This is life—recruiting, repairing, feeding, cleansing, purging; ailments, rags, excrements, dregs. Which of all the sensations is it for which life is eligible? Where is the day or hour in…
“Through NBC, GE has paid hundreds of million of dollars to broadcast the Olympics,” Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch said in an interview here recently. “Will we see tough…
“Truthiness,” a phrase coined by the comic Stephen Colbert, has emerged as one of the hallmarks of the Bush Administration. Truthiness, Colbert tells us, is something a government spokesperson knows…
In an editorial last week the New York Times suggested that the International Olympic Committee, in its ceaseless shilling for China in the run-up to the games, had proven itself…
Two months ago, I wrote about the news of Dmitri Nabokov having announced, after protracted hemming and internationally reported hawing, that he intended to publish his father Vladimir’s final, unfinished…
Yesterday a military panel rendered a split decision in the prosecution before a Guantánamo military commission of Salim Hamdan, the chauffeur of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In the…
This has not yet been authenticated but the National Enquirer must be pretty confident about this story on John Edwards and his alleged “lovechild.” After all, Edwards is a trial…
A book I read this past weekend, not John Haskell’s American Purgatorio about which I wrote in my previous post, but one that comes out in the fall, was a…
I posted an item last week noting that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign liked to talk about all the money it has raised from small donors, but that it was raking…
Whenever the cry goes up in Washington for lobbying reform, lobbyists insist that there’s really no need for any serious change. After all, they’ll say, we are already required to…
Earlier this year I described my night at the Capitol Hill Club, the exclusive private watering hole for Republican elected officials and their supporters, primarily lobbyists. The club boasts a…
John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the forthcoming book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. A version of this column…
Caught in the Web, 1860. Senator “Uncle” Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and “Alaskan of the Century,” was indicted for seven felonies related to unreported gifts worth…
Enthusiasm is suspicious. Or so a critic sometimes feels. Ruth Franklin, writing in the New Republic a few years ago about David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, expressed some discomfort over…
Exxon Mobil is quietly commemorating the biggest operating profit in U.S. corporate history, announcing last week that it had earned $11.7 billion during the second quarter. Here’s something else that…
Noch unverrückt, o schöne Lampe, schmückest du, An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen hier, Die Decke des nun fast vergeßnen Lustgemachs. Auf deiner weißen Marmorschale, deren Rand Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem…
In his Washington Post column today–one of thousands he has written over his career that end with a cry to end “partisan gridlock”–David Broder gets misty-eyed over the indictment of…
Es gibt aber neben den blinden Lobpreisen der Heimat eine ganz andere und schwere Pflicht, nämlich sich auszubilden zum erkennenden Menschen, dem die Wahrheit und die Verwandtschaft mit allem Geistigen…
In my previous post, I touched upon the habit of rereading, suggesting that it’s a central feature of all reading experience. To mint a crude means of measuring literary quality,…