following exchange, excerpted from an interview with a contractor that used to work in McMurdo Station in Antarctica:

JOHNSON: You spent a lot of time in Antarctica. Why did you stop contracting there and go to Iraq?

NERO: When I first went down, McMurdo was still like a fire-swept mining town, full of rust, canvas, and barefoot hillbillies playing fiddles in their tents. It was a portrait of struggle, of the odd and the rustic. Strange events blossomed without scripts in a landscape of decay, dirty machines, and whiskey-soaked mustaches. Men were piled into old military tents on the side of the mountains far from the heart of the town. It was the only place I had been where at night you lulled yourself to sleep pretending that the noise of half a dozen men whacking off was actually a group of thirsty dogs lapping at a water bowl. As cum-soaked socks hit the floor with gentle thuds, the heavy breathing was followed by the click of Zippos, and I would grab my blanket for comfort in the darkness. Simple pleasures: watching a line of pale white zombies lined up at Sunday brunch waiting for a slab of bloody beef to be hacked from the shoulder clod and placed on their plate. A bearded man sits alone in the corner with a half glass of milk mumbling words unheard. We had stepped back in time to a place where you would never bring your mom or your sister - a primate working-class culture in the harshest of environments. Anything seemed possible.

---

I want to hang out with Nero.

Yah dude that Antractica thing was fucking fantastic, tho having only seen the continent in "The Thing" I am having a hard time imagining it as this new yupster socialite place.

I'm having a real hard time getting into the Romney article. Somehow that guy just exhausts me with don't-give-a-fuckness (apathy isn't really the right word here).

Mine hasn't come in yet ;_;

"The Spy Who Came in and Was Cold" from last month was incredible.

Disaster Capitalism was very good. I think it was the comparison of New Deal bowling in America to paranoid future state instead of to blank familiar unseen middle, which actually ends up being much closer to the latter.

Paranoid future state is actually the opposite of what I mean. It's being numb to things that are odd but have only to be mentioned to be quite possible, such as going on a cruise to avoid a natural disaster.

i just got my first (paper) issue in the mail the other day!
i got stuck at the picture of a mink tho on like page 5 and couldn't stop laughing. sorry 'friends of teh animals' time to get a new marketing guy

oh it was on p 19
i'm sure i will read a few of the articles eventually

"my plan to disappear from station and live in a snow cave at winter's end fell through disastrously; I was found facedown in front of the fridge clutching a half-eaten five-pound summer sausage"

Yeah, I'm desperate to read the entirity of that interview.

Where is my Harper's?

Meanwhile, I bought the Atlantic Monthly's 150th Anniversary edition and read a bunch of those "American Idea" essays on the PATH. Eughhhhh - so fucking inane.

i got stuck at the picture of a mink tho on like page 5 and couldn't stop laughing. sorry 'friends of teh animals' time to get a new marketing guy

otm

I bought the Atlantic Monthly's 150th Anniversary edition and read a bunch of those "American Idea" essays on the PATH. Eughhhhh - so fucking inane.

does this mean i should cxl my subscrip to atlantic y/n

I don't know - I haven't read the Atlantic in a long time, but I generally don't remember most of it being anywhere near as bad as the FOB stuff in the current issue. Even the rest of this particular issue might be better.

I just subscribed for the last issue and it was kinda ok. I wish Harper's was that long, but then I suppose qual would decline.

that mcmurdo thing is some of the worst post-gonzo bullshit
whoever nero is, he's sure to write a well-timed shit of a bestseller

I also just resubscribed after many years away, and also got a bit stuck on the mink. I thought he was a cute enough mink, though.

I want to cut out that dotted line bit and tape it to my collar.

How many people even wear fur these days? I thought ermine and the color violet were the province of kings alone. And Prince, of course.

There was some sort of retro pro-fur movement a while back, a sort of reclamation of the right to wear carcass, a few years ago, or so the NPR-ish media told me.

The Bush administration's forbearance as Gen. Pervez Musharraf proclaims, like [vainglorious monarch], that [famous megalomaniacal statement] recasts [open Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to any random page, close eyes, plunge finger into text, and insert here a précis of incident described therein] as opera bouffe. The sham outrage teases forth memories of the contortions displayed by [famous Ottoman acrobat of the 15th century] or the prevarications of [obscure three-fingered gangster of the 1930s] as the Katie Courics and Wolf Blitzers of their day distracted the starving masses with [celebratory ritual performed by an island-based indigenous people] and competitions to mimic the cry of the mighty [extinct animal from the Cretaceous period].

Lewis Lapham Mad Libs! How to write the sentence he has been redrafting for 40 years.

his column on how "Iraq is just like the housing bubble" was so awful.

Even when I first subscribed to Harper's in college and was still in awe of anything liberal I hated Lapham.

Has anyone read Lapham's Quarterly?

That Mad Lib is fucking golden, as are the mailing instructions.

I think the guy is o-kay.

The column is spot-on. No one else uses so much erudition and learning to say so little.

I'll try to condense his stuff:

St. Andrews:
Although arranged like St. Andrews, the course at North Berwick presents a wider variance of hazards, and possibly because of the names of the holes ("Gate," "Perfection," "Pit"), what little I could remember of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress came suddenly to mind in the elegiac light of a slowly ebbing sunset. I played the round in the company of two other solitary golfers on the hole ahead and the hole behind, three wayfarers set forth on the Scots' equivalent of the road to Canterbury, each of us in turn raising the flag of hope for the fellow pilgrim who maybe had come thus far without having fallen afoul, at least not yet, of Worldly Wiseman or Giant Despair.

Condensed:
St. Andrews golf course left me in reverie.

I had a hard time even parsing this one:

Extended King Richard analogy:

When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

Condensed:
You can't eat things totemically, esp. if the qualities you want aren't there in the first place.

"Pretensions to Empire" excerpt:

The train from Paris to Brussels passes through fields sown for 2,000 years with the seed of war, and on the way north last February 1 to the opening sessions of this year's European Parliament, I was reminded of the brightly beribboned armies—Saxon, Roman, Norman, English, French, Spanish, Austrian, German, and American—that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory.

Condensed:
I thought about a lot of dead people on a train.

"Choir of Prostitutes":

When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero's hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes.

Hilary & Guiliani – oh, you two!

i have a real hate/love for this guy

"Brightly beribboned armies [...] that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory"
He's actually Terry Pratchett, isn't he?

got renewal notice in the mail (why don't they just email? eesh. maybe i check 'no' on that box?) and considering that i have put my last few issues of the mag in a pile of 'to be read' i had to think a little abt renewing. then i remembered that the reason i subscribed in the first place was b/c of the online archives. and right now i am reading an article about 'social life in russia' from 1889! it is great! so ok harper's you have yr renewal.

Fuk, yeah the archives. I totally haven't taken advantage of those and now I've been thinking about not renewing. I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]" covers. The last straw for me was the contagious Tazmanian Devil cancer that will kill us all.

bahahahahahahaha, that is kind of true. But they always have something fun and unexpected, too, like that recent thing on the Magic Olympics.

WHY (poitician running for office) WILL FUXOR TEH WORLD. Glad you took on Giuliani and Romney in the past year – mad challops, bros.

This makes me want to create a Harper's Mad Libs.

I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]"

Yeah I tend to ignore them and just do the Readings and Fiction and Criticism sections. Sometimes the Postcards section is a real gem too, like that one from a couple months ago about the crust punks floating the Mississippi.

the Notebooks vary widely from STFU dumbass (the one about paying taxes to blow shit up) to OTM (public deference to high office)

Still better than when they were all written by Lapham, I guess

Ach, the newest issue (Jan. '09 – THE FUTURE) is kind of the worst. A 3-page index of reruns about George Bush, and all the articles are bleak retrospectives about "damn if the past eight years weren't balls p.s. the world is going to end & we're fuxored). Oh shit was it the worst issue.

As Rick Johnson once wrote, "Avoiding what subject?"

the article about Saakashvili + Georgia was good, i thought? as someone who knows very little about the region. i can't even look at that Bush + the economy infographic, though; it makes me want to die.

i liked reading the dfw eulogies in the 'readings' section

i mean didnt "like" but appreciated

yes i liked those, too; saunders made me tear up. so did delillo, actually.

ya. i hope i can have ppl who are as articulate and intelligent speak at my funeral.

also good source to mine for my modern authors fanfic

"damn if the past eight years weren't balls p.s. the world is going to end & we're fuxored

this is every issue of the last year and a half imo

I'll def have to stop at the bookstore & read the DFW pieces though.

Agreed on the suckage of latest issue.

By the way, Abbott, to answer your question from a year ago about Lapham's Quarterly, I LOVE IT. They keep getting better as they go on, and the latest issue, "Ways of Learning", is their best yet.

Nice!

guys i want a mag subscription, do i get

--harper's
--nyer
--atlantic
--other (suggest, plz!)

nyer has some good stuff sometimes but since it's a weekly it piles up all over the place but you feel guilty about just throwing away old copies so soon you have old copies of the nyer all over the place like some kind of urbane hobo

that is what happened to me with the economist

economist is pricey!! but the snide photo captions are worth it imo

i have some insanely cheap nyer subscription--like 29 bucks a year?--and i've had it forever, so i suffer from the urbane hobo problem, but i don't feel bad about it, since it's so cheap. i've had harper's, too, on and off, but their non-fiction just isn't as good as the nyers. though i think *generally* the fiction in the nyer is suckage.

if time is an issue (lol doctor gbx) i would suggest a monthly, like harper's? i dunno, depends on much time ya got

only one with cryptic now = harper's, so I vote for that.

vladimir-putin-in-tuxedo.jpg
Putin on the ritz

atlantic has changed so much in the eight years i've subscribed. william langewiesche's series on the unmaking of the wtc is what hooked me. he's long gone. david bradley bought it and it hasn't been the same--feels ever more bloggy, or like an expanded economist. the long articles aren't as long. there's at least one jeff goldberg or andrew sullivan "how to fix the world" article per, which doesn't do much for me.

yeah see that is the thing, the piling up, and the lack of time. :-/

my suggestion to you is no nyer, then :/

no more fiction in the atlantic either, though at least that means i never have to encounter christopher buckley again. c michael curtis has bizarre taste.

sandra tsing loh is always a treat.

i think the atlantic does a once a year fiction issue in august

so harper's, then, huh

yup. newsstand only. xpost

I cancelled my Harper's sub after the coup article a few years ago...it was getting too much like a left conspiracy mag.

yah i get that vibe from it too--why i never subscribed

but now lewis lapham has his own joint right?

assuming that kind of thing was coming from him...

the readings section in harper's and the fiction are the best parts, i thinks

plus if you subscribe, you get access to all of the back issues on line, which is awesome

The Atlantic works well as a bathroom mag, because the writing is generally pretty easy and lacking in insight, so when you finish your business and the article sucks it's no prob to move on. And since you prob don't use your bathroom very many times a day, it lasts a month. Good grief @ Sandra Tsing Loh; her articles drive me nuts. She had some thing about how she was getting divorced recently, and I was like, "really, that's a shock".

Lapham would write these long rants at the beginning of each mag too; I think the coup article was by someone else, but I take it Lapham commissioned or at least accepted it. If he's gone, I might go back, because yeah their archives are rad, and the fiction is nice.

new yorker, evan. i kind of hate harper's.

i had a subscription to the economist one year but it made me feel so guilty because i never read it and it came like every day it seemed so the piles of it i had lying around unread were physical testament to the many, many things i didn't know.

sometimes the nyer piles up, yes, but it is more fun to read than the other magazines you're considering imo and you can take your back-new yorkers on vacation with you and they are very relaxing reading in my experience.

yeah go w/ new yorker, smart enough to not make u mad but not so taxing that u avoid it because it will be difficult

if u have a commute on public transportation its great--never piles up for me cuz i read it on the subway/train

atlantic is totally ridiculous now, they should just change the name to "challops bimonthly"

i dont hate harpers but i only ever read the "readings" and the index and the "findings" im always way disappointed by the essays and whatnot

fuck the atlantic for real

I should just get a sub to New Yorker, my mother-in-law gets it and every time we visit I spend lots of time flipping through them.

i have a visceral hatred for the economist because its a big signifier for "im a white douchebag poli-sci major who will describe himself as a 'moderate' and be totally dismissive of anyone to the left of joe lieberman despite having picked up all of my opinions from my advisor and this magazine" or at least it was in my school

i was sort of hoping that the atlantic having hua hsu and ta-nehisi coates would make it better but ummm so far it hasnt

yes i would like to except ta-nehisi coates but he can't write all their articles, unfortunately

i dont know why not it only comes out like every three months and is like 20 pages long

harper's had a very good run in the 90s but lapham became increasingly tiresome during the bush years. i know he's not there anymore but i haven't checked it lately to see the changes

i never understood what people see in the economist

i subscribed because i thought it would make me know a lot of things all at once. i cannot remember a single thing about it, though

the few times i picked it up i noticed its articles on america tended to have lots of errors, so it made me question what i was reading about the international stuff, which is why you'd pick it up in the first place (as an american)

i had a subscription to the economist one year but it made me feel so guilty because i never read it and it came like every day it seemed so the piles of it i had lying around unread were physical testament to the many, many things i didn't know.

― horseshoe, Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:04 AM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is precisely what happened. i let the subscription lapse, it was just too much to handle

and reading back issues of the economist is pretty much a non-starter

nyer is the best of these imo. totally OTM upthread about harper's seeming more & more like a leftist conspiracy mag. by contrast the political writing in the nyer is pretty good and usually a pretty reliable part of the magazine. the 'profiles' are also usually really good

i almost never read the fiction tho, and there are a lot of issues that i just don't have time to read. i wish they did more regular music crit, too, seems like only 1 or two issues a month has it.

i used to keep all of them too, but it got too crazy w/ all the back issues everywhere. i'd pick up an older issue and swear to myself that i had never seen that particular cover before. now i clean them out every month, so i only keep the 3 or 4 most recent issues. if there's an article i really like, i know that as a subscriber i can always access it online

but it's super cheap 4 realz - i pay like $40 a year for weekly issues, and it gets cheaper the longer you subscribe.

new york review of books!

i think they do music essays every issue--pop music reviews are more like every other issue

i am of the opinion that a lot of their critics are stupid and/or irritating

i have a visceral hatred for the economist because its a big signifier for "im a white douchebag poli-sci major who will describe himself as a 'moderate' and be totally dismissive of anyone to the left of joe lieberman despite having picked up all of my opinions from my advisor and this magazine" or at least it was in my school

― Bobby Wo (max), Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:15 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

;_; why you gotta cut to my core like that

(fwiw i like but do not subscribe to the economist, dislike lieberman, and i was a poli sci/econ double major, SO THERE)

i agree with mookieproof - it's the best by far of this bunch

"eat shit - 1,000,000 flies can't be wrong" -- the economist

i was a poli sci/econ double major

fwiw u are worse than a theater major

:C

i never understood what people see in the economist

― velko, Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:20 AM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark

good writing on, imo, e. europe and africa that doesn't start with, "hey! there's a country called swaziland!" or whatever.

there's a lot worse than a theater major big max and I say this as an english/classical studies dude (no horse)

cosign w/Review of Books, or even Bookforum which isn't great & is often too cursory but on the other hand gets some good essayists now and then (Vollman a few months back with a straightup incredible review of some newer Holocaust books) & won't pile up unread like NYROBs almost surely will. OTOH William Gass is writing for Harper's pretty regularly, and he's one of the best stylists alive, if a total misanthrope, but imo his ability to tease cruelty out of even the simplest idea makes him worth the price of a subscription

yeah theres way worse shit than theater majors, such as kinesiology majors, or ECON POLI-SCI DOUBLE MAJORS

haaahaahaha

the school next to mine was basically all econ/polsci's and they all had ANNOY THE LIBERAL MEDIA: TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE REAGAN-BUSH LEGACY posters in their dorm windows

not that guy

bunch of winners those dudes

luckily they are all in positions of unbelievable power making policy in washington LOL ;_;

if it makes u feel better, i am in a position of no power in not washington

i shouldnt be fronting, i was president of the young democrats one year

luckily they are all in positions of unbelievable power making policy in washington LOL ;_;

most of them went straight to wall street or the chicago board of trade and I am assuming a number of them moved back in with their parents last year

unlike my classmates who were smokin weed then and are doubtless smokin weed now

holla

if u have a commute on public transportation its great--never piles up for me cuz i read it on the subway/train

^^this

oh someone recommended the new york review of books the other day!

The intro essay for Harper's (formerly all Lapham, now revolving I think?) is usually amusingly indecipherable.

nyrb rules but its so giant and unruly i feel like a total bag reading it in public

i would read it on the bus while standing and feel like HM HELLO YES I LIVE THE LIFE OF THE MIND AND GARGLE TESTICLES

hoosbag

i haven't been reading any of these mags for a while now - i used to subscribe to them all and when i worked at the hospital i would just steal old ones - and i don't miss them at all.

there really needs to be some new magazines. or something. i would tell people to subscribe to a good science magazine. or smithsonian. or national geo. i find that stuff more entertaining these days than old guard handwringers and lethemite types.

reading the NYRB online feels really, really strange, but I do it

i had a subscription to the economist one year but it made me feel so guilty because i never read it and it came like every day it seemed so the piles of it i had lying around unread were physical testament to the many, many things i didn't know.

HA HA. Yeah, substitue the Economist for Scientific American, and I felt the same way. I stopped my subscription two years ago, and I still have some back issues to read.

I'm about 4 issues behind in my Harper's, but I read an article or two everyday at work, so I keep up the subscription.

I meant, "I read an article or two [from the online archives] at work everyday.

By "left conspiracy mag" do you really mean "left mag"? Because it is that, and the New Yorker isn't, much as I love it (and the Atlantic and the Economist really aren't).

Everything Ken Silverstein writes is worth checking out, but his going undercover as a representative of some horribly repressive country to hire a lobbyist was genius. Other faves from the stack of recent issues: "Jesus Killed Mohammed" (amazing report on right-wing evangelicalism in military), "The Sicario: A Juarez Hit Man Speaks" (also amazing), "Barack Hoover Obama," Wallace Shawn on sex, etc. etc...

I get both Harper's and the New Yorker. Both are great, but I prefer Harper's for the often absurd and amusing selections in the "Readings" section.

really miss the old atlantic.

I know nothing about magazines.

Is the NYer especially New York centric in its content? I don't live there & wiki says
"reviews and events listings often focus on cultural life of New York City"
I only really know the cliche about the cartoons being dry & whatnot. Also the dandy on the cover makes me think it's for bourgeois fops or something.

What about the NYRB as opposed to The Believer etc? Is NYRB for old people ?

oh wait the Believer is like 60 bucks

Some New Yorker articles and columns are on their website. Many American public libraries also carry copies of the magazine.

i know it's always pretty brutal, but this month's index is pretty brutal
(rest of the issue looks good also)

sooo
does anyone read harper's, here? I was thinking of butting in on the NYer alert thread to see if anyone who's more tuned in than i am wanted to rep for any articles, recently, I guess, but historically, too. I have a digital subscription I dip into, reading the index & some of the short pieces, but I seldom get into the essays, just because there's always something else to read.

it has a good eye for things like absurd & profound exchanges in court transcripts, cf this month's 'head trauma' piece.

I was just about to bump this thread last night!

bacevich's short essay on the "American century" was pretty good
really enjoyed the longer piece on monopolies and the perversion of open markets
most of the way through the piece on Phillip Larkin - probably inessential if you've already read about his letters and his racism, but good nonetheless

(talking about the feb 2012 issue btw)

yeah we get harper's.

it can be a tough slog month after month but there's always stuff worth reading.

ty kevin, gonna dip into the bacevich thing now. i've probably read a couple of pages into essays by people i recognise, over the past few years, i think i need nyer-thread style endorsements though. i was enjoying new books while zadie smith was doing it, i guess that's over now?

I like this and was reading this at a friend's house the other day, but I neva eva do. it sorta removes itself from internet-relevance by being 100% gated but I guess they're really into the 'not going out of business' thing.

yeah i'm not a fan of the new new books guy

i generally can't believe how cheap american magazine subscriptions are - noticed this in the spin thread, also - like i don't know how a new yorker sub covers even the mailing costs, but harper's is p cheap. i know that's not the point. but it's maybe part of the model that makes it more viable to them.

he is a cowboy

yeah it's super cheap, less than 20 bucks

can we officially make this the bumpable harper's endorsement thread, btw. i'll try to read some of what got mentioned about this month's, at some point, & make some perfunctory contribution or endorsement to keep the ball rolling. know that you have an audience if you are ever wondering whether or not to bump this thread to say an article was good.

I liked the Jan. article on the drug cartels in Juarez. It was long but it really caught me up to speed on a lot of those goings-on.
If I keep Harper's at my dinner table I always end up reading the whole thing.

i'm halfway through this article and it's totally fascinating: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/02/0083789

story of peru's largest prison, so overcrowded and understaffed that the inmates essentially are able to live normal lives within its confines: it basically has its own economy (inmates own and run restaurants and shops inside the prison) run on contraband brought by visitors; its inmates' (drastically disparate) living conditions are determined by their wealth, much like the outside world; and in one literally walled-off community they even hold local elections. the story follows some of the delegado candidates in the days leading up to the big election

cool, haven't read this month's issue yet but that sounds totally fascinating

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/10/0083639

This month's cover stories:
• Starving Your Way to Vigor has to be the stupidest cover story of theirs since the AIDS-denier one. It's about him using starvation/fasting as a weight loss plan (as well as hunger artists of yore). Not once does it mention anorexia nervosa, which is a separate thing, but also totally not. I'm not a doctor but it just seems stupid to promote starving as weight loss. It made me cranky, as you can plainly see.
• The Tyranny of Breastfeeding is just the opposite, sounds like it'd be a heavy-handed polemic but mostly it's just the history of Le Leche League, and nicely written. Last page covers some "do we really need to guilt women who choose not to breast feed," which is what I thought the whole thing would be.

i need to not seek out and read that starvation article because it will just infuriate me.

hm looking forward to reading that breatstfeeding one

did anyone else read that prison democracy article i mentioned? so good

there was an article abt the starving hobbyists somewhere that did discuss anorexia it was p fascinating those people are nuts

it was sad this one lady compulsively arranging her 12 almonds she was eating for breakfast

Peru prison democracy article was great! Best thing in Feb's issue.
This starving article is first-person guy asking why more doctors don't recommend starving for general health and also things like epilepsy.

wtf, harpers

Not reading it is a life-enriching formula; stick w/your instincts on this one, horseshoe.

When I first heard of anorexia and starvation diets in the 70s, this was the account my nutrition major friend mentioned--from '65, and a hell of a thing
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/news/microbio-65.php

i found that radical, hardcore starvation was an excellent weight-loss strategy. lost over 100 lbs in like 6 months. of course my hair fell out, my heartbeat got all fucked up, and i started to black out randomly, but hey, i looked great in a bikini.

• The Tyranny of Breastfeeding is just the opposite, sounds like it'd be a heavy-handed polemic but mostly it's just the history of Le Leche League, and nicely written. Last page covers some "do we really need to guilt women who choose not to breast feed," which is what I thought the whole thing would be.

― dream words & nightmare paragraphs from a red factory in a dead town (Abbbottt), Sunday, February 19, 2012 6:12 PM (5 days ago)

this was pretty good yeah, maybe could have been a few pages longer even and gotten into breastmilk vs formula even deeper (because i kind of half-objected to a couple of the "just sayin"s she threw in there), but overall well-written

there was an article abt the starving hobbyists somewhere that did discuss anorexia it was p fascinating those people are nuts

there was a new york magazine piece on this where the writer tried living the minimal calories lyfestile that was p good, def mentioned how many people into it have a history of eating disorders

yah maybe that was the one

my wife was really annoyed with the Harpers Le Leche piece bc (nb I haven't read it yet) apparently it claims that nursing is a suitable form of birth control? which is actually a myth and post-pregnancy is a very fertile moment and it is very very possible to get pregnant while nursing.

tbh the article states that pregnancy is avoided because the man invariably wants to come on her rock-hard, milk-engorged tits

not really

Hey Abbbottt I emailed you.

In re: starvation for epilepsy mentioned above.

There is a well-founded diet-based therapy for epilepsy that is similar to the Atkins diet, but it is even stricter in tems of not allowing carbohydrates. It is called the Ketogenic Diet. The effect of the diet is to induce a state of ketosis. For reasons I do not understand, this self-induced ketosis is clinincally proved to control seizures.

The good news is that most seizure drugs are very powerful and can have nasty side effects, but this diet allows you to forego drug therapy and it can even work in cases where drugs have failed. The bad news is that reducing carbs to almost zero is very difficult and an exclusively fat-and-protein diet is downright weird and a bit disgusting, not to mention that ketosis is not a desirable state of health in general.

My wife and I investigated this as a possibility for our daughter. Ultimately we decided against it.

my wife was really annoyed with the Harpers Le Leche piece bc (nb I haven't read it yet) apparently it claims that nursing is a suitable form of birth control? which is actually a myth and post-pregnancy is a very fertile moment and it is very very possible to get pregnant while nursing.

― Mordy, Sunday, February 26, 2012 9:34 AM (6 hours ago)

can you link to something on this? from what i know, in terms of birth control, there is a very low failure rate in the first 6 months if you breastfeed exclusively, as long as the mother hasn't gotten her period back

From I Love Books NYRB thread mentions of Jean Stafford, the Harper's connection (with typos now removed, even):
Was thinking about The Mountain Lion while reading the recently revived Harper's thread. Back in the 80s, when Michael Kinsley was editing it (and well!), James Wolcott wrote about Stafford. To my friends and I, she was mostly the wife whose nose was broken twice by hubby Robert Lowell, as graphically described in Ian Hamilton's Lowell bio.(Stafford also wrote both fiction and poetry, I think, re those experiences; don't know Lowell's confessional verses go that far, but he also became literally a textbook example of bipolarity.))Nevertheless, Wolcott got us into The Mountain Lion, Boston Adventure (novel), and I still need to read the non-fiction A Mother In History, Stafford's encounters with Lee Harvey's mom. Way later, an interviewer mentioned this column, and Wocott said people were still thanking him for it. As well they might. the main character of The Mountain Lion seems like somebody you might never want to bother having compassion for, but she compells it, a shit-sympathetic sub-villain (maybe like Lowell to her? Although she did get the hell out--the mother in Boston Adventure is somewhat similar to The Mountain Lion's hellish lass)

correction: most typos now removed

The article on South Sudan adopting English as its official language is AWESOME.
I am working my way through it slowly.

Looking forward to reading that.

My wife, who reads a lot about health and medicine, thought the starvation article was super-interesting.

why no ipad app harpers, not talkin abt stupid zinio neither

the starvation cover story is so inane and thoughtless i can hardly believe it actually got published. here and there you got bits of a potentially interesting story about the long, weird history of fasting as a medical treatment, but you had to wade through the writer's drawn-out take on his own fasting experience, from which he seems to have concluded that extended fasting is actually really totally awesome and harmless and FUN, and the only reason we're not all doing it, all the time, is that we've been brainwashed by a conspiracy led by the pharmaceutical industry. uh.

I really liked the short story this month.

^ hey which one was this, abbott? i have been dipping into Harper's way more successfully than I've been reading the longform stuff, I would give a story a whirl though. I couldn't work out whether you meant March or April.

also, does anyone have any fav long ponderous essays from the archives? i think i worked through a bunch itt a while back upon subscribing. i'm interested.

I put myself through a book of Lewis Lapham's essays last summer; he makes Gore Vidal look like E.J. Dionne.

oil photo-essay v affecting

^ hey which one was this, abbott? i have been dipping into Harper's way more successfully than I've been reading the longform stuff, I would give a story a whirl though. I couldn't work out whether you meant March or April.

also, does anyone have any fav long ponderous essays from the archives? i think i worked through a bunch itt a while back upon subscribing. i'm interested.

― blossom smulch (schlump), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 8:28 PM (2 months ago)

This was Thief by Jess Walter in the March issue

linky linky http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/03/0083833

I'm behind on my reading with these. Still reading the June issue. They really only get looked at on the toilet. Takes me a couple of days to read an article. I liked the Brooklyn Zoo one, nice little vignettes about zoos plus some eugenics history thrown in. I also liked "My Old Man," I found it very affecting: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/06/0083933

hey ty, crabbs. i will catch up with those couple articles. the bathroom thing is otm, harper's just doesn't fit into my life so having recommendations or exclusively reading the index & any photographic essays is what the only way i can get through any of it.

http://harpers.org/blog/2012/10/monopoly-is-theft/?single=1

^^have not read but looks intersting

A cover story on Prince just at the exact emotional moment when I would need Harper's to have a cover story on Prince. To the day, no less. Thank you, Harper's.

The story on Prince was very good; I can tell because it cheered me emotionally and made me listen to a lot of Prince. Admittedly neither of those is the hugest feat but it feels like one of those nice surprises that keeps me subscribed to this magazine.

yeah there is way more in this issue that i'm gravitating towards; i hadn't realised a 900 page richard brautigan bio had come out (this kinda feel like the spiritual-opposite approach to writing a richard brautigan than the one i'd expect, but that's okay); & i'm not finished w the prince piece yet but i'm all interested. i mean i never knew jamie foxx was a comic. i read this online which limits how much i dip into the lil findings sections, which are often some of the best bits i think.

Yeah the Brautigan bio piece was a surprise to me, too! Not done w/that yet. I wonder if the book itself is worth the commitment? I was once such a Brautigan maniac that I tried to dress exactly like him and everything (teenager).

You'd think I'd try to dress like the LADIES on his cover, but: no.

Brautigan's death bums me out so bad. His stuff meant so fuckin much to me back when

ha ha no dressing like RB is way better. tbh i feel like everything other than affecting the half-haunted expression is a sideshow though; i have a picture of myself outside the presidio library & all it does is enumerate the differences between us. i haven't looked at the review, yet (i dug up a times piece, too, cause given that i'm not about to sit down with a 900 page book & make headway with it i might as well soak up some stuff other people have skimmed from it), but i had weird experiences with the other couple of Brautigan bios; his daughter's was the one i took to best (though never finished), just cause she got with the write-endearingly-like-Richard-Brautigan-did thing, not even in voice but just in vignette & drift. i don't know if i want to read a really long brautigan bio or not.

his last couple books of poetry, the sad japanese stuff (partic june 30th, june 30th, & that last novel that i can't remember the name of (wait, an unfortunate woman?, right?), where he isn't even trying to map any fictional distance onto the life he's writing, are so so sad. there's so much empty space in them. all really great, just kinda hard to work through, particularly with how funny anything earlier is.

I haven't read them in a long time, and I wonder what I'd think now - but when I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies and Sombrero Fallout I loved them, a lot, and couldn't get why people thought he'd lost it. To me it seemed like his humor'd just gotten darker. Willard in particular could practically be a Coen brothers comedy.

oh man i haven't read willard. there are maybe ten of salinger's 22 stories i've never read, & i think i just like knowing that there's still some salinger out there for me in the world, once in a while when i think of him. a bunch of libraries i've belonged to have had reserve copies of the few brautigan novels i haven't read - the genre-y stuff, i think, hawkline monster, willard, &c - & i think it's just comforting knowing i can go drink from that well when i want to. i turn reading into such a sad aspirational hassle & to read one of his books is so pleasurable.

sombrero fallout is one of my favs. it's so funny. i have been thinking about this guy a little recently because he's the closest thing i have to the pile of records inseparable from past relationships; the books have figured pretty centrally w/most everyone i dated, either by describing things or else because of us reading the books together & stuff. i can't imagine having read him without fastening him to some part of my life.

you didnt know jamie foxx was a comic?!?!?!?

ha, no? like he wasn't on my radar until ray, he wasn't any part of the fabric of me growing up or watching tv or anything. jamie foxx as a person always kinda weirds me out & i'm still soaking up what this new layer of the onion means about him. if there are crucial jamie foxx '90s youtubes i should be watching let me know.

haha i guess the jamie foxx show wasnt as ubiquitous as had imagined at the time

i was in the uk, we were watching gritty dramas about the marital tensions of coalminers & their wives, there was no room for this humour about hollywood & crushing on prince

Guy who wrote the Brautigan book also wrote the book Angel Heart is based on, Fallen Angel, I think, and some kind of historical whodunit featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Kit Carson, maybe. Counterpoint is a pretty classy imprint, think I may have started a go-nowhere thread about it.

Falling Angel. Conan Doyle and Houdini.

decent piece from the publisher: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/03/obamas-real-political-program/

i really loved the ehrenreich excerpt

Doug Henwood's Hillary takedown is very good and fair-minded, although I'm not sure what it accomplishes since I feel like a lot of people already don't love her and will vote for her anyway in the seeming absence of other options.

The ISIS article is great, maybe best thing I've read on the topic so far.

technological workplace monitoring article freaking me out

i just subscribed to this
there is this kind of shimmering vein of newness, presentness, running through some of the best harper's things, something i can't find elsewhere
the list of asmr requests last issue, the piece on tech libertarians, just fragments
really a nice part of my month

&

did anyone read the Values-of-a-Solitary-Life article

i kinda found it simultaneously unbearable, for its outlook, & valuable, for its frame of reference

Solitude is overrated

Believe me

really feel you
kind of a hard piece to read occuyping some of the same spaces as the author without having made lemonade from them

i wonder just how many pieces lewis lapham has written decrying american politics/society with comparisons to the fall of rome (republic or empire, take your pick)

not that he's *wrong*, but it's a very specific and tiresome hammer he wields. mixed it up by going with the greeks this last time, at least

i couldn't even bear to start that article.

lol, I haven't read him in years but I feel like that was every "Easy Chair" (or whatever they called the editor's column at the time) he ever wrote. He seemed completely useless to me as a writer and thinker.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSlAnIbWoAAGoVF.png

smdh

"When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line." https://t.co/BjFbmBgqHJ

— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) January 12, 2018

🙄

There are some judgments in that piece that bypass "right-wing columnist" and go straight to "failed human"

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

dud

the motives of these signatories aside, there's no attempt (by some) to establish thoughtcrime in the name of progressivism right now, huh? Check.

the motives of these signatories aside

sorry can't extricate letter from motives of signatories

which likely vary except in Wokeland

that's where i live

On the positive side, my homie wrote this one:
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/