HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.
Three’s a Crowd I greatly appreciated Andrew Cockburn’s piece about the enduring views of my husband, Walter Karp [“Party Walls,” Letter from Washington, November]. Throughout his career, Walter articulated ideas that few commentators recognize or acknowledge: that the two major parties exist to maintain their own power, that they need one another to exist, and that their leaders are often willing to lose an election in order to maintain control of their internal party machinery. The result, as Cockburn illustrates with several recent examples, is the suppression of viable reform candidates and third parties whose positions challenge the status quo. This squelching of outside voices has resulted in low voter turnout, stagnation in Congress, and disgust and hopelessness among citizens. My husband’s career was not easy. It can be challenging…
In the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of the exploding Bay Area tech world. London at the time was fairly sure of itself culturally; this was a moment when you could affix “Brit” to things—BritArt and BritPop—and they would sound cool. But we didn’t have much in the way of BritCyberculture, which was what Wired was selling: a freewheeling future in which old problems like state repression and economic scarcity would be swept away by the internet. Early in my tenure, I was sent to San Francisco for what was called, only half-jokingly, “an injection of Wired DNA.” I lounged in hot…
[Essay] HEAVEN’S DOOR By Pico Iyer, from The Half Known Life, which will be published this month by Riverhead Books. Four hours in Iran, and already I was having to rethink almost everything. The local guide who’d greeted me as I stumbled out of customs had begun to speak about his days at a boarding school near London in the Seventies. We’d pulled up at a luxury hotel, and I’d heard the strains of “Yesterday” being plaintively piped through the lobby. In one corner, a small sign in English pointed to a tiny room: mosque. Very close to it, a Swarovski shop was dripping in crystals and a Yves Rocher boutique promised this season’s offerings from Paris. Now, as I strolled back from an early morning walk, I saw Ali,…
Beatty, an old gold rush town in Nye County, Nevada, looks like a Wild West stage set. Burros, legacies of the region’s mining past, wander the streets. A century ago, it was a bustling three-railroad town. Today, it’s home to 854 people. Beatty has two gas stations, one excellent barbecue restaurant, and no stoplights. At Happy Burro Chili & Beer, a meal costs less than ten dollars and you can still smoke inside. West of town, a sign on State Route 374 reads WELCOME TO BEATTY: GATEWAY TO DEATH VALLEY. The road winds through the Bullfrog Hills—prospectors thought its green rock resembled the skin of a bullfrog—before a wide valley comes into view, dizzyingly vast for anyone unaccustomed to the basin-and-range topography of the West. It’s so big you can see the…
In the beginning, when I first went West, I thought it was because I was in love with loneliness. Love of a certain kind of life and a certain kind of natural beauty was involved as well. But as I grow older, as I see more of the world, I realize that it was not actually loneliness I sought, but rather the fulfillment of a more subtle and persistent human need. It was the pursuit of the wraith of order: the unformulated wish to find some place where man had not yet begun to set out his garbage can and, if possible, to help direct the growth of that place so that when the garbage cans became necessary they might even be pleasant to look at. And so I went…
Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Rorty considered the possibility that “the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments.” He went on to describe how such a process might transpire in the United States, where members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to…
