Six Questions

Michael Hastings’s Polk Award–winning Rolling Stone article, “The Runaway General,” brought the career of General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander in Afghanistan, to an abrupt end. Now Hastings has developed the…

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The last decade was clearly something of a Hobbesian moment in American history. Now, political philosopher and Hobbes scholar Ted H. Miller has written a book entitled Mortal Gods: Science,…

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Kingdom Under Glass, by frequent Harper’s Magazine contributor Jay Kirk, came out in paperback in late November. The book tells the story of the remarkable career of Carl Akeley, the…

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In the wake of September 11, Glenn Greenwald emerged as the nation’s premier chronicler of the war that U.S. officials waged on the nation’s civil liberties under the pretext of…

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Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Jeff Sharlet recently published Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between, a beautifully written bricolage of reported narrative, character study, and…

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The December issue of Harper’s Magazine features an excerpt from Ben Marcus’s new novel, The Flame Alphabet, to be published in January by Knopf. In the novel, Marcus’s fourth, the…

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Kathryn Sikkink has spent thirty-five years studying how nations hold their leaders to account for such crimes as kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial execution, which are often committed against the backdrop…

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For a philosopher who claims to eschew the carnivalesque, Slavoj Žižek creates quite a circus wherever he goes. After his concluding remarks as host of a recent conference in New…

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The name and face of former FBI special agent Ali Soufan have only recently become known to the public, but to those inside the U.S. government Soufan has long been…

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The July 2011 issue of Harper’s Magazine features an excerpt from Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which is being released by Random House on October 18. Harper’s put six questions to…

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Join Michelle Shephard for a conversation with Bart Gellman about A Decade of Fear at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, in Robertson Hall, on Tuesday,…

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University of Chicago professor Bernard Harcourt is a student, but not a follower, of the Chicago School, an academic movement that has had a profound effect on America in the…

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Harold Bloom, Yale professor and celebrated literary critic, has a new book — his thirty-eighth — entitled The Anatomy of Influence. In a sense it is an updating of The…

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Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore policeman who now serves as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, is disgusted with the nation’s prison system.…

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A career clandestine-services officer in the CIA, Glenn Carle drew an unusual assignment in the fall of 2002. He was sent to serve as the case officer of an Afghan…

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Waging war and engaging in diplomacy would generally be reckoned among the most important powers of any sovereign. Yet as Laura Dickinson argues in her new book, Outsourcing War and…

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Journalist turned foreign-affairs analyst Anatol Lieven has Pakistan in his bones. Descended from civil servants and officers in British India, one of whom fought in the rugged North-West Frontier, he…

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Under Ronald Reagan and each of the presidents who followed him, America went on a privatization rampage. At some point, the privatization turned increasingly to core governmental functions: railroads and…

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Michael Hirsh, the longtime economics correspondent for Newsweek , now serves as chief correspondent for National Journal. In his new book, Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future…

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Career Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander, who won the Bronze Star for leading a team in a series of intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, has written a dramatic account of the…

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Cherif Bassiouni, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, was one of the key authors of the Convention Against Torture and is one of the world’s preeminent experts in…

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Beginning with the disclosures of Abu Ghraib and continuing over a period of several years, Reagan Administration Solicitor General and Harvard law professor Charles Fried discussed the Bush Administration’s policy…

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Bach’s cello suites are among the best known works of classical music, now risking popularization to the point of fatigue as they provide background music for cat food commercials. But…

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Eric Metaxas, whose best-selling biography of William Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, provided the framework for an important motion picture, is now out with a thick review of the life of Dietrich…

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C. Bradley Thompson, a political science professor at Clemson University, has recently teamed up with Yaron Brook to write Neoconservatism: An Obiturary for an Idea, a classical-liberal critique of the…

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Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman surveys the last fifty years and sees the American presidency transformed into a potentially dangerous vehicle for political extremism and lawlessness. In his latest book,…

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Madhusree Mukerjee, a former editor at Scientific American and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, has published a bombshell book about Churchill’s attitudes toward India and the steps that he…

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Most American war reporting stretches from the corridors of the Pentagon to embeds with the troops. It rarely offers a street-level view, and almost never the perspective of the civilians…

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