Page 12 | Harper's Magazine

Social conditions

“Today Is Better Than Tomorrow”

A Marine returns to a divided Iraq

Body Count

by Alexander Kluge,Translated by Martin Chalmers,

By Alexander Kluge, from Air Raid, an account of the destruction of Halberstadt, Germany, by American bomber squadrons on April 8, 1945, out this month from Seagull Books. Kluge is…

Israel and Palestine

by Bernard Avishai, Dani Dayan, Forsan Hussein, Eva Illouz, Bassim Khoury, Erel Margalit, Danny Rubinstein, Khalil Shikaki,

Where to go from here

Badlands

by Vladimir Pozner,

From diary entries made during a 1936 visit to America by Vladimir Pozner (1905–1992), a French novelist and screenwriter, included in his travelogue The Disunited States, published last month for…

Customs of the Country

by Suki Kim,

By Suki Kim, from notes she took during teacherorientation sessions at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, included in her book, Without You, There Is No Us, out next…

Kandahar’s Mystery Executions

by Anand Gopal,

Are the Afghan police using torture to achieve peace?

Return of the Strongman

by Negar Azimi,

How did Egypt revert to dictatorship?

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…

Good Pilgrims

by Sarah Menkedick,

Why Mexican immigrants are moving back home

Interrogation

by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzheniëtìsyn,

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years…

Diss Placed

by Andrew M. Guest,

From insults exchanged by children living in refugee camps near Luanda, Angola, between 2002 and 2003. “ ‘You Traded Your Mother for an Unripe Mango’: Playing with Insults in an…