Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28. Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art ...

In the fall of 2014, I attended a public dialogue on “Revolution and Religion” between Bob Avakian, chairman and cofounder of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Cornel West, professor of ...

From “An Army of One’s Own,” which appeared in the February 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174 ...

From Liontaming in America, which was published last month by New Directions. I was reaching for a passage to the world they came from, the bodies slowly turning into the… ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

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 ...

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, ...

“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 ...

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 ...

Little bottles of neon-yellow liquid, the scent of pastis. Paregoric elixir, or tincture of opium, it sounds like something out of César Birotteau. You can buy it over the counter. The instructions ...

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 ...