Southern States

Southern Harm

By William Faulkner,

We are faced with two apparently irreconcilable facts in the South: the one being the decree of our national government that there be absolute equality in education among all citizens,…

Tyranny of the Minority

By Rebecca Solnit,

Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it…

The Monument Wars

By Rebecca Solnit,

For years, whenever I was in New Orleans, I used to run past an equestrian statue just outside the voluptuously green City Park. Though it is situated at a major…

Weary Oracle

By Dawn Lundy Martin,

By Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin is the author of four books of poetry, including Good Stock, which will be published by Coffee House Press in 2016. She teaches at the…

The Civil Rights Act’s Unsung Victory

By Randall Kennedy,

When I was a kid, in the early Sixties, my mother and father meticulously prepared our car for holiday journeys from our home in Washington, D.C., to my birthplace in…

You Had to Be There

By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc,

Many comedians consider stand-up the purest form of comedy; Doug Stanhope considers it the freest. “Once you do stand-up, it spoils you for everything else,” he says. “You’re the director,…

Bob Shacochis’s “Written in the Big Wind” (1991)

By Harper’s Magazine, on November 20, 2012

Why development persists in coastal areas, despite the threat of hurricanes Read More

Pack-mules in the mountains

Art by Kara Elizabeth Walker,

Cotton hoards in southern swamp

Art by Kara Elizabeth Walker,

Citizen Walmart

By Dan Halpern,

One of the things I like about Walmart is that pretty much the nearest neighbor to its Home Office, which is to say the nearest neighbor to the world headquarters…

The elder modernist

By Wells Tower,

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