Harper's Magazine March 2015

Eastbound and Down The world is far more complicated than Andrew Cockburn would lead us to believe. In “Game On” [Letter from Washington, January], Cockburn tells us about NATO’s irresponsible expansion eastward without mentioning Russia’s own foreign-policy priorities and pursuits at the time. Indeed, the only mention of some of the decade’s most illuminating events is a dismissive reference to “Kosovo separatists.” What Cockburn means, I think, is the entirely reasonable response of a small, largely Muslim population to a historic pattern. Since the nineteenth century, the Russian state has conducted genocidal wars against many Muslim peoples, eliminating some—including the Ubykh—while deporting or otherwise nearly destroying others. The most recent Winter Olympics took place in what was once Circassian territory. Maybe the United States should have pursued other policies, instead…

I loved reading before I could read. I have a distinct memory—yes, our memories are subject to lapses and improvisations, but this one has been around so long I can’t doubt it—of myself at perhaps five years old, sitting between my mother and my father, them with their respective books, me holding my own big book full of pictureless pages of small type, turning the pages one by one and scanning them, chuckling or smiling or sighing now and then as my parents did. It seemed an inexpressibly delightful activity. It still does. So I have read many books, uncounted numbers of them, starting as soon as I could and continuing to this day. I am sure that I have read more books than most people, though I am equally…

Nobody thinks much about bureaucracy anymore. But in the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the word was everywhere. It dominated works of sociology with grandiose titles like A General Theory of Bureaucracy, popular paperbacks like The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, and novels and films such as Joseph Heller’s Something Happened and Jacques Tati’s Playtime. Everyone seemed to feel that the foibles and absurdities of bureaucratic life were among the defining features of modern existence and, as such, worth discussing. Today, the subject rarely comes up; perhaps we’ve simply become habituated. When we do discuss bureaucracy, we still use terms established in the Sixties and Seventies. The social movements of the Sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but…

On December 29, 2014, at approximately 1916 hours, while assigned to road patrol, I, deputy sheriff Joseph Hall, was dispatched to SW 18th Street. Upon arrival I made contact with Dale Garcia. Dale advised me that when he returned home from Walmart he found that his two twelve-year-old daughters had gotten into an argument while he was gone. At one point H had locked herself inside her bedroom, and J used a knife to pick the lock. Dale wanted to use his paddle to discipline J, and wanted me to stand by while he spanked her. H advised me that when her father was gone, J had taken her tablet without asking. H stated that she hit J in the face with a ball, and when J chased her, she…

We have never visited BuzzFeed before, but it seems dedicated to providing users with the latest info on hot trends and cool celebs BuzzFeed, a trend-tracking site that recently linked to several fake Craigslist ads BuzzFeed, a news-and-entertainment aggregator that’s partly devoted to these new sources of memey entertainment BuzzFeed, a site that employs both paid staff and volunteers to create a user-generated hot list of newsworthy items BuzzFeed, a site where the editors and algorithms sift the Web in search of viral articles elsewhere BuzzFeed, the popular online outfit known for cute animal pictures and breezy “listicles” (along with political reporting) BuzzFeed, a new breed of social news organization BuzzFeed, the viral-content aggregator that recently hired staff members to report on politics BuzzFeed, the social website that is suddenly…

It was a good neighborhood, the East Village. It was bugged out, rich people, poor people, everybody on top of each other. I was like eight, seven, and I had this friend, his name was Richard, black kid—we’d go all the way to the West Side Highway, when the West Side Highway was still up high, and I used to look at the graffiti on the walls. I wondered why somebody would do that. I used to write—graffiti, whatever. The gods, they don’t mention the word “graffiti.” It’s “writing.” I fuck up and call it graffiti all the time. Writing on trains is the ultimate. You gotta be in and out. I wasn’t great by any means, but I went to prestigious yards where we would stop and just look…