I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. If The Deserters poses this question in a dramatic way, the relationship ...

“There are very few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve.” With these words, on September 18, 1851, Henry Jarvis ...

Harper’s Magazine turns 175 this month, but New Books is only twenty-three—too young to rent a car without incurring an additional fee. It feels older, doesn’t it? Those two imperious monosyllables, ...

From “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” which appeared in the July 1865 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The simple habits of Mr. Lincoln were so well known that it is a subject for surprise that ...

From outgoing executive editor Jim Hicks’s essay in the Spring 2025 issue of The Massachusetts Review. Back in the spring of 2009, shortly after taking this job, I met with the Bosnian writer Semezdin ...

On Saturday, December 10, 1853, as the January issue of Harper’s Magazine was being printed, a plumber repairing some water pipes in the pressroom lit his lamp and tossed the kindling into what he ...

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few ...

celebrating 175 years of fearless journalism and literary excellence.

From Useless Etymology, which will be published in October by John Murray Press. Starting in the fourteenth century, “meseems” was used sort of like the word “methinks,” but instead of “I think” it ...

From his introduction to a new edition of Fear and Loathing in America, by Hunter S. Thompson, which was published this spring by Simon & Schuster. In 1971, when I was fourteen, I read Hunter S.

From The Xenotext: Book 2, which will be published this month by Coach House Books. Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It ...