Harper's Magazine: C/D

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