Harper's Magazine: C/D

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.