Economic conditions

The Wanderer’s Port

By Thomas Chatterton Williams,

I landed in Lisbon late on a temperate Thursday in January. This was the end of an unusually pan-European week for me. I’d spent the previous two days in a…

Nighthawks at the Dunkin’

By Jeff Sharlet,

From The Brilliant Darkness, out last month from W. W. Norton. The book is composed of short essays about encounters Sharlet had while photographing strangers. mike All photos by Jeff Sharlet The…

Gimme Shelter

By Wes Enzinna,

I. That year, the year of the Ghost Ship fire, I lived in a shack. I’d found the place just as September’s Indian summer was giving way to a wet…

Where Our New World Begins

By Kevin Baker,

The river “flows up the map,” they used to say, first south, then west, and then north, and through some of the most verdant and beautiful country in America. It…

Lost at Sea

A few miles north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sausalito, is Richardson Bay, a saltwater estuary where roughly one hundred people live out of sight from the world.…

The Myth of White Genocide

By James Pogue,

The squatter camp outside Lawley township, in the southwest of Johannesburg, stretches for miles against a bare hillside, without electricity, water, or toilets. I visited on a blustery morning in…

The Myth of White Genocide in South Africa

By Harper’s Magazine, on February 25, 2019

An ongoing racial and economic crisis in a republic that reflects our own Read More

Range Wars

By Mort Rosenblum, Art by Samuel James,

Silver Bell Mine, just northwest of Tucson, Arizona, is shielded from the suburban homes nearby behind rocky hills and barbed wire. Seen from above, it is an upside-down Machu Picchu:…

The Death of a Once Great City

By Kevin Baker,

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state…

Mobbed Up

By Andrew Cockburn,

Lance Bunch has had an impressive year. In July 2017, he gained a coveted star, having been promoted to brigadier general while serving as the principal military assistant to James…

Before the Deluge

By Petra Bartosiewicz,

In the summer of 2016, when Congress installed a financial control board to address Puerto Rico’s crippling debt, I traveled to San Juan, the capital. The island owed some $120…

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