Page 16 | Harper's Magazine

History

Flights of Fancy

by Steven Shapin,

A history of ballooning

Secretary of Nothing

by Andrew Cockburn,

John Kerry and the myth of foreign policy

Damage Control

by Ben Lerner,

The modern art world’s tyranny of price

Look at Me

by Edwidge Danticat,

Photographs from Africa past and present

I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind

by Siri Hustvedt,

By Siri Hustvedt, from a keynote lecture delivered in Paris at this year’s winter meeting of the Société de Neurophysiologie, to be published in a special issue of Clinical Neurophysiology,…

Dirty South

by Ken Silverstein, Samuel James,

The foul legacy of Louisiana oil

Is Paris Bathing?

From 112 Gripes About the French, a 1945 handbook for American soldiers in occupied France, edited and republished this month by the Bodleian Library.

Bartók’s Monster

by Jay Kirk,

Stalking the dead composer through Transylvania

Sirocco

by Michael Christopher Brown,

The Inventory Room

by Arlette Farge,Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton,

By Arlette Farge, from The Allure of the Archives, published this month for the first time in English by Yale University Press. Farge is a historian of eighteenth-century France and…

Laundry and Candidates, Cairo, November 2011

by Rebecca Bird,