In which he finds Harper's not as relevant as it used to be. He recommends subscribing to n+1 instead.
Proyect mentions, but doesn't include a link to, this interview with former Harper's editor Roger Hodge, in which Hodge points out problems that potentially spell the end of the magazine.
4 April update: I posted a comment to Proyect's blog. I subscribe to Harper's and Bookforum. Will Harper's go defunct before my sub runs out in Nov. 2015? If I didn't subscribe to either magazine, and browsed them at the newsstand, which one would I be more likely to buy? At this point I'd say Bookforum ($4.95), with its many, many book reviews and edgy writing. Harper's ($6.95) is more of a mixed bag. Its "Easy Chair" and "Anti-Economist" columns are a play for the Washington relevance The Atlantic enjoys, and its choice of Readings is more predictable than what I remember from the `90s, when I first began subscribing. Yet the March issue has a lengthy report on the cost of North Dakota's fracking boom, a review of a biography on P.G. Wodehouse and a feature on adult animation coming of age with the fX show Archer. It's this variety of writing, and a certain remove from the buzz-chasing world of opinion magazines, that are among Harper's strengths.
No one magazine can do it all. What Harper's lacks, an n+1 might have. But n+1 lacks what Harper's has. So I read the (relatively) edgy and stodgy together.
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2 comments:
Harper's made two fatal mistakes. It pitched its appeal to older white college educated males and it refused to put free content online. So it disappeared itself.
Harper's, with a circulation of about 200,000, will stay around for a while. But it's not as relevant as it was twenty or thirty years ago. The Atlantic has used the Internet very shrewdly, and it's one of the hottest opinion magazines nowadays. As are Mother Jones and The Nation.
Roger Ebert stayed in the public eye through social media, and that's a major reason why he got so much press when he died recently.
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