From MediaPost: on why Harper’s is still a great magazine.
It’s really quite stunning to contemplate the vast choices you’re offered for $6.95 at an airport newsstand. Of course, when it comes to gravitas that separates a magazine from the pack, Harper’s offers plenty.
For starters, it’s been in print since 1850 (the year Zachary Taylor suddenly died in office — if that’s any help, perspective-wise). And no one could teach either an American Lit or Journalism class that banned the works of Harper’s writers. Currently the list of contributing editors includes Francine Prose, John Edgar Wideman, and Tom Wolfe, and even newly departed Walter Cronkite graces the masthead as Honorary Member of the Board.
But the August issue doesn’t rest on laurels. Wideman has a “Notebook” piece in here, a searing essay on black fathers entitled “Fatheralong.” He tilts the prism a bit by writing not about Emmett Till — the Chicago boy murdered in Mississippi in the 1950s — but focuses instead on Louis Till, who was hanged by the U.S. Army when his son was only four. And then Wideman hits his stride: “Race is myth. When we stop talking about race, stop believing in race, it will disappear.” I had the bizarre experience of reading this piece on a commuter train, as a loud woman nearby complained to her seatmate about her neighbor’s parties by explaining, “And kids of all races come and go, not that it matters, because it doesn’t matter to me.” Thus the cosmos provided the punctuation for Wideman’s words.
