= Subscribers only. Sign in here. Subscribe here.

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

1986 / December | View All Issues |

December 1986

illustration

Front cover PDF

Bourse·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.


Letters

4-7, 75-76 PDF

Letters·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Notebook

8, 10 PDF

Paper moons·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Harper’s Index

13 PDF

Harper’s index·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Readings

17-36 PDF

[Article]

Le Carré·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

The dishonorable spy

[Article]

Military reform·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Cartoon]

Readings·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

Black men and public space·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

AIDS·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

The view from Wall Street

[Article]

Party politics·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Money changes everything

[Article]

Pinochet and you·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

Getting high, getting hysterical·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[illustration]

Readings·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

The meaning of chewing·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

Maureen Reagan·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

Tammy Bakker·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Collection]

A woman and her dog·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Cartoon]

Readings·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

Muir on deer·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Article]

Little manifesto·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Fiction]

Nebraska·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Photography]

Philip Larkin, with books·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

[Drama]

I am bigfoot·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Collection

Front cover, 37-47 PDF

Is there virtue in profit?·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Quotation

40 PDF

Capitalism and the intellectuals, 1942·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

charts

43 PDF

Six countries·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

How they share the wealth

illustration

44 PDF

America·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Quotation

45 PDF

A raw plutocracy·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

1924

Quotation

46 PDF

How wealth accumulates and men decay·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Article

56-57 PDF

The currency of secrecy. An account of Swiss banking·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Fiction

65-68 PDF

The art of cartography·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Article

70-71 PDF

Stranger than true. Why I defend guilty clients·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Article

72, 74 PDF

Truer than strange. Why I am not a short-story writer·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Double acrostic

77 PDF

No. 48·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Puzzle

80 PDF

Tree trimming·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Get access to 165 years of
Harper’s for only $45.99

United States Canada

THE CURRENT ISSUE

September 2015

Weed Whackers

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

Tremendous Machine

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

A Goose in a Dress

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

The Genealogy of Orals

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

view Table Content

FEATURED ON HARPERS.ORG

Article
Romancing Kano·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The first was attributed to the college’s founder, which dates it to the 1920s. The second was extracted from the latest version of the institution’s mission statement:

The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.

leadership
service
integrity
creativity

Let us take a moment to compare these texts. The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.

Article
The Prisoner of Sex·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

“It is disappointing that parts of Purity read as though Franzen urgently wanted to telegraph a message to anyone who would defend his fiction from charges of chauvinism: ‘No, you’ve got me wrong. I really am sexist.’”
Illustration by Shonagh Rae
Article
Gangs of Karachi·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

“In Karachi, sometimes only the thinnest of polite fictions separates the politicians from the men who kill and extort on their behalf.”
Photograph © Asim Rafiqui/NOOR Images
Article
Weed Whackers·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

“Defining 'native' and 'invasive' in an ever-shifting natural world poses some problems. The camel, after all, is native to North America, though it went extinct here 8,000 years ago, while the sacrosanct redwood tree is invasive, having snuck in at some point in the past 65 million years.”
Photograph by Chad Ress
Article
The Neoliberal Arts·

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

“College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.”
Artwork by Julie Cockburn

Percentage of Britons who cannot name the city that provides the setting for the musical Chicago:

65

An Australian entrepreneur was selling oysters raised in tanks laced with Viagra.

A naked man believed to be under the influence of LSD rammed his pickup truck into two police cars.

Subscribe to the Weekly Review newsletter. Don’t worry, we won’t sell your email address!

HARPER’S FINEST

Subways Are for Sleeping

By

“Shelby is waiting for something. He himself does not know what it is. When it comes he will either go back into the world from which he came, or sink out of sight in the morass of alcoholism or despair that has engulfed other vagrants.”

Subscribe Today
http://harpers.org/archive/1986/12/
harpers.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-35
160569
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:H2KPOR4UXOVAW5KZWRKXHEP5M5K6PIPS
<urn:uuid:6a8332a9-f92c-41cc-871a-32c9fcf2f5ed>
2015-08-31T08:24:46Z
54.243.234.21
sha1:RGNQEGY675BBHNDDVK5GIH3SPRF4XKCJ
<urn:uuid:2b289718-c0a1-4fd7-8455-7a9bf5c63449>
http://harpers.org/archive/1986/12/
response
<urn:uuid:e8baa52c-7ee3-4862-bef8-0cf97b8e44d1>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf