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Commentary — October 22, 2012, 2:27 pm
Why the Help America Vote Act has done anything but.
Commentary — October 10, 2012, 8:46 am
Mandatory voting would greatly expand American electoral participation—and help the Democrats.
Commentary — September 14, 2012, 10:27 pm
Looking back on Taftanaz and the slowly shifting course of Syria’s revolution.
Commentary — September 6, 2012, 11:03 am
This month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine features ”The Water of My Land,” a portfolio of photographs by Samuel James, who spent two months this past February photographing life in the riverine communities of the Niger Delta. Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa and the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, but many delta residents have been shut out from this multibillion-dollar industry, and so have resorted to the clandestine trade of bunkering crude oil and refining it themselves. Through his photographs, James hopes to convey how communities engaged in this relentless and destructive practice are risking …
Commentary — September 4, 2012, 9:01 am
It is strangely humbling to read the last writings of a dying atheist whose opinions seemed of near-stratospheric condescension, and who stood among a group of modern anticlerics who consider empiricism a virtue, disparage religion without consulting theological texts, and in general exercise the same merciless rigidity they despise in their opponents. Humbling because these are the words of a man who was dying. To gripe with his ideas seems petty, irreverent even. And there is, after all, a difference between a man and his beliefs. Christopher Hitchens, who died on December 11, 2011, is the author of the posthumous …
Commentary — August 21, 2012, 9:23 am
David Sirota is a Denver-based syndicated newspaper columnist, radio host, and the author of three books, including Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now. His article “The Only Game in Town: An unlikely comeback for dying newspapers” appears in the September 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Last month, the Denver Business Journal showed that international banking scandals can be a major focus of local reporting. In its article “LIBOR scandal may cost Denver schools money,” the low-circulation trade magazine documented how the interest-rate scandal, which originated in the United Kingdom, could end up …
Commentary — August 17, 2012, 9:11 am
Why are multilevel-marketing companies making big donations to state attorney-general candidates? Virginia Sole-Smith’s article on Mary Kay Cosmetics in the August 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine has brought renewed scrutiny to the company’s multilevel business model, and specifically to whether or not it constitutes a pyramid scheme. By offering commissions to distributors on the purchases of other distributors whom they recruit, Mary Kay ladies create incentives for sales reps to focus on inventory sales to these recruits, rather than on sales to end consumers. Although state and federal laws differ, the distinction between a legitimate business and pyramid scheme hinges …
Commentary — August 8, 2012, 10:21 am
Last month, video emerged from the Syrian town of Tremseh showing scores of blood-sodden bodies of children and adults, some with cracked skulls and slit throats, all of them purported victims of the Syrian army. As the camera panned across the grisly tableau, an anguished commentator read out the names of the dead and cried, “God is greater!” The Syrian National Council, an umbrella rebel group, announced that 305 people had been killed, making Tremseh the gravest massacre of the fifteen-month-long uprising. Hillary Clinton decried this “indisputable evidence that the regime murdered innocent civilians,” and the United Nations issued its …
Commentary — August 6, 2012, 12:58 pm
In 2011, Time magazine recognized Sue Savage-Rumbaugh as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for her research into language among bonobo apes, which has profoundly altered our understanding of language, learning, social behavior, and cognition in primates. I write about Savage-Rumbaugh in an essay on the history of ape language research in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. When her work with bonobos began, Sue and her colleagues were trying to get Matata, an adult female, to understand a system of lexigrams—arbitrary, nonrepresentative pictures indicating everyday meanings. Matata did not learn them, but her adopted infant …
Commentary — August 1, 2012, 10:21 am
All images © Guy Martin/Panos In the spring of 2011, photographer Guy Martin came across a wall covered with photographs of missing men outside the central courthouse in Benghazi, Libya. They were images of men who had disappeared during the forty years that Muammar Qaddafi had ruled the country, whether during the conflict then taking place or during decades of arrests and kidnappings. At the time Martin was there, fierce fighting was still underway between rebels and government forces, with months to go before Qaddafi would be overthrown. The pictures have since been removed. The August 2012 issue of …
Commentary — July 30, 2012, 8:49 am
Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and the author of “Broken Heartland: The looming collapse of agriculture on the Great Plains,” from the July 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The drought settling over the American heartland this summer would be historic by any measure. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it is the most widespread drought in half a century, covering more than half the country and affecting nearly 90 percent of the nation’s corn and soy crops. In a single July afternoon, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack declared more than …
Commentary — July 25, 2012, 2:20 pm
Alexander Cockburn passed away on July 21 at age 71. He wrote many pieces for Harper’s Magazine over the years, among them “The Tedium Twins,” a classic of humor writing and media criticism. Alexander Cockburn was no saint, and he always hated the idea that obituary writers should sanctify the dead no matter how egregious their high crimes, misdemeanors, and other failings, so he’d no doubt disapprove of what follows. But his death hit me hard, and so I apologize to him for this highly sentimental remembrance. I first discovered Alex when I was a student at The Evergreen State …
Commentary — July 20, 2012, 7:30 pm
Dan Baum is the author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip, which will be published by Knopf in March. He wrote “Happiness Is a Worn Gun: My concealed weapon and me” for the August 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine. He blogs at Our Gun Thing. When you write about guns, as I do, and a shooting like the one in the Aurora movie theater happens an hour from your house, people call. I’ve already done an interview today with a Spanish newspaper and with Canadian radio. Americans and their guns: what a bunch of lunatics. Among the many ways America …
Commentary — July 20, 2012, 11:59 am
Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press). He wrote “Up From Globalism” in the January 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine. For all its intensity, nearly all the outrage sparked by news about the U.S. Olympic team’s Chinese-made uniforms has been pathetically superficial and downright useless. Even worse, the furor is shaping up as another lost opportunity for Americans to learn why jobs and production really move overseas, what …
Commentary — July 18, 2012, 2:14 pm
Virginia Sole-Smith is a reporting fellow with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Her article “The Pink Pyramid Scheme: How Mary Kay cosmetics preys on desperate housewives” appears in the August 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Feminists have long been blamed for making women want to “have it all”: the supportive spouse, the beloved children, the high-powered career. When Anne-Marie Slaughter published her treatise in The Atlantic last month on why even the highest-powered of women don’t yet have all of it, this mindset prevailed again. “I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist …
Commentary — July 13, 2012, 4:36 pm
William Pfaff has been contributing to Harper’s Magazine since 1961. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is not the only European convinced that the European crisis, now a political as well as economic crisis, can only be solved by pressing forward—ever forward!—to an ever more closely unified European Union, with ever-strengthened institutions of federalism and centralized authority. This is the formula insistently put forward not only in Germany but in European Union staff circles and the E.U. administration, and in the academic and other professional groups concerned with the EU’s future. What about going backward rather than forward? I would argue that …
Commentary — July 9, 2012, 10:08 am
Christopher R. Beha is an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine. His first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, was published in June by Tin House Books. In the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, I write about three books by writers I call the “New New Atheists.” The New Atheists—among them Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens—wrote bestselling books in the past decade that fiercely attacked belief in God. The fundamental difference between these polemicists and the next wave of atheist writers is evident in the titles of their books. In place of Dawkins’s The God Delusion, we …
Commentary — July 6, 2012, 2:46 pm
Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta. Courtesy of Kara Walker and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. The July 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine features a portfolio of images by New York artist Kara Walker from her series Works from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). The series, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, consists of fifteen lithographs and screenprints created using enlargements of woodcut prints from the titular book. Featured in the magazine portfolio are four images, all named after their source images’ captions: Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, Cotton …
Commentary — June 27, 2012, 10:15 am
Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. This excerpt is drawn from his July 2012 cover feature for Harper’s Magazine. Subscribers can read the entire story here. Sprawling beneath eight states and more than 100 million acres, the Ogallala Aquifer is the kind of hydrological behemoth that lends itself to rhapsody and hubris. Ancient, epic, apparently endless, it is the largest subterranean water supply in the country, with an estimated capacity of a million-billion gallons, providing nearly a third of all American groundwater irrigation. If the aquifer were somehow raised to the surface, it …
Years of consideration preceding the inclusion of the word “phat” in Random House’s 1996 Compact Unabridged Dictionary:
Scientists created crash helmets that stink when cracked and fruit flies to whom blue light smells delicious.
In Belize, a construction company bulldozed a 2,300-year-old Mayan temple to make road fill.
“This is the heart of the magic factory, the place where medicine is infused with the miracles of science, and I’ve come to see how it’s done.”
