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13-27 PDF
[Essay]
[Criticism]
[Painting]
[Poem]
[Illustration]
[Travelogue]
[Lexicon]
[Advice]
[Memoir]
[Photography]
[Debate]
[History]
[Procedure]
[Photography]
[Fiction]
[Clarification]
[Photography]
Forty years ago, when I worked as legal counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we occasionally pulled all-nighters reconciling the House and Senate versions of a bill. Inevitably, we haggled over the wording, each side trying to preserve the language that would please our respective bosses. One evening, as we were toiling over a bill that contained provisions on foreign aid, human rights, and arms sales of keen interest to the State Department and the Pentagon, I set off through the warrenlike offices of the Rayburn Building in search of coffee. Opening the wrong door, I was surprised to find a State Department lawyer sitting at a desk, in front of a typewriter. He should have been at home, in bed, but here he was, typing away, writing language that he was quietly slipping to the House staffers, who presented it as their own.
Our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump's presidency
Samuel Donkoh had just turned ten when he began to slip away. His brother Martin, two years his senior, first realized something was wrong during a game of soccer with a group of kids from the neighborhood. One minute Samuel was fine, dribbling the ball, and the next he was doubled over in spasms of laughter, as if reacting to a joke nobody else had heard. His teammates, baffled by the bizarre display, chuckled along with him, a response Samuel took for mockery. He grew threatening and belligerent, and Martin was forced to drag him home.
The final two contestants of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, held just outside Washington last May, had gone head-to-head for ten rounds. Nihar Janga, a toothy eleven-year-old with a bowl cut and the vocal pitch of a cartoon character, delighted the audience by breaking with custom: instead of asking the official pronouncer for definitions, he provided them himself. Taoiseach: “Is this an Irish prime minister?” (Yes.) Biniou: “Is this a Breton bagpipe?” (Right again.) His opponent, Jairam Hathwar, a stoic thirteen-year-old, had been favored to win, in large part because his older brother, Sriram, had won in 2014.
Mrs. B’s Baby Village Day Care was on a frontage road between a mattress wholesaler and a knife outlet. There were six or so babies as regulars and another one or two on weekends when their parents were passing through looking for work. They wouldn’t find work, of course, all the security positions were full, the timber and ore had all been taken under the active-stewardship program, and the closest new start-up industry was the geothermal field hundreds of miles away. Mrs. B didn’t even bother to write those babies’ names down in her book. It was fifteen dollars a day and they had to be in reasonable health. Even so the occasional mischievous illness would arise and empty the place out.
Chances that a monkey will type Bright Lights, Big City:
A clinical trial in Pittsburgh suggested that bone marrow stem cell therapy might heal broken hearts.
A G.O.P. county chair in Oregon recommended that Republicans employ private militias, and a former Trump campaign official was sentenced to seven years in prison for organizing an armed militia to aid in a standoff against the U.S. government.
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis."
© 2015 Harper’s Magazine Foundation. April 2017 cover photograph: At the Women’s March on Washington, January 21, 2017 © Benedict Evans/Redux
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