Tuesday, April 18, 2006
(10:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Lewis Lapham Retires as Editor of Harper's
Although I really should be doing something other than blogging, I just read Lewis Lapham's latest "Notebook" column announcing his retirement as editor of Harper's, and I feel I need to say a few words about it. I have been reading his "Notebook" columns virtually every month since I was 17 -- part of what has become a satisfying monthly ritual, in retrospect one of the most stable, but at the same time destabilizing, aspects of my life. His style in those columns has grown increasingly artificial and even annoying over the years, but in his capacity as editor, he has seemed to me to show remarkable judgment and integrity -- something that cannot always be said, for example, of the editors of The New Yorker or (even worse) The Atlantic Monthly.There's none of this cutesy formulaic stuff about how "both sides are wrong," none of these over-clever simple solutions, no hollow attempts at a posture of tough-minded "realism" -- instead, every month there are well-written, compelling, and above all memorable stories. Certainly there is a bias toward the "paranoid," but we are living now (and perhaps always have been living) in times that require a thorough-going paranoia.
I came to Harper's because of a desire to tap into the intellectual scene, inspired by a high school teacher who read The New Yorker religiously (and was apparently trying to work his way through all the back issues as well). There I read of George W. Bush's craven incompetence before he was even a presidential candidate -- not the only or even the best example of a time when Harper's was way ahead of the curve. And I think that over time, it changed me, not into a generic bleeding-heart liberal (the presumed only alternative to the sneering conservative I was in high school), but into an independent leftist. I recognize now that it was Harper's that laid the groundwork so that when I woke up and saw the news on September 11, 2001, my reaction was not a knee-jerk patriotism, but a deep-seated dread at what we good Americans were going to do to the rest of the world as a result of this. And it is a testimony to Lapham's integrity of an editor that I continue to be surprised and challenged by the stories appearing in that magazine -- no simplistic party line and no easy answers are being sold.
So I wish Mr. Lapham the best of luck in his future endeavors -- and it does sound like he'll be busy, with book deals and with a new quarterly. I have not been able to find out who the new editor is going to be, but I hope they find someone who can tarry with the negative as well as Lewis Lapham has.
