Publisher’s Note

Publisher's Note — December 16, 2011, 7:04 pm

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

We at Harper’s Magazine deeply regret, on a personal and professional level, the death of Christopher Hitchens. Christopher was a friend to me and to the magazine for many years, especially during his time as Washington Editor from 1987 to 1992. Lewis Lapham and I would surely concur that some of Christopher’s best work was written for Harper’s. Among our proudest collaborations were “The Case against Henry Kissinger,” which ran in two parts in 2001 and was published as a book later that year, and his brilliant analysis of President George H.W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. …

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Publisher's Note — December 14, 2011, 12:16 pm

President Obama Richly Deserves To Be Dumped

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the Providence Journal on December 14, 2011. As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored. Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the …

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Publisher's Note — November 16, 2011, 3:16 pm

The Progressive, Sensitive, Rational Governor Romney

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the Providence Journal on November 16, 2011. I’ve been reading up on former Governor Romney, and I like what I’m learning, about both his passion and his powers of observation. Here’s an emblematic excerpt of a speech he delivered to editorial writers following a cross-country tour: “The America I saw was not America the Beautiful…. Instead, I saw the other face of America — the America of ugly streets and rotted …

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Publisher's Note — October 21, 2011, 8:51 am

An Architect’s Optimism; The U.N.’s Pessimism

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the Providence Journal on October 19, 2011. As I left the United Nations General Assembly last month, having just heard Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s plea for recognition of a Palestinian state, I noticed Elie Weisel, the Nobel laureate and death-camp survivor, surrounded by admirers. The Romanian-born writer was lending his moral support to the Israeli prime minister in the middle of an audience of diplomats, U.N. staffers, …

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Publisher's Note — September 14, 2011, 9:04 am

Some Liberals Finally On To Obama’s Betrayal of Liberalism

As a self-proclaimed independent journalist normally content to attack politicians from outside the establishment, I’ve found it very lonely criticizing Barack Obama these past three years. Before then it was easy to be at odds with power, since the Bush nightmare rallied all sorts of disparate foes of the administration. But with Obama’s arrival in the White House, ordinarily skeptical liberals thought they had found their redeemer, a genuine reformer with leftist instincts who, even better, was the son of a black African father and a liberal white mother. It didn’t matter what Obama’s actual record was — how (or …

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Publisher's Note — September 12, 2011, 8:24 am

The Hangover

A video interview with Viceland about where we’re heading now that the 9/11 memorials are over: [removed][removed]

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Publisher's Note — September 10, 2011, 4:04 pm

The Sad Legacy of Sept. 11

John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author, most recently, of You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on September 10, 2011. For weeks I’ve been dreading the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and not because I fear another attack. As a New Yorker who works below 14th Street, I’m reluctant to revisit the unhappy images I witnessed on that paradoxically lovely, cloudless day: the vast plume of smoke blowing eastward over my office building when I emerged from the Bleecker Street subway station around 9 …

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Publisher's Note — August 15, 2011, 5:33 pm

Goodbye to Fostoria, Ohio: A Small Town in the Middle of Everywhere

The jobs went south — to Mexicali, Mexico — after the NAFTA liberalizations of the 1990s. New owners have come and gone, the last U.S. employees are awaiting redundancy, and only a very few money men have profited, handsomely. “When I went to Fostoria, in September 2009, long freight trains still rumbled through town regularly on the railroad lines that made the city, despite its modest size (population 13,441), such an attractive place to build a factory in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the trains weren’t stopping to pick up much and the chamber of commerce was reduced …

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Publisher's Note — July 13, 2011, 9:39 am

A Pinch of Sympathy with My Disgust

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the July 13, 2011 Providence Journal. Rupert Murdoch’s legal, and now political, problems in the U.K. — stemming from the practice at one of his newspapers, the News of the World, of eavesdropping on cell phones and paying police for information — remind me of a dark joke I sometimes share with the staff at Harper’s Magazine. As it happens, the Australian-born press baron owns the Harper’s trademark because he owns …

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Publisher's Note — June 15, 2011, 8:48 am

DSK and the Typical American Ignorance About France

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the June 15, 2011 Providence Journal. Isn’t French-bashing fun? With Dominique Strauss-Kahn (aka Le Perv) residing in tabloid hell on charges of attempted rape, we’ve gone back to anti-Frog ridicule not seen since Bush and company were denouncing the other Dominique — de Villepin — for opposing the invasion of Iraq. “The Simpsons” image of a “cheese-eating surrender monkey,” popularized by Anne Coulter among others in 2003, has been replaced by …

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Publisher's Note — May 19, 2011, 9:45 am

Head-examining After the Osama bin Laden Killing

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the April 20, 2011 Providence Journal. There’s much to criticize about the bloody pageant surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden: the assassination of an unarmed man apparently in front of one of his unarmed wives; the unseemly displays of patriotic fist-pumping by Americans who feel themselves superior to chanting Islamic radicals; the brazen exploitation of the killing by a president already campaigning for re-election, and America’s “alliance” against “terrorism” with …

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Publisher's Note — April 26, 2011, 5:56 pm

Blindness Toward War Easy for Americans

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the May 19, 2011 Providence Journal. To understand the utter absurdity of America’s intervention in the Libyan civil war, I recommend a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see its new exhibition of German Expressionism. It will be much more instructive than reading the media commentary about the president’s opening of yet another Mideast war. I’m not merely referring to the surrealism (in the work of …

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Publisher's Note — March 17, 2011, 12:38 pm

Revisiting a Hallowed Gymnasium with its Star Novelist

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the March 16, 2011 Providence Journal. With “March madness” approaching and my own neuroses about basketball beginning to spike, I fulfilled a childhood dream last month by attending a college game at the Palestra, in Philadelphia. I’m not sure what took me so long to make the trip to the Jerusalem of collegiate hoops, but it might have something to do with why I’ve never been to the Parthenon in Athens …

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Publisher's Note — January 20, 2011, 1:20 pm

A Country with Chicago in Charge

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the January 19, 2010 Providence Journal. Back in the summer of 2008, when Barack Obama was still the bright new hope of liberals, I found myself chastised for raining on the future president’s parade. My essential point — that an administration incubated and hatched in Chicago would never break with the autocratic, anti-reformist, reactionary traditions of the city’s Democratic machine — was unwelcome among Democrats desperate for a savior after eight …

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Publisher's Note — December 17, 2010, 8:50 am

I Won’t Hug This File — I Won’t Even Call It My Friend

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the December 15, 2010 Providence Journal. Long before I took myself off Facebook, I doubted the “revolutionary” potential of the Internet. In part my viewpoint was a result of the annoying smugness of the pre-crash dot.com “entrepreneurs,” who always seemed to be murmuring initial public offering nonsense at a table next to mine in tony restaurants. What’s more, I never found e-mail exciting, since I’d already experienced a surfeit of computer …

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Publisher's Note — November 17, 2010, 10:31 am

An Evening with Charming Huckster Charlie Rangel

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the November 17, 2010 Providence Journal. I didn’t feel like watching the election-night TV news at home — it was too depressing to hear the shrieks on Fox or the bromides on CNN — so instead I went up to cover Congressman Charles Rangel’s “victory party” in Harlem. Despite facing trial before the House Ethics Committee, Rangel’s re-election was guaranteed in the overwhelmingly Democratic 15th District. But with the Republican takeover …

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Publisher's Note — October 22, 2010, 12:47 pm

Courtliness on the Court, and Splendor on the Grass

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the October 20, 2010 Providence Journal. NEW YORK— If, like me, you’re an occasional tennis player who once harbored dreams of competitive glory, you might understand why I feel sorry for tennis pros. Think about it: the patient teacher endlessly hitting the ball to undistinguished players of middling ability, knowing that his livelihood depends on a polite consistency that never reveals his true talent. A sudden, unrestrained forehand smash or devastating …

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Publisher's Note — September 15, 2010, 11:17 am

Decline of Daley, Chicago, and U.S.

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the September 15, 2010 Providence Journal. The Democratic Party indeed must be in very bad shape if the boss of Chicago is relinquishing his nearly absolute power. Mayor Richard M. Daley’s bombshell announcement that he won’t seek re-election is the most significant indication yet that the majority party will lose a great many congressional seats in November and that its love affair with Barack Obama may be on the wane. Daley’s …

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Publisher's Note — August 18, 2010, 4:23 pm

Of the IRA and the Afghan war

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the August 18, 2010 Providence Journal. SAG HARBOR, N.Y. – I know it was supposed to recall the drama of Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg, but when WikiLeaks jolted Washington last month with its “revelations” about the Afghan debacle, I was disappointed. This isn’t to minimize the courage of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and the leaker, or leakers, who gave him the documents. I was pleased to …

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Publisher's Note — July 14, 2010, 4:37 pm

Dyer’s Convincing Global-warming Vision

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the July 14, 2010 Providence Journal. Until very recently, global warming never struck me as the great issue of the day. I avoided Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” because it seemed too much like homework, and when I finally forced myself to watch it at home on DVD, I fell asleep. Then, last November, after e-mails were leaked from England’s University of East Anglia that made their scientist authors appear high-handed …

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