Ellen Rosenbush (ed.)

My mum was gonna get me some magazine subscriptions for Christmas but then she couldn't work the internet well enough, so she just bought me a bunch of single issues, and Harper's was far and away the best one, which is good because I had a subscription to this in the Lapham years and it was just sort of standard hyperattenuated grass-eating/self-loathing American liberal stuff, and so it's gotten better and now I know. Don't believe in bed rest, do believe in the connection between childhood abuse and unhealthy relations with food, remember Srebrenica and the continuing plight of Bosnia-Herz, remember Waterloo and that there is a whole weird culture devoted to reproducing historical battles and it's weird, read Primo Levi, etc.… (más)

What's the point of magazines, anyway? They more an article approaches "something that coulda been a book," the more pointful it gets to read it. And there's plenty of books out there already. Although I suppose then it could also be said "what's the point of new books". But I dunno. Informative yet pointless; small-time yet valuable. I guess there's still time to make up my mind forever on magazines later.

Harper's, of course, elevates its value with the index, the always-bracing synaesthetic shock of the front matter (classical English gossip, Shakespeare and weed, Barthes in China, portraits of jocks, Chinese news censor diktats, Occupy Wall Street bulletins, Julian Assange), and generally seeming like it does give a shit, even if it's obvs for champagne socialists whose lives have had their last upheaval (OR SO THEY THINK). There is also an article about the multiverse that reminds us what, like, string theory is while being all sad that the 20th century will never see Thomas Edison explain the universe in a single equation or whatever; a really strong article on Israel and Palestine and water and other things from Bernard Avishai; one on Tuvalu and sinking and the weird market logic of development aid that has moments and makes me think seriously about this Uganda (totally different place, I know that) opportunity that's landed in my lap; good book reviews; spot-on but still (but therefore) inevitably meanspirited Christopher Hitchens retrospective/skewering from Terry Eagleton; and others, and others. This is actually pretty full of stuff, even if it thinks the New Deal is new news (Keynesian spending can put people to work? You actually think your role as a shaper of public opinion is such that anyone who doesn't know that with their mother's milk is gonna come within five miles of Harper's, Harper's?) and the fiction is by the three most dispiriting words in the English language, Joyce Carol Oates.… (más)