Subscribe Today

Second Read RSS

Thu, 20 Mar 2008

Divided Soul

Rian Malan stared down the demons of apartheid
By Gal Beckerman
Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (1)

Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white and conscious in the face of apartheid’s stupidities and... Read More

Tue, 5 Feb 2008

Uncomfortable Truth

P. Sainath reminds us that India is still a poor country
By Naresh Fernandes
Posted at 09:00 AM

One evening, a couple of summers ago, The Times of India organized a free classical music concert at an amphitheater cut into a hill along Bombay’s coast. It was a stunning locale, with the sea in the distance and twinkling stars overhead. All around the stage, giant canvasses depicted idyllic scenes of a futuristic Bombay—a city whose contemporary counterpart... Read More

Tue, 13 Nov 2007

The Unvanquished

Marshall Frady and the dime-store rascals of southern politics
By Scott Sherman
Posted at 12:00 PM Comments (1)

A few months before he died in a car accident, David Halberstam published a droll, melancholy homage to his colleague and friend Marshall Frady, who lost a prolonged battle with cancer in 2004. The essay appears as a new introduction to two books by Frady that Simon & Schuster has reissued: Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (1979)... Read More

Thu, 9 Aug 2007

Bohemian Rhapsodies

Mary Heaton Vorse’s labor reportage
By David Glenn
Posted at 08:30 AM

In April 1952, Harper’s Magazine published “The Pirates’ Nest of New York,” a report on the aftermath of a wildcat strike on the city’s docks. The piece begins with a longshoreman and two activist priests conducting a friendly argument about exactly how a port reformer of an earlier era had been murdered. Was he shot, garroted, or immersed in... Read More

Tue, 12 Jun 2007

On the Rocks

Douglas McCollam on John McPhee's Annals of the Former World
By Douglas McCollam
Posted at 08:30 AM Comments (1)

Annals of the Former World
By John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1998

I first encountered the writer John McPhee about ten years ago on a remote stretch of the Salmon River in the wilds of northern Alaska just inside the Arctic Circle. That’s where he was, at least. I was sitting in the sun outside a... Read More

Thu, 1 Mar 2007

Corps Values

Thomas E. Rick's 1997 book Making the Corps describes a society's relationship to its warriors.
By Russell Working
Posted at 08:30 AM

Early last year, my cousin, a Marine captain based in Okinawa, sent me a Wall Street Journal story about changes in Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The article had been e-mailed back and forth around the world, from North Carolina to Iraq to Japan, until a dozen little forwarding arrows nudged every line into the right... Read More

Mon, 1 Jan 2007

Benevolent Dreamer

Ben Yagoda on St. Clair McKelway, who wrote with lucidity about his own mental illness.
By Ben Yagoda
Posted at 08:30 AM

Last summer James Wolcott reviewed The Complete New Yorker on DVD for The New Criterion. He concluded with a list of “future topics for inquiry.” Number one with a bullet point was this: “Why does A.J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?” Liebling’s continued popularity is... Read More

Archives

Current Cover

May / June 08

Table of Contents Browse Back Issues Subscribe Mission Revisited Getting Bit More...
  • Club Med(vedev)

    The inauguration of Dmitri Medvedev as Russia's new president this week is one of those fantastic Historical Occasions for which air quotes (yes, "air quotes") seem designed. In the sense that the inauguration is basically a farce. Medvedev is, if...

  • EJ Graff Joins the XX Factor

    The XX Factor, Slate's women-written blog, welcomes a new voice today: EJ Graff. Graff, the author of Getting Even and What Is Marriage For?, is an expert on social policy, with a particular focus on women's issues. She's a senior...

  • More ...

The Associated Press. Miami, Florida. Photo by Sean Hemmerle. More...

Top Stories
Recent Comments