From “What’s Wrong with the Right People?,” which appeared in the June 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.…
From “Contract Killers,” which appeared in the June 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive. A small group of…
From the Editor’s Notebook that appeared in the June 1988 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 173-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive. The news from…
Let us follow a Cossack seigneur who is going by way of the Volga to his domains in the steppe of the Don. We are seeking picturesque representations of national…
My particular line of country has always been generalization and synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I hate statements, views, prejudices, and beliefs that jump at you out…
I was getting awfully suspicious of environmentalists. Their solutions to problems had an inordinate amount of impracticality about them, more than they would have tolerated in their own lives, and…
In the last two years of his brief and stormy life, Robert Kennedy showed a remarkable ability to arouse extravagant political hopes. California grape-pickers came to look upon him as…
The question for the arriving generation is not whether our society is imperfect (we can take that for granted), but how to deal with that imperfection. So far as I…
It is my impression that the modern phase of science and of scholarship began with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Here exploring and exploiting became synonymous, and the collection of…
An American adult today has, in his ordinary lifetime, virtually spanned ages. His mind and imagination have been confronted with the demand that they make room for five traditional lifetimes’…
At stake was more than some Caribbean island. America itself, one elder statesman informed the president, faced a crucial test “in the great struggle between liberty and despotism.” Would the…
I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100…
This is the story of two scientists. Their search began five years ago with a single radiocarbon clue from the ocean floor. It led over many continents and seas, to…
I heard about a rejection letter recently that deserves preservation in these days of big-time word-merchandising. “I cannot recall reading,” it said without irony, “a novel as learned, as intelligent,…
What do most of us do when we notice a hungry, disoriented person slumped on the street in obvious despair? Why, we pass quickly by, averting our eyes toward an…
In the beginning, when I first went West, I thought it was because I was in love with loneliness. Love of a certain kind of life and a certain kind…
Funeral Pyre, by Rockwell Kent © Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York. Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl…
St. Francis once converted a wolf to reason. The wolf of Gubbio promised to stop terrorizing an Italian town; he made pledges and assurances and pacts, and he kept his…
I have just returned from forty-eight hours’ attendance at a bedside. My patient was a gentleman of forty who for eight years has habitually taken opium. He first learned its…
It is often said that our Constitution is alive. As the Supreme Court reinterprets the law in different eras, our rights both grow and diminish—sometimes with glacial slowness, sometimes with…
In Henry IV, the king on his deathbed gives his son and heir the ancient advice dear to the hearts of rulers in dire straits at home: I . .…
The incongruity is the fascination of it all. In New York, the most modern of all large cities, the very embodiment of twentieth-century youth, thrives superstition, gray with countless centuries…
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with…
The entrance to Castle Garden was blocked up with vehicles, peddlers of cheap cigars, apple stands, and runners from the boarding houses and intelligence offices that abound in the neighborhood…
“I have just had a gratifying illustration of the conscientious perfection of the American people in enacting and enforcing a law when they are agreed that it is really for…
Wise heads tell us we act first, or decide to act first, and reason afterward. What could be put down in black and white as to why we took up…
I’ve given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensible proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness. I have rubbed…
We have perhaps created too much history too quickly—more than we can cope with. We know the cycles: birth, growth, glory, degeneration. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first…
Shea Stadium is not Eden, and the picture of Tom and Nancy Seaver leaving its graceless precincts in tears did not immediately remind me of the Expulsion of Adam and…