http://harpers.org/rss/index.xml Harper's Magazine: Founded June 1850. en-us Copyright Harper's Magazine Thu, 24 May 2012 18:00:32 -0400 http://www.harpers.org/media/image/Harpers_305x100.gif http://harpers.org http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/0083943 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/0083943 Rafil Kroll Zaidi N Thu, 24 May 2012 15:05:54 -0400 Eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs, and fish with uncovered gills were discovered near the site of the 2010 Deep­water Horizon oil spill. James Cameron descended to the Hadal Zone of the Mariana Trench but sprang a leak, Jeff Bezos located Apollo 11’s F-1 booster engines on the Atlantic seabed, and Newt Gingrich was bitten by a Magellanic penguin. A swan drowned an Illinois man. “It’s presumably a male swan,” said Her Majesty’s Swan Warden. Nestlé designed ice cream using data supplied by the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research and summarized in the journal Soft Matter. Impotent men are likelier to suffer migraines, estrogen slows the healing of women’s wounds, and women with dense breasts have twice the risk of cancer recurrence. False killer whales squint their echolocation beams by squeezing their melons. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008632 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008632 Genevieve Smith Wed, 23 May 2012 15:44:13 -0400 Underearners Anonymous, the mutual-aid group I write about in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, includes a diagnostic test in its newcomers packet, consisting of the following fifteen questions: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008629 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008629 Scott Horton Wed, 23 May 2012 13:12:03 -0400 Kimberley Dozier of the Associated Press reports that the burden of making the life-and-death decisions surrounding drone use is settling on the shoulders of a single man, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008630 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008630 John R. MacArthur Wed, 23 May 2012 09:25:09 -0400 Last week I spoke at my alma mater’s Class Day ceremony, which at Columbia College serves as the central event for seniors, even though Columbia University, of which it’s a part, conducts the formal commencement and awarding of degrees on the next day. I won’t reprise my speech since I’m reluctant to promote a contribution to a genre of public speaking that many people equate with sedatives. (It is available on Harpers.org.) As my fellow Columbia graduate Tom Vinciguerra wrote in Newsday, “The days of memorable, even historic, end-of-academic-year speeches are long gone,” replaced mainly by “throwaway sentiments equally trite and hortatory—e.g., ‘seize the day,’ ‘don’t forget to give back,’ ‘dare to be different.’ ” . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008628 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008628 Scott Horton Tue, 22 May 2012 14:14:34 -0400 This week has been full of illuminating disclosures concerning the American criminal-justice system. Last Monday, a Columbia Law School project showed convincingly that Carlos DeLuna, executed for homicide by the state of Texas in 1989, was innocent of the crime; the project also showed who actually committed the crime. The revelation was shocking in part because DeLuna’s name had never figured among the dozen or more prisoners executed by Texas whose guilt has been vigorously and publicly contested; even his own lawyers seemed to have assumed his guilt. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008627 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008627 Jeremy Keehn Mon, 21 May 2012 17:51:30 -0400 President Barack Obama hosted a G8 summit at Camp David and a NATO summit in Chicago. At the G8 gathering, leaders stayed up late chatting, debated policy while exercising on treadmills, and sang “Happy Birthday” to Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda around a chocolate birthday cake. “Camp David has just got a special atmosphere to it,” said one of Obama’s economic advisers.[1] Thousands of people, including scores of veterans and hundreds of felt-cap-wearing nurses calling for a “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street, protested in Chicago. “The military handed out cheap tokens like this to soldiers and servicemembers to fill the void where their conscience used to be,” said U.S. Army veteran Greg Miller, who threw away his Global War on Terrorism and National Defense medals from a stage. Nearly 50 other veterans discarded their medals, Anonymous hacked the websites of the Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago, 45 protesters were arrested, and three men were charged with conspiring to commit terrorism for allegedly plotting to firebomb Obama’s campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] At The Hague, the genocide trial of former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic was suspended indefinitely, and in Yemen, a suicide bomber killed 96 soldiers on parade following a week in which government forces killed dozens of Al Qaeda fighters in the country’s south.[9][10][11] Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am passenger flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, died at 60 in Libya.[12] Iran hanged a man it claimed was an Israeli Mossad agent responsible for the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, and Turkey declared that a European bee-eater with larger-than-usual nostrils discovered in Gaziantep Province was not, as locals initially suspected, an Israeli spy.[13][14] Sixteen hundred Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails ended their month-long hunger strike, and Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from prison in April and then reached a deal with authorities that allowed him to leave the country, arrived in the United States to begin studies at New York University.[15][16] A Spotsylvania County, Virginia, woman was stabbed by a man whose forehead was tattooed “Cogito ergo Sum.”[17] . . . http://harpers.org/archive/1989/01/0058734 http://harpers.org/archive/1989/01/0058734 Carlos Fuentes Fri, 18 May 2012 13:09:43 -0400 The primary reason for these recent failures is the United States’ unique obsession with events in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua. The last administration—despite eight years of feverish activity, rattling rhetoric, and millions of dollars spent—failed to overthrow the government in Managua. The administration also failed to defeat the rebels in El Salvador. Moreover, the Reagan approach failed to bend the independent will of President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica or to pressure him into abandoning either his own territories or his policies favoring the use of diplomacy over the use of force. It should be noted, too, that all the rhetoric and military spending failed to prevent violent outbreaks against the U.S. presence in Honduras; and in Panama, the Reagan administration put forth a blundering policy which, instead of overthrowing General Noriega, has overthrown the Panamanian economy. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008626 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008626 Mr. Fish Fri, 18 May 2012 09:43:55 -0400 . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008615 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008615 Scott Horton Fri, 18 May 2012 09:34:39 -0400 A successfully completed prosecution in the International Criminal Court, new demands for investigations into atrocities in Syria, ongoing issues surrounding crimes committed by American officials during the Bush-era “war on terror”—international criminal-law issues are steadily topical. Canadian scholar William Schabas, now a professor at Middlesex University in London, is one of the world’s leading writers and speakers on the subject. I put six questions to him about his new book, Unimaginable Atrocities: Justice, Politics, and Rights at the War Crimes Tribunals. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008623 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008623 Thomas Frank Thu, 17 May 2012 11:18:24 -0400 Massive indebtedness changes a person, maybe even more than a college education does, and it’s reasonable to suspect that the politicos who have allowed the tuition disaster to take its course know this. To saddle young people with enormous, inescapable debt—total student debt is now more than one trillion dollars—is ultimately to transform them into profit­-maximizing machines. I mean, working as a schoolteacher or an editorial assistant at a publishing house isn’t going to help you chip away at that forty grand you owe. You can’t get out of it by bankruptcy, either. And our political leaders, lost in a fantasy of punitive individualism, certainly won’t propose the bailout measures they could take to rescue the young from the crushing burden. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008621 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008621 Scott Horton Wed, 16 May 2012 14:32:42 -0400 British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, appearing in character as Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen to promote his new film, The Dictator, has been working in lines about the double standards of American human rights assessments. “What in Wadiya you call genocide,” he says, referring to the dictator’s fictitious Arab homeland, “in Texas you call the justice system.” Texas criminal justice may not amount to genocide, but it does misfire with alarming frequency, and claims innocent lives in the process. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008619 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008619 Scott Horton Wed, 16 May 2012 09:20:01 -0400 ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer continues her examination of the federal pardons process with a piece, excerpted in Monday’s Washington Post, that contrasts two pardon candidates. Both cases are the sort of victimless drug offenses that clog the federal detentions system. One involves a star athlete with no prior criminal record, and a prosecutor’s office and judge who favored immediate commutation of the sentence. The athlete was present at a drug sale, and he introduced the parties to one another, for which he received a gratuity from the dealer. Though such offenses are theoretically prosecutable, this very rarely happens. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008620 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008620 John R. MacArthur Tue, 15 May 2012 13:19:22 -0400 There was a time when I harbored ambitions of becoming president—to fulfill the dream shared by so many young Americans—so that I might leave my mark on history, bring peace where there was war, free the unjustly imprisoned, outmaneuver the leaders of other great nations, bask in the admiration and affection of my fellow citizens, and have my pick of college and university commencement venues. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/0083939 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/0083939 Andrew J. Bacevich Tue, 15 May 2012 13:14:02 -0400 Call it a hallowed tradition. To invest their views with greater authority, big thinkers—especially those given to pontificating about the course of world history—appropriate bits of wisdom penned by brand-name sages. Nothing adds ballast to an otherwise frothy argument like a pithy quotation from John Quincy Adams or George F. Kennan or Reinhold Niebuhr. In The World America Made, a slim volume of mythopoeia decked out in analytic drag, the historian and pundit Robert Kagan cites all three of those renowned figures. For real inspiration, however, he turns to a different and altogether unlikely source: Hollywood director Frank Capra. The World America Made begins and ends with Kagan urging Americans to heed the lessons of that hoariest of Christmas fantasies, It’s a Wonderful Life. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008618 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008618 Sara Breselor Tue, 15 May 2012 00:13:25 -0400 One day after North Carolina approved a state-constitution amendment banning same-sex marriages, and three days after Vice President Joe Biden claimed he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to announce that he believes gay couples should be able to wed. During an interview on ABC News, the president, who has long described his views on same-sex marriage as “evolving,” said he had “concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” He added that a progressive stance on marriage equity was important for reaching younger voters. “They are much more comfortable with it,” he said.[1][2][3] Newsweek declared Obama the first gay president, Betty White endorsed Obama’s reelection bid, and George Clooney hosted a $40,000-a-seat celebrity fundraiser for the campaign on his personal basketball court. “We raised a lot of money because everybody loves George,” said the president. “They like me; they love him. And rightfully so.”[4][5][6] A crowd of 34,000 at evangelical Liberty University cheered presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney when he reiterated his definition of marriage as “a relationship between one man and one woman.” “There is no greater force for good in the nation,” Romney told the audience, “than Christian conscience in action.”[7][8] High school friends of Romney’s recalled a 1965 incident in which they attacked a boy they presumed to be gay and held him down while Romney cut his hair. “It was a hack job,” said one witness.[9][10] Vidal Sassoon, inventor of the five-point cut and the Kwan bob, died at 84; children’s-book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died at 83; an autopsy revealed that “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose; and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he was “dead wrong” last month when he dismissed concerns about trading by his bank, which disclosed a loss of $2 billion in botched trades over the past six weeks, as a “tempest in a teapot.” “We made a terrible, egregious mistake,” Dimon said. ‘‘There’s almost no excuse for it.”[11][12][13][14][15] . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008614 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008614 Mr. Fish Fri, 11 May 2012 06:47:19 -0400 . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083883 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083883 Thu, 10 May 2012 09:48:18 -0400 From interviews with Yup’ik hunters and elders in the Alaskan villages of St. Mary’s and Pitka’s Point by researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, conducted as part of a study of indigenous people’s experiences of climate change. A summary of the USGS findings was published last fall in the journal Human Organization. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008612 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008612 Scott Horton Wed, 09 May 2012 14:34:54 -0400 One of the lasting challenges to America’s federal judiciary will be addressing American complicity in the tortures and disappearances of the past ten years. Two recent appeals-court decisions show us how judicial panels are tackling these issues: by shielding federal officials and their contractors from liability, and even by glorifying the fruits of their dark arts. In the process, legal prohibitions on torture are being destroyed through secrecy and legal sleight of hand, and our justice system is being distorted and undermined. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/1978/04/0025426 http://harpers.org/archive/1978/04/0025426 Maurice Sendak and Brian Sutton-Smith Tue, 08 May 2012 14:20:43 -0400 We have all grown used to the idea that we should tell stories to children. We are not so well acquainted with the idea that we should listen to the stories children tell us. When we do hear stories by two-, three-, and four-year-olds, we often fail to understand them or to enjoy their plotless nature. Yet these stories are highly structured and highly meaningful, once we know what to look for. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083897 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083897 Ben Austen Tue, 08 May 2012 14:15:54 -0400 Forty years ago, when U.S. cities began abandoning high-rise public housing, blasting crews would fill a tower with explosives and in a few monumental booms all would be reduced to rubble and rolling clouds of dust. It was as swift as it was symbolic. Now the demolitions are done by wrecking ball and crane, and the buildings are brought down bit by bit over months. This gradual dismantling seemed especially ill suited to the felling, in March 2011, of the last remaining tower at Cabrini-Green. Described almost unfailingly as “infamous” or “notorious,” this Chicago housing project had come to embody a nightmare vision of public housing, the ungovernable inner-city horrors that many believe arise when too many poor black folk are stacked atop one another in too little space. For the end of Cabrini-Green, I imagined something grandiose and purifying—the dropping of a bomb or, as in Candyman, the 1992 slasher film set in Cabrini’s dark wasteland, a giant exorcising bonfire. Instead, as I watched, a crane with steel teeth powered up and ripped into a fifth-floor unit, causing several feet of prefabricated façade to crumble like old chalk. Water sprayed from inside the crane’s jaws to reduce dust. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008603 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008603 Scott Horton Tue, 08 May 2012 12:56:20 -0400 If America’s national-security mavens had to identify their biggest worry on a world map, odds are that the pin would land within a hundred miles of Islamabad. Once hailed as America’s most vital non-NATO ally, and the recipient of more than $10 billion in aid since 2001, Pakistan is now emerging as a nightmare. It may be home to the world’s fastest-growing nuclear stockpile, and it is certainly the most worrisome source of nuclear proliferation over the past decade. Its security forces have a mysteriously cozy relationship with scheduled terrorist forces, such as Lashkar-e Taiba, which launched a series of attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, killing or injuring at least 472 people. And it is a state in abject collapse—unable to convince its citizens to pay taxes, to provide basic utilities to its people, to keep order, or to provide for essential defense. Significantly, Pakistan is also a nation filled with rage against the United States—a dangerous enemy in the making. How could this happen in a country that could barely stand up without massive U.S. assistance? . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008602 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008602 Jacob Z. Gross Mon, 07 May 2012 17:40:17 -0400 Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were arraigned before a military tribunal at Camp Justice in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for orchestrating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Six of the victims’ families, who had won the right to attend the hearing in a lottery, watched from behind soundproof glass as the accused protested the conditions of their confinement by refusing to enter pleas and answer questions posed to them by the judge. The defendants also insisted that the entire charge sheet be read out, though prosecutors stopped short of reciting the names of all 2,976 people killed on 9/11. Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the attacks, disrupted the proceedings with a prayer session; another defendant stripped to show scars he said had been inflicted by Guantánamo guards; and two others quietly read The Economist magazine. “Why is this so hard?” asked the judge.[1][2][3][4][5] An explosion killed six people outside a Kabul housing complex on the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, hours after President Barack Obama visited the city to sign a troop-drawdown pact with the Afghan government.[6] Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, rebuked Obama for politicizing the bin Laden assassination. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” Romney said at a campaign event.[7] Newly released documents obtained during the raid on bin Laden’s compound included critiques of Fox News as “lacking neutrality” and MSNBC as “good and neutral” until it fired Keith Olbermann and “Octavia Nasser the Lebanese,” a plan to rebrand Al Qaeda with a new name, and details of a plot to assassinate Obama. “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency,” wrote bin Laden. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post.”[8][9][10] An American citizen was found guilty of plotting a suicide attack on the New York City subway system.[11] One World Trade Center became the city’s tallest building.[12] . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008600 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008600 Ben Austen Mon, 07 May 2012 10:09:17 -0400 The last tower to stand at Cabrini-Green, a fifteen-story high-rise known by its address, 1230 N. Burling Street, was opened in 1962 and torn down in 2011. There were 134 families living there at its peak occupancy, then fewer than fifty, and, for a short time before its demolition last year, only the household of Annie Ricks, her children bouncing balls in their top-floor unit, blaring music, with no neighbors around to object. On the Cabrini-Green Facebook page, former residents reconnect, posting competing memories of the movies that were projected onto 1230 Burling’s façade, the unlicensed candy store that was operated out of a first-floor apartment, or the slick jackets they wore as members of the Junior Police Explorers. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008577 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008577 Scott Horton Sat, 05 May 2012 12:59:55 -0400 The world is quickly being reshaped, writes political economist Ian Bremmer. America established itself as the paramount power following the collapse of Communism, but the emerging system is one in which no nation or group of nations stands out as its leader. What will this mean for the global economy and for conflict in the near future? In Every Nation for Itself, Bremmer looks at the world forming now and sees glimmers of hope, but a somber future. I put six questions to him about his new book. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008599 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008599 Chiara Barzini Fri, 04 May 2012 14:00:43 -0400 Whenever Italians catch the sound of Cristina Boraschi’s voice, they insist that she complain about “slippery little suckers” like Julia Roberts in the escargot scene from Pretty Woman. Ferruccio Amendola used to go about Rome reciting the ’fanculo scene from Taxi Driver—his fans created a medley of his best fuck-yous on Facebook after he died. Tonino Accolla, meanwhile, has conquered generations of bartenders near Rome’s Technicolor studios by laughing like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Unfortunately, laughs didn’t pay Accolla’s 1,000-euro tab for caffes and aperitivos. The bartenders at the café where he ran up this bill were was so upset they asked the satirical TV show Le Iene to track Accolla down (see the video on this page, starting at the 2:30 mark). Confronted with the bill by one of the show’s hosts, Accolla, whose personal habits have been much gossiped about in Italy, admitted that he had spent most of his dubbing money. Then he drove off in his Austin Mini. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008598 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008598 Mr. Fish Fri, 04 May 2012 08:22:01 -0400 . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008595 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008595 Scott Horton Thu, 03 May 2012 14:16:42 -0400 Daniel Chong, an engineering student at the University of California at San Diego, went to a 4/20 party thrown by some friends. He got stoned, fell asleep, and was still present the following morning when agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration stormed the house. Although it was clear that Chong had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the DEA threw him into a cell. Then they forgot about him, leaving him without food or water for four days: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083912 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/0083912 Rafil Kroll-Zaidi Wed, 02 May 2012 10:12:11 -0400 In Scotland, Donald Trump was attempting to stop the wind harvest, there was disagreement over whether the rare pine marten would drive the rare capercaillie to re-extinction, an English egg thief was sentenced to his fourth prison term and banned from entering the country during nesting season, fewer birds of prey were being poisoned, scientists confirmed the uniqueness of northern prongwort, young otters were discovered in a post office and a seafood restaurant, and the Edinburgh Zoo suspended its penguin parade. An extinct crocodile was named for Rudyard Kipling. Ecologists captured a new species of spiny-scaled venomous sea snake in the Gulf of Carpentaria but were unable to investigate it further because they feared being killed by box jellyfish, bull sharks, and saltwater crocodiles. A Dutch ecologist found that 99 percent of the Hydrobia ulvae snails he fed to mallards died within five hours. Researchers found twice the coefficient of friction between an inclined ramp and an alert albino corn snake as between the ramp and an albino corn snake who had been drugged unconscious. Engineers involved in the project used their data to build Scalybot 2, and a Navy-funded team unveiled a hydrogen-powered version of its biomimetic Robojelly. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008592 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008592 Scott Horton Tue, 01 May 2012 16:50:36 -0400 Why did Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, destroy ninety-two tapes of interrogation sessions in which terrorism suspects were subjected to waterboarding and other torture techniques? On Sunday, Lesley Stahl put the question to him on 60 Minutes, and he provided an answer: . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008576 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008576 Scott Horton Tue, 01 May 2012 10:04:41 -0400 Last week, in a courtroom in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Justice Department launched its latest political charade in the guise of a public-integrity prosecution. Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, a man with whom President Obama once broached the possibility of an appointment as attorney general, faces charges that he spent nearly $1 million in campaign donations to cover up an embarrassing sexual liaison. This, prosecutors insist, was a federal crime, for which Edwards could spend as many as thirty years in prison and face a $1.5 million fine. . . .