http://harpers.org/rss/index.xml A Harper's Magazine Weblog en-us Copyright Harper's Magazine Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:08:37 -0400 http://www.harpers.org/media/image/Harpers_305x100.gif http://harpers.org http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006107 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006107 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:08:24 -0400 If President Obama has ever heard of William L. Shirer, chances are it’s in connection with Nazi Germany. Nowadays, you can’t make assumptions about what people under 50 know and don’t know, but it’s a safe bet Obama recalls Shirer’s most famous book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, even if he hasn’t read it. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005911 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005911 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:17:12 -0400 Are you tired of hearing how “smart” Barack Obama is? I reached my limit over the summer, when The New York Times Magazine quoted Valerie Jarrett, the president’s liaison to Chicago City Hall, declaring, “I mean, he’s really by far smarter than anybody I know.” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005735 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005735 John R Mac Arthur Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:02:22 -0400 Vacation for me isn’t just vacation from work; it’s vacation from reading for work. During my working year I read an enormous amount of journalism and history (all of it claiming to be non-fiction), and by summertime this steady ingestion of prosaic “reality” has worn me out. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/08/hbc-90005476 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/08/hbc-90005476 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:24:09 -0400 When Walter Cronkite’s son, Chip, took the lectern of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan last month to remember his father, he thanked him for various kindnesses. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/07/hbc-90005409 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/07/hbc-90005409 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:02:35 -0400 When I was growing up, my sense of humor was largely defined by James Thurber and his famous story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” In our home, as in so many other upper-middle-class American families in the ’50s and ’60s, Thurber was the last word in sophisticated satire, whose only possible rivals were Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip and Charles Addams, of Addams Family fame. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/06/hbc-90005226 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/06/hbc-90005226 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:17:25 -0400 It isn’t quite fair to call Barack Obama a liar. During the campaign he carefully avoided committing to much of anything important that he might have to take back later. For now, I won’t quibble with the St. Petersburg Times’s Obamameter, which so far has the president keeping 30 promises and breaking only six. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90005017 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90005017 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 20 May 2009 08:52:27 -0400 Have you ever asked yourself what you would have done if you had found yourself in Paris on June 14, 1940, when the German army rolled into town? Collaboration so quickly became the norm that this fundamental question– would I have run, fought, played ball or just kept my head down?– rarely gets posed in public. Of course, the answer would have depended largely on whether you were Jewish, or French, or both. But whatever your origins, or your politics, the practical and moral choices presented that day still trouble the conscience and demand debate. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/04/hbc-90004796 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/04/hbc-90004796 John R Mac Arthur Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:51:17 -0400 Harper’s readers are cordially invited to attend a panel discussion in New York City, Sunday, 19th April, 12–2pm. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/04/hbc-90004778 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/04/hbc-90004778 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:34:27 -0400 Barack Obama’s commitment to helping labor has always been suspect, but handing over the American car business to the investment banker Steven Rattner might well turn the president into the last great union buster. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004581 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004581 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:39:27 -0400 Assessing the gigantic new budget proposed by Barack Obama is hard enough, but the $3.6 trillion behemoth turns incomprehensible when left- and right-leaning journalists assigned to analyze it seem unable to separate wishful thinking from political reality. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004401 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004401 John R Mac Arthur Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:13:43 -0400 Killing time before the Studs Terkel memorial celebration in Chicago on January 30, I glanced up at the magnificent Tiffany dome of the Chicago Cultural Center and noticed it was ringed with a quotation from Joseph Addison: “Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004253 http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004253 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 21 Jan 2009 09:21:55 -0400 Noting the imminent death of newspapers is all the rage, fast becoming one of the reigning clichés of the day. I beg to differ, but not for the self-interested reasons one might imagine. To explain, I’d like to tell a story—a newspaper story. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/12/hbc-90004035 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/12/hbc-90004035 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:48:15 -0400 When it comes to foreign affairs, Barack Obama seems like a serious person with an authentic liberal’s concern about the health of the world beyond our borders. After all, he campaigned for president in Berlin and his blurb appears on the back of a book by Reinhold Neibuhr, the great liberal theologian and internationalist. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/11/hbc-90003870 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/11/hbc-90003870 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:07:17 -0400 God help me, but I had to laugh when I heard the news that Barack Obama had named Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. What else could I do? Without even so much as a symbolic gesture in support of reform, the great agent of “change” immediately selected as his chief political enforcer a figure who epitomizes the Washington consensus of the past two decades—pro-“free trade,” pro-Iraq invasion/occupation and, perhaps most importantly, pro-pork barrel. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/10/hbc-90003688 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/10/hbc-90003688 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:57:55 -0400 It’s not as though no one saw it coming. Here’s the economist Michael Hudson, writing in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “The reality is that, although home ownership may be a wise choice for many people, this particular real-estate bubble has been carefully engineered to lure home buyers into circumstances detrimental to their own best interests…. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servitude of debt serfdom.” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/10/hbc-90003664 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/10/hbc-90003664 John R Mac Arthur Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:17:08 -0400 . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003638 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003638 John R Mac Arthur Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:13:48 -0400 Wilson got his way, and from his speech before a joint session of Congress on April 2, 1917, calling for a declaration of war against Germany, until October 2, 1919, the day he suffered a massive stroke while campaigning frantically for Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, the great proponent of democracy engaged in the most anti-democratic domestic crusade in American history. Wilson’s self-righteousness encouraged coercion, rather than persuasion, and he resorted to moral blackmail and brute force when faced with domestic political opposition, whether to his war plans or to his vision for postwar peace. For example, if the treaty and the League of Nations were not approved, there would result “in the vengeful Providence of God, another struggle in which, not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the peoples of the world.” As the historian Anders Stephanson wrote, Wilson’s messianic obsession with making the League into what Wilson called a “wholesale moral clearinghouse” meant that opponents of his vision were heretics. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003564 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003564 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:13:47 -0400 Sarah Palin never had much hope of getting my vote, but when she told the Republican convention that special-needs children would have “a friend and advocate in the White House” in a McCain administration, I felt obliged to give her a hearing. God knows, kids with disabilities and their parents need powerful friends, so I even called my own special-needs daughter to the television to watch. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/hbc-90003366 http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/hbc-90003366 John R Mac Arthur Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:31:46 -0400 Among the several unpleasant outgrowths of the Obama–Clinton death duel, perhaps the most disturbing was the widespread perception that the junior senator from New York was more attuned to the cares and hardships of the working class than her chic counterpart from Illinois. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2007/06/jrm-pubnote-20070609 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/06/jrm-pubnote-20070609 John R Mac Arthur Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400 They say America is the land of the second chance -- the chance to make good on a promise, a project or a virtuous deed that might lead to redemption. But in the case of Henry Kissinger, the chances never seem to run out, no matter how much harm he does. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2007/05/jrm-pubnote-20070502 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/05/jrm-pubnote-20070502 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 02 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 A few days after I voted in the first round of the French presidential election, I dropped by the French Cultural Center on Fifth Avenue to attend a reception in honor of the American novelist Paul Auster—and to gather some political intelligence. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/jrm-pubnote-20070417 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/jrm-pubnote-20070417 John R Mac Arthur Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:00:00 -0400 Given my dissident politics, I should be up in arms about the Israel lobby. Not only have I supported the civil rights of the Palestinians over the years, but two of my principal intellectual mentors were George W. Ball and Edward Said, both severe critics of Israel and its extra-special relationship with the United States. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2007/03/jrm-us-must-decide http://harpers.org/archive/2007/03/jrm-us-must-decide John R Mac Arthur Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/whos-the-journalistic-hypocrite-2007-02-06 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/whos-the-journalistic-hypocrite-2007-02-06 John R Mac Arthur Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/whos-the-journalistic-hypocrite-2007-01-17 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/whos-the-journalistic-hypocrite-2007-01-17 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/12/jrm-centrist-democrats-3402838 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/12/jrm-centrist-democrats-3402838 John R Mac Arthur Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/11/jrm-pre-election-waterbury-28482834 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/11/jrm-pre-election-waterbury-28482834 John R Mac Arthur Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/10/jrm-clinton-democrats http://harpers.org/archive/2006/10/jrm-clinton-democrats John R Mac Arthur Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/09/AmericasTrains http://harpers.org/archive/2006/09/AmericasTrains John R Mac Arthur Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/08/jrm-american-raj-2006080229394 http://harpers.org/archive/2006/08/jrm-american-raj-2006080229394 John R Mac Arthur Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400