Page 4 | Harper's Magazine

New York

The Last Witnesses

By Meline Toumani, adapted from her first book, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, out this month from Metropolitan…

Freedom Isn’t Free

From items listed as of this May in the online store of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Several items have since been removed from the site.

Page Turner

by John Crowley,

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…

Harlem Is Nowhere

by Ralph Ellison,

To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires…

Islands

by Hilton Als,

By Hilton Als, written on the occasion of Peter Doig’s exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts this spring and published in Transition 113. Als’s “I Am Your Conscious,…

Search and Destroy

by Christopher Cox,

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…

Good Cop, Sad Cop

From remarks by Joseph Esposito, a retired New York City police officer, during a wiretapped phone conversation with another former city employee. Esposito was accused in January of helping some…

Greetings

by Jon Cotner,

By Jon Cotner, from issue 5 of Gigantic magazine. Cotner is an artist and poet who teaches at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. The following lines are spoken by participants in…

The Get Set

From an October 10, 2013, complaint against ten Jewish men, including two rabbis, in New York and New Jersey, accused of running an organization that kidnaps and tortures husbands who…

Happiness is a Warm Biscuit

From a glossary of terms used by three rival East Harlem street gangs, compiled by prosecutors for the April indictments of sixty-three gang members. Between October 2009 and March 2013,…

Othello’s Son

by Frederic Morton,

A racial education