A Break Point?
Peruse these timeless stories from our 173-year archive, handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
Haley Hangs On
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A Harper’s exclusive from Max Blumenthal on Nikki Haley’s final week before resigning as U.N. Ambassador.
Read “Nikki Haley at the Council for National Policy”
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Clayton Fritchey describes the historical pattern of clashes between the President and the U.N. Ambassador.
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After the 2016 primaries, Scott Horton’s conversation with Sydney Blumenthal on the origins of the Republican Party.
An Uncertain Future
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“Palestinians want a common regime of rights; Israelis, a political border around cultural ones…postponing ways of meeting this challenge will, I fear, invite terrible violence, a new war of ethnic cleansing…”
Read “Abraham’s Children” by Bernard Avishai
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“Fudging, waffling, looking the other way, avoiding the issue entirely, or accepting pabulum definitions of ‘peace’ will bring Palestinians and, in the long run, Israelis nothing but hardship and insecurity.”
Read “Fifty Years of Dispossession” by Edward Said
Lay Off!
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“I advise no man who is drawing a salary–even if he be a reader of Harper’s Magazine–to treat the situation over cavalierly.”
Read “Laid Off at Forty” by Stuart Chase
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An excerpt from Allegra Hyde’s short story “Dear Employee,” in which everyone is laid off…and reassigned.
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From a memo on unemployment compensation, or lack thereof.
A Racket Down Under
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“He had a hit doesn’t mean that he got hit. It’s the Australian way of saying that he had a rally with someone to warm up.”
Read “Gentleman’s Game” by Russell Lynes
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David Foster Wallace’s first article for Harper’s, on his Midwestern boyhood in competitive junior tennis.
Read “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes”
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The rotten world of professional tennis.
Read “Say it Ain’t So, Bjorn,” by Michael Mewshaw