Page 5 | Harper's Magazine

Social life and customs

Two Exiles

By Frederic Morton, from a speech given at the Vienna Haus der Barmherzigkeit two days before he died, in April. Morton was a critic, an essayist, and the author of…

The Speakeasy

by Dave Madden,

A week of stand-up in Hollywood’s toughest room

For the Longest Time

by Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury,

From entries in the India Book of Records, founded in 2004 by Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, who holds the Guinness world record for constructing the largest screwdriver.

Rotten Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich,

Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic

Honky, Napoleon, and the Empress Wu

by Lynn Freed,

Memories of a South African childhood

Poison Apples

by Rebecca Solnit,

Thirty years ago, Apple Computer launched a new product with a messianic commercial in which legions of blank-faced, coverall-clad workers march, as if in a trance, through a strange industrial…

A Little Girl’s New York

by Edith Wharton,

In my seventeenth year, there suddenly appeared in Fifth Avenue a very small canary-yellow brougham with dark trimmings, drawn by a big, high-stepping bay and driven by a coachman who…

Briefly Noted

by Rona Levin,

From entries in Comic, Curious and Quirky: News Stories from Centuries Past, by Rona Levin, a collection of British newspaper articles published this month by the British Library.

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…

Putin’s Double

by Emmanuel Carrère,

By Emmanuel Carrère, from Limonov, to be published in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Carrère’s books include The Adversary, My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than…

Racial Profiling

by Christian Rudder,

From a list of words used least often by Latino men, relative to other men, in personal profiles on the dating website OkCupid. Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think…