Timeless stories from our 174-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.

In Memoriam: Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024)

We at Harper’s Magazine mourn the loss of our editor emeritus, Lewis H. Lapham (1935–2024), who died on July 23 in Rome. A dear friend and colleague for over half a century, Lapham ran the magazine for nearly three decades, serving as editor from 1976 to 1981 and from 1983 to 2006, and regularly contributed columns and essays that were compared to the work of Michel de Montaigne, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken.

Read our tribute here. Lapham’s work for Harper’s is collected here. A selection:

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“The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear about what might happen tomorrow.”

Read “Figures of Speech,” Lapham’s farewell Notebook

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“A government that must hold Senate hearings to discover whether it has a reason to go to war is a gov­ernment that doesn’t know the meaning of war.”

Read “The Road to Babylon,” Lapham’s critique of the Bush administration and the Iraq war

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“What so annoys people about the media is not its rudeness or its stupidity but its sanctimony…Some readers apparently welcome this sort of thing, and they expect their magazines to clothe them with opinions in the way that Halston or Bloomingdale’s dresses them for the opera. The readers of Harper’s, I suspect, always belonged to a different crowd. They strike me as the kind of people who would rather have the tools to work the American grain into a knowledge of their own making.”

Read “The American Grain,” Lapham’s preface to the magazine’s redesign

Biden Out, Harris In

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An unusually candid report on the making of Presidents–and Vice Presidents.

Read “The Man to Watch at the Democratic Convention” by Helen Fuller

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Can progressive prosecutors achieve meaningful criminal-justice reform?

Read “Power of Attorney” by Andrew Cockburn

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On the race to rebuild the Democratic Party.

Read “Star Search” by Lisa Rab

CrowdStruck: An Outrageous Outage

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“In the world of Amazon, Google, and Facebook…we [are] subject to the will of a few private companies, manipulated moment to moment by unseen forces that rule our commerce, track our movement, and record our every thought.”

Read “The Big Tech Extortion Racket” by Barry C. Lynn

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On the inescapability of Microsoft.

Read “Selling Windows to the World” by David Chun

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“There is no sunshine law to compel the government or private companies to release details on the inner workings of their digital decision-making systems…we have remarkably limited access to the equations, algorithms, and models that shape our life chances.”

Read “The Digital Poorhouse” by Virginia Eubanks

Je Ne Sais…Olympics?

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John R. Tunis interrogates the Games’ claims of generating fellow-feeling: “Victory! That’s the ideal of our teams. Win. Come in first. Don’t stop to bother about friendly intercourse with athletes of other lands.”

Read “The Olympic Games”

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Geoff Dyer on the 2012 London Olympics: “He claimed that Parisians were still breathing a collective sigh of relief that they had not been lumbered with the Games for which they’d enthusiastically pitched.”

Read “A Brief Period of Rejoicing”