Harper's Magazine November 2024

Remembering Lewis H. Lapham This month’s Letters section is devoted to remembrances of Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024), the editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006. Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur’s remembrance of Lapham follows on page 8. I first worked for Lewis just out of college, having graduated into the Great Recession with a degree in ancient Greek and what could fairly be called limited prospects. On weekends I sometimes took the train in from Long Island, where I was living in my parents’ basement, to fill in for Ann Gollin as Lewis wrote his essays, taking dictation and entering edits into manuscripts, watching, over the course of seemingly endless drafts, what was cut, what rewritten, what moved where, what later restored. That was…

Lewis H. Lapham wanted to be remembered as a literary man and an essayist, and no one should begrudge his lofty ambition to be compared with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, the brilliant French chronicler of nineteenth-century class, money, and status in a society torn between its revolutionary heritage and its desire for royalty and aristocratic privilege. Lewis never published a novel (though he did have a youthful attempt in the drawer), but he probably got closer than any writer of his generation to piercing the mysteries of the analogous American paradox: a republic born of violent revolution that hasn’t yet shed its wish for kings. Lewis was also a courageous and often radical journalist who guided others, and when I think of his twenty-eight years as editor of Harper’s…

I’ve written in many places, some wonderful, others makeshift or uncomfortable. I’ve written on trains and in hotel rooms, at ergonomically perfect desks and on laptops balanced on my knees. I once spent a few days working at a table in the middle of a vast, empty factory in France. I still dream about a hut on a remote Scottish island with no internet access or cell-phone reception, where I sat at my desk and watched the sun set over the sea. Wherever I am, one constant presence is noise. I don’t believe I’m unduly sensitive to it, though I certainly will hunt for a mysterious electrical hum in a hotel room or end up nodding my head to the off-kilter rhythm of a washing machine. For several years in…

[Essay] THE THING ITSELF By Simon Critchley, from Mysticism, which was published last month by New York Review Books. “Mysticism” is the word for what we modern, critical philosophers are meant to distrust in the name of enlightenment. It is all that is weak-minded and lazy, a pseudophilosophy that avoids the labor of proper philosophical thinking. This view is why philosophers like to identify themselves with workers: Locke sees the philosopher as the under-laborer to science; Husserl has a bizarre conception of philosophers as civil servants; and the one really good joke in Heidegger’s work (not intended to be funny) suggests that philosophers are the police force in the procession of the sciences. By contrast, mysticism is suspicious and possibly criminal. All claims to visions, inspired visitations, ecstatic experiences, and…

By Katherine Rundell, from Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, which will be published this month by Doubleday. Rebecca was an unusual White House inhabitant for two reasons. The first was that she arrived as prospective dinner. The second, and most immediately obvious on meeting her, was that she was a raccoon. In 1926, a citizen of Mississippi sent the raccoon to the First Family in time to be cooked for Thanksgiving. Calvin Coolidge instead kept her as a pet. Later, the First Lady, Grace Coolidge, wrote of Rebecca: We “had a house made for her in one of the large trees, with a wire fence built around it for her protection.” When she was inside, the First Lady wrote, she had her liberty. She was a mischievous,…

From letters exchanged by John Berger and his son Yves, collected in Over to You, which will be published this month by Pantheon Books. Yves, I send two “postcards.” One is a photo taken by Iona Heath of a terra-cotta by Andrea della Robbia, and the second a watercolor by me of a white rose from the garden. The della Robbia family produced so many tender terra-cottas of Madonnas and angels offering gentleness and consolation to others in the face of the cruelty of life, but this one suffered such cruelty itself, because it was burned in a fire in Berlin in 1945. When Iona sent me her photo, I found it very touching, and put it where I could see it when sitting at my worktable. Later, Nella said,…