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.
Masters of None The practice of interviewing government officials became commonplace in the United States by the 1880s, but was considered uncouth in parts of Europe through the end of the First World War. As American audiences enjoyed a more intimate, and often critical, perspective on their leaders’ decision-making, one French observer disparaged the “spirit of inquiry and ‘espionage’” animating the American press. Thomas Meaney’s dispatch from the Munich Security Conference [“Masters of War,” Letter from Germany, June] is an impressive revival of that spirit. His interviews with David Petraeus, Ben Rhodes, Niall Ferguson, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, and an unguarded Chinese foreign minister whom he chases down are relayed with the familiarity and irreverence of the original “correspondents”—often the friends of an editor whose long-distance correspondence was simply published. Meaney’s…
On a damp, gray afternoon in April, I took my daughter with me to vote in the New York Democratic primary. After a long Tuesday, she was keen to get home to Cheddar Bunnies and apple juice; instead, she was watching me fumble with a series of locked doors outside a local high school in Brooklyn. As it started to rain, I realized that my problem was acute: I had to explain to the hungry four-year-old on my shoulders why I had taken a precious chunk of her afternoon in order to cast an empty ballot. She realized it, too, with a ring of triumph in her voice: “But if you’re not voting for anybody, Daddy, why do you have to vote?” I was doing this to register dissent from…
If you are from somewhere else, living somewhere else … no, if you are an African or an Arab living in Europe … no, if you are a Libyan and therefore both African and Arab, and moved as a boy to England in the Eighties … after all that has happened, after Balfour and World War II, after the invasion and occupation of Palestine, and long after Kipling, after all the countless gestures of reduction and prejudice, long after your land and resources have been stolen, and being born into that dispossession, the hot bitterness of it running in the veins of those around you and, more bewilderingly, in your veins, then witnessing how your own are spoken of, seeing how cheap your body has become, how it can be…
“My fiancé is waiting for me in Las Vegas,” she says. She keeps on talking about her fiancé and apologizing for her every move. That’s just something junkies do. I know she’s a junkie not because she’s drinking liquid morphine but because she says sorry a lot. And the cheekbones, of course. She calls it “my medicine,” the morphine. She asks the flight attendant for wine and I join her. I’m on a Manchester–Las Vegas Thomas Cook flight and I need a drink. If she didn’t call it her medicine I would ask her for some. I can’t sit still. I’m nervous. I’m in trouble. I was told that entering through Las Vegas would be easier than LAX, that the immigration officers are more relaxed. Or that they are so…
The museums of New York in the Seventies and Eighties were as much the domain of my semi-feral childhood as the Automats and the soda counters and the used-book stores and Washington Square Park. I grew up going to the Museum of Natural History every year—it was a pro forma class trip for a public school kid, even one from Brooklyn. My father was a painter, so if we hit the museums uptown instead of the SoHo galleries, it was MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. I remember MoMA’s epochal Picasso show in 1980, and the Whitney’s Alexander Calder exhibition in 1981. The Metropolitan I went to with my grandmother once or twice and knew from reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In high school I made…
More than four million Americans are already part of the growing enhanced community. It takes courage. The International Olympic Committee has weaponized the athletic community against science and against you. Below are some tips to help you on your enhanced journey. YOU DON’T HAVE TO COME OUT AS ENHANCED It’s really up to you. If you are in an environment that is hostile toward enhanced athletes, remember that the Enhanced Games embraces you. IF YOU THINK SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS ENHANCED Remember that you cannot force them to come out. But if a friend comes out as enhanced to you, respect their commitment to their health. STAY IN CONTROL OF THE NEWS If you come out as enhanced, it is important to control the messaging. You are overcoming the dogma…
