LIFE AT 1/12 SCALE
Little Things
"Miniatures are the most concentrated form of extravagance I know, a decadent combination of ontological and visceral attraction."
Harper's Magazine
HELD BACK
Battling For The Fate Of A School District
On Detroit's school system.
KEEPING A LEVEL ARROWHEAD
Inside The Mind Of A Professional Archer
Olympic archers regularly split one another’s arrows, and though none would recommend trying to shoot an apple off anyone’s head, they are confident in their ability to do so without bloodshed at anything less than a hundred yards.
YUGE FANS
Trump's People
Among the candidate's fans in Florida, New Hampshire, and Iowa, such as Gary Shipko, who (legally) changed his name to “Donald Trump” as an homage.
THE LAND BANK OF AMERICA
The Great Republican Land Heist
The story of Cliven Bundy and the politicians who are plundering the West.
SHOULD BE DOING MARATHONS
The Bed-Rest Hoax
The case against a venerable pregnancy treatment.
LOST GIRLS
Women, Sex, And The Arab Spring
Seated on my sofa, Meriem narrated her life story. I stopped her on occasion to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding her Moroccan Arabic. “Your childhood boyfriend raped you?” I asked. I repeated the word she had used, which I assumed meant “rape.” She nodded while I looked it up in my dictionary, but rape wasn’t there.
LETTER FROM MOROCCO
Lost Girls: Women, Sex, And The Arab Spring
Seated on my sofa, Meriem narrated her life story. I stopped her on occasion to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding her Moroccan Arabic. “Your childhood boyfriend raped you?” I asked. I repeated the word she had used, which I assumed meant “rape.” She nodded while I looked it up in my dictionary, but rape wasn’t there.
CAPTIVE MARKET
Why We Won’t Get Prison Reform
Maybe the story of Democrats and prison reform is no longer the familiar one about pandering for votes, but an entirely different, if equally familiar, story about the unholy alliance of big government and big business.
LETTER FROM MUMBAI
House Of Fire
Can India’s Parsis survive their own success?
PERFECT COMPROMISE
Welcome To The Nerve-Wracking Reality Of Being Finland
To a casual visitor, it seems like yet another Western European country, a placid paradise with its abundance of bicycles, its obsession with its own mid-twentieth-century design, and stores that close punctually at six in the evening. The Finns feel otherwise.
SNOOZEFEST
In Praise Of Boredom
To embark on an endeavor that has no clear aim — to amble through a city, or to spend an entire afternoon conversing in a restaurant, or to lie in bed and read a book chosen at random from the shelf, or to major in English literature, for that matter — has come to be seen as wasteful.
CRISIS IN THE CARIBBEAN
Displaced In The Dominican Republic
With the news that the Dominican Republic is preparing to strip citizenship from and deport hundreds of thousands of residents of Haitian descent, here is a recently-unpaywalled piece on the crisis from the May issue from Harper's Magazine.
'INSHALLAH'
Yemenis' New Home
A visit to Djibouti City, where thousands of Yemenis have sought refuge from their country’s civil war.
BURN AFTER READING
What Do You Do After You Publish 'The Anarchist Cookbook'? Try To Take It Out Of Print
In 1971, William Powell published "The Anarchist Cookbook," a guide to making bombs and drugs at home. He spent the next four decades fighting to take it out of print.
HOW THE ISLAMIC STATE WAS WON
Last Interview With First Brit To Perform Suicide Bombing
Suicide bomber Abu Sumayyah, who killed himself and eight others in Iraq, gave his final print interview to Harper’s.
ON GETTING WASTED
Among The Hoarders And Junk Haulers Of Charleston
Junk hauling is the best job for writers. Writers are not necessarily the best junk haulers. My first day at work I became so engrossed in the boxes we were taking away that I almost got fired.
WHAT'S IN STORE FOR IRAQ'S CHRISTIANS?
Marooned At The Mall
It made perfect sense, in a way: Iraqi Kurdistan is in the midst of an economic boom, the harvest of which, so far, seems to be half-built malls. With the Islamic State on the border, construction has come to a halt, and the malls and other developments are being used to house the nearly 1.5 million refugees and internally displaced persons who have poured into Kurdistan.
TIME FOR A SOLUTION
Ending College Sexual Assault
Can Obama’s new campaign bring change?
AGING WITHOUT DENTAL INSURANCE
Make Your Own Teeth
George Washington’s dentist, a New Yorker named John Greenwood, would pay skid-row denizens a pound and sixpence each for their teeth, which he then pulled out and incorporated into metal plates hammered to conform to the surfaces of his patients’ mouths.
