Easy Chair | Harper's Magazine - Part 4
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Easy Chair

Selective Service

It may have been that I neglected to register with the Selective Service System when I turned eighteen, in 1960, as the law required. Or maybe my student deferment, available…

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In the Shadow of the Storm

Ten years ago this month, on the day Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was at Camp Casey, an informal encampment outside George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch, listening to…

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Dressed to Kill

For my birthday last year, my wife bought me three hours with Chris Davis, a master falconer and breeder of hawks. My time would be spent meeting the hawks that…

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Shooting Down Man the Hunter

Sooner or later in conversations about who we are, who we have been, and who we can be, someone will tell a story about Man the Hunter. It’s a story…

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An Artist of the Sleeping World

Long years ago I gave pain by saying, with the arrogance of boyhood, that it was foolish to tell one’s dreams. I have done penance for that remark since. .…

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Abolish High School

Ididn’t go to high school. This I think of as one of my proudest accomplishments and one of my greatest escapes, because everyone who grows up in the United States…

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On Not Being Well Read

I loved reading before I could read. I have a distinct memory — yes, our memories are subject to lapses and improvisations, but this one has been around so long I…

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The War of the World

On a single day in July of 1943, more than 500 Allied planes bombed Rome, killing 1,500 people. The city got off lightly compared with Naples, which was attacked 200…

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Universal Use

In the 1950 film The Men, Marlon Brando in his first movie role plays Ken, a paraplegic World War II veteran struggling alongside other vets with spinal-cord injuries to learn…

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Poison Apples

Thirty years ago, Apple Computer launched a new product with a messianic commercial in which legions of blank-faced, coverall-clad workers march, as if in a trance, through a strange industrial…

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Spare the Darling

Though I have been hearing (or rather reading) it a lot lately in many venues, it was a little odd — even a bit unsettling — to read it in the New…

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Cassandra Among the
Creeps

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf…

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Page Turner

The time is close at hand when the scattered members of the civilized communities will be as closely united, as far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various…

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The Octopus and Its Grandchildren

When an 1882 cartoon in San Francisco’s Wasp newspaper depicted the Southern Pacific Railroad as an octopus with the whole state of California in its far-reaching tentacles, it launched an…

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Angle to Montgomery

Justin Barkley and I met as freshmen in college. He was the soft-spoken kid with an Alabama accent who lived down the hall. His roommates were all jocks of one…

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Beyond a Boundary

From a distance, as it hugs the hilly terrain, the fence looks almost decorative — a rambling, rust-colored abstraction. A thin ribbon of road runs alongside, its sandy surface kept…

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Fill In the Gap

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the bulk of the Affordable Care Act in June of 2012, the decision was widely viewed as a victory for President Obama and a…

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Search and Destroy

Gutter punks throw bottles at the cops near Tompkins Square Park, a police cruiser is flipped upside down in Crown Heights, two men fight under the marquee of a Times…

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Dodge the Draft!

Ever since the last draft was ended, in 1973, a small but devoted chorus of pundits, legislators, and retired military men have been stumping for its return. These are not…

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Tears for Fears

One of the many poignant glimpses of midcentury America afforded me by a fiftieth-anniversary reading of the Warren Report was the story of an ephemeral conservative organization called the American…

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Donkey Business

That the Republican Party has worked its way to a lonely and unpopular place is not news. The G.O.P.’s congressional wing has been moving rightward since the 1980s, and in…

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Chicago Is the Future

It was in 1988 that I moved to the bedraggled neighborhood of Hyde Park in order to study American history at the University of Chicago. I left the city ten…

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Home of the Whopper

Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University,…

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Course Corrections

To the long list of American institutions that have withered since the dawn of the 1980s—?journalism, organized labor, mainline Protestantism, small-town merchants—?it may be time to add another: college-level humanities.…

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If Memory Swerves

September 15 will mark five years since the beginning of the economic slump that defines the world we live in. Disaster was in the air already by that day in…

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Ad Absurdum

Suppose we decide to take a look at the Sixties from a fresh perspective. Suppose we start not with politicians, or soldiers in Vietnam, or civil rights protesters, or Woodstock…

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Trio Grande

The lady who changed the world,” was how The Economist described Margaret Thatcher in its obituary. Whether or not we believe that individuals ever wield such power over history, it…

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Getting to Eureka

The writer for Harper’s Magazine had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a…

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