Harper's: A Review

I recently got my first issue of Harper's, a magazine about politics, literature, culture, and the arts.

The first thing that caught my eye was an article by Daniel Ellsberg, former U.S. Military Analyst, on a possible war with Iran. Only a few weeks ago in my Media Law class, we had talked about Ellsberg's role in leaking the "Pentagon Papers" to the New York Times in 1971, and ultimately helping to end the war in Vietnam. Seeing his name in the byline of a current article intrigued me to read more.

The gist of the article is that Ellsberg believes that there are plans in the works to invade Iran, and that the government officials involved in the plan should leak that information to the press now, before war breaks out. Ellsberg reflects that if he had come forward sooner with the intelligence he had, it might have been possible to avoid Vietnam altogether. While I'm not convinced that Ellsberg alone truly had that much power, I think he makes some very important points about the responsibility of those on the inside, and the consequences of standing by and saying nothing. He should know.

Harper's is not all heavy political talk, however. Interspersed with the longer articles and more serious content are poems, art, and works of fiction. In the current issue, I found an excerpt from a longer novel called Happyland, as well as a bit taken from Allen Ginsburg's diary as a teenager entitled, "Yelp." The humor in Harper's is smart, and the articles truly make you think. I found it to be refreshingly different from any magazine I'd ever read before. And now I can't wait to get my next issue.