Six Questions

Filmmaker Adam Hall on capturing the dark magic of a T. C. Boyle short story

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Michelle Orange on the art of the personal essay, navigating cultural overload, and the distance that separates two human heads

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Alex Gibney on his documentary investigating the Roman Catholic Church's handling of child sex-abuse cases

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Timothy Donnelly on writing challenging verse, the cultural faith bred by 30 Rock, and the poet’s need to reach for the eternities

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Christopher S. Stewart on his epic hunt for Honduras???s lost White City

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Tina Rosenberg on the British spy novelist who hoodwinked Hitler

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Mark Kingwell on fugitive democracy, the cultural role of philosophers, and hockey-borne Canadian anti-intellectualism

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Elena Passarello on the animal appeal of the human voice and the art of the lyrical essay

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Six Questions for Frederick Kaufman

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Theodore Ross discusses the history and evolution of American Judaism and recounts his attempt to reconcile with his childhood alienation from his Jewish heritage.

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After four years in the political penalty box, Karl Rove has returned as the undeniable mastermind of the G.O.P.’s electoral effort. Vanity Fair contributing editor Craig Unger has just published…

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Joshua Cohen’s new story collection, Four New Messages, was published on August 7 to wide and deserved acclaim. The book’s four independent but stylistically and thematically harmonious stories are an…

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We live in a world in which the private space we are afforded seems to be constantly shrinking. Travelers are subjected to ever-mounting indignities at airports, and those who turn…

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Alex Cooley Through much of modern history, Central Asia has been a borderland between great empires that vied for influence within it. This came to an end with the Soviet…

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Measured by revenue, ExxonMobil is the largest corporation on earth. Its operations span the globe, and it behaves like a powerful sovereign, exercising immense influence over the governments of the…

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The last years of Mozart’s life and the prodigious and important works he created during them have been heavily romanticized in the musical literature. Now, one of this generation’s leading…

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After more than a decade spent writing on subjects as diverse as Uzbekistan, the Iraq War, and video-game voice-overs, Tom Bissell published his sixth book, a collection of some of…

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Henry Crumpton spent twenty-four years in the CIA’s clandestine service. His work put him at the forefront of the agency’s counterterrorism efforts, and on the front lines as America took…

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The last time Harper’s Magazine readers saw Gideon Lewis-Kraus was in 2009, when he diagnosed the diseases of the publishing world at the Frankfurt Book Fair and infiltrated the community…

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Julie Otsuka is the author of two novels, When the Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, the latter of which was recently awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for…

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The American Constitution has been the subject, just as Thomas Jefferson predicted, of a great deal of “sanctimonious reverence,” especially from American politicians who make comments demonstrating they know little…

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Jesselyn Radack came into the Justice Department through the Attorney General’s Honors Program and worked as an ethics adviser until she found herself embroiled in a scandal that arose because…

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A successfully completed prosecution in the International Criminal Court, new demands for investigations into atrocities in Syria, ongoing issues surrounding crimes committed by American officials during the Bush-era “war on…

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The world is quickly being reshaped, writes political economist Ian Bremmer. America established itself as the paramount power following the collapse of Communism, but the emerging system is one in…

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Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now writes for the Daily Beast and teaches at the City University of New York, has just published a remarkable…

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Alan Lightman is a professor of physics and humanities at MIT, and the author of novels, poems, and such essays as “The Accidental Universe: Science’s crisis of faith” (December 2011),…

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Vladimir Putin is emerging as an iconic figure for Russian politics in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he remains rather mysterious even at home, and…

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Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right is the first full exploration of the rise of a new kind of false…

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