HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.
Worth a Dame As the author of Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means, the first comprehensive biography of her, I read Christopher Tayler’s review of her novel An Awfully Big Adventure [“The Zone of Silence,” February] with much pleasure, and I hope that it, along with the recent reissue of her work in both the United Kingdom and the United States, will help boost the author’s popularity—particularly in America, where her success has always been elusive. I started working for Beryl in 1987, so I witnessed the novel’s life cycle firsthand, from conception to Booker Prize nomination, recording the tribulations of its genesis in a diary I kept at the time. I was at Beryl’s house when her publisher, Colin Haycraft, brought around the first proofs. His unannounced…
“Even in the darkest of times,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “we have the right to expect some illumination.” The words are prominent on the back cover of an early Pelican edition of her book Men in Dark Times, which I noticed on one of the crammed shelves in my Himalayan home one calamitous morning of the New Year. I had just recoiled from a New York Times headline: a defense of u.s. intervention in venezuela. The subhead was more horrifying still: the former envoy elliott abrams says the administration should push harder for regime change. I immediately reached for the Arendt volume, intrigued by her notion that in a dark time illumination is a human right. I couldn’t help but look at the other books in my library and wonder, with…
Portion of Americans who want the United States to take an active role in world affairs : 3/5 Portion of Chinese who want China to do so : 9/10 Portion of Americans who say that China having more power and influence than the United States would not affect them : 1/2 Minimum number of court orders in Minnesota that the Department of Homeland Security violated in January : 97 Portion of Americans who say that it is unacceptable for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to hide their faces : 3/5 For ICE officers to target people on the basis of language or appearance : 3/4 Amount of money reportedly budgeted by the DHS to pay pro-ICE online influencers this year : $8,000,000 Estimated percentage of LinkedIn and Facebook posts in…
[Yarn] HED GAMES By John Banville, from “Lead Heads,” which was published in Issue 26 of The Fence. At the close of the Sixties, after some years of aimless wandering, I decided that life abroad was not to my taste and persuaded my American wife to return to Dublin with me and settle there. In those days, Ireland prided itself on being behind the times, and the frantic Sixties felt to us more like the fallow Forties. There was, however, one significant difference: jobs were plentiful. I had hardly been back in Dublin for more than a week or two when I landed a job as a subeditor on the Irish Press. I knew nothing of the inner workings of a daily newspaper, and on my first night I floundered.…
For months, it seemed no one here in New Orleans was sleeping well. Every now and again, the president would fixate on our city, threatening to send in troops to “clean it up.” Then he’d back off. Long before Minneapolis, with its broad-daylight slayings of American civilians, the worst-case scenarios had yet to materialize. Macabre possibilities haunted us at night, Piranesian visions of dungeons and interrogation chambers. Just after Labor Day, seated by his gilded fireplace, President Trump breezily addressed the press: “We’re making a determination now,” he said. “Do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in?” In the end, he chose Chicago and launched Operation Midway Blitz—a winking…
Ellis Island used to be one of the liveliest, most colorful places in the world. In 1910, seventy thousand immigrants passed through it each month, and Americans proudly spoke of their country as a melting pot. But thanks to the postwar anti-alien hysteria and the deportation laws enacted during and soon after the First World War, the island’s business has become the expulsion of foreigners. The alien himself is no menace to anything sound in the land. There are elements connected with the alien problem, however, that constitute an extremely ugly mess, which is perilous to America. This peril is due to the fact that Americans, by and large, including many legislators, are misinformed about the alien question, while professional patriots exploit it to their strange ends. In this, the…
