Harper’s Magazine columnist Thomas Frank appeared on Democracy Now today to discuss Obama’s budget speech.
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On behalf of Harper’s M
agazine, John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, donated $1,000 to PS 20 on the Lower East Side for the school’s Spring 2011 Read-a-thon. The event helps students form strong reading habits while raising funds for school programs.
This donation helps PS 20 reach their goal of raising $10,000 to maintain essential student programs.
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Harper’s Magazine is deeply saddened by the untimely death of L.J. Davis, a longtime contributor. Among the many essays he wrote for the magazine, his penetrating 1990 report on the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and his prophetic 1987 essay on the looming stock market crash, which received a National Magazine Award, remain beacons of journalistic excellence.
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The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) announced the finalists for the 2011 National Magazine Awards. The awards will be presented on Monday, May 9, in New York City. Harper’s Magazine is nominated in the reporting and profile writing categories.
For Reporting:For “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides: A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle,’” by Scott Horton
March 2010
In the March 2010 issue, Harper’s Magazine challenged widely reported accounts of how three prisoners died suddenly at Guantánamo. “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle” by contributing editor Scott Horton, revealed, through corroborated accounts by military personnel, that the deaths were not, in fact, suicides as the U.S. government has claimed.
The U.S. government has long maintained that three Guantánamo prisoners—Salah Al-Salami (37), from Yemen, and Mani Al-Utaybi (30) and Yasser Al-Zahrani (22), both from Saudi Arabia—committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells on June 9, 2006. “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’” draws on the accounts of four members of a military-intelligence unit who were present at Camp Delta that night and tell a much different story. Among them is Staff Sergeant Joe Hickman, decorated for his distinguished service at Guantánamo and responsible for the guards on duty the night of June 9. Using Hickman’s observations, and with the corroboration of other named soldiers who served on the watch with him, Horton’s article demonstrates that official claims are surely false.
For Profile Writing:
For “Own Goal: How Homeless Soccer Explains the World,” by Wells Tower
June 2010
Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Wells Tower followed the U.S. team’s misadventures in the Homeless Soccer World Cup. A do-gooder scheme that’s both well meaning and harebrained, the Homeless World Cup quickly became a media darling. Tower traveled with our ragtag band of sportsmen as they bumble their way to the tournament in Melbourne.
Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of short stories, which is now out in paperback (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Tower is based in New York.
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J
ohn R. (Rick) MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, looked back on the Gulf War and how it was covered by the media. The Al Jazeera English interview with MacArthur is available here.
In 1993, MacArthur received the Mencken Award for best editorial/op-ed column for his New York Times investigation of Nayrah Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter who helped fake the Iraqi baby-incubator atrocity.
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Congratulations to Téa Obreht on the success of her debut novel.
The New York Times just published this glowing profile of Téa. It’s mentioned in the piece that The Times’s Michiko Kakutani reviewed Obreht’s first book, The Tiger’s Wife, which was published this month, and called it “hugely ambitious and audaciously written.”
Téa wrote for Harper’s Magazine last year. In the November 2010 issue, Téa wrote “Twilight of the Vampires: Hunting the Real-Life Undead.” The piece is mentioned in the aforementioned profile of Téa:
By the end of 2008, Ms. Obreht said, she and Mr. Eaker thought they were finished with the manuscript, but she wound up substantially rewriting it in 2009, after Mr. Fishman got her an assignment from Harper’s Magazine that sent her to the Balkans to research an article on contemporary vampire lore.
“That was when I rediscovered Belgrade,” she said. “I noticed changes in the city itself, in people’s attitudes, and I got myself emotionally reconnected to the place and the culture in a way I needed to reshape the present-day story.”
If you’d like to see video of Téa reading from her Harper’s Magazine story, click here.
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