Editorial Product Review:Item Description:This magazine is edited to cover current social, political, cultural, scientific and economic issues. It also includes reporting, essays, fiction and memoirs by distinguished writers and promising new voices. It regularly features a statistical index, short cuts from various international texts and close analysis of current pieces of media.
From Amazon.com:Literary, brainy, and left-leaning,
Harper's Magazine is an American institution (the first issue was dated June 1850). Its clean, type-heavy design shouts 'serious readers only': many pages are two columns of text, period, and the illustrations are mostly art (often photographic) and artistic adornments. The reading, though, is what matters. It's substantive and often sublime. Along with lengthy, thoughtful, frequently controversial articles on politics and culture, you'll find essays, short fiction, in-depth reporting, and a few book reviews. Bylines routinely represent leading writers and thinkers of the day. Standing features include the much-copied but rarely equaled 'Harper's Index,' in which statistics tell stories; 'Readings,' a section of excerpts ranging in length from a few lines to thousands of words; and 'Annotation,' in which a real-life document is reproduced and 'explained,' usually to devastating political or cultural effect. Each issue is a full meal for the mind.
--Nicholas H. Allison
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Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
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very good place to go for good journalism and short fiction
yeah , to be intellectually honest it has an agenda (it's difficult to find a balanced publication , if not impossible) , but there is too much to recommend for me not to cast a vote in favor .
Customer Rating: 
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The Sky is Falling
I used to read Harper's when I was a cynical 20-something. Now that I'm a somewhat less cynical 30-something, I just can't take the nearly hysterical atmosphere of gloom that pervades it. Life is grim for many around the world--always has been, always will. Wallowing in that grimness isn't in anyone's interest. Additionally, Harper's doesn't give voice to alternative political viewpoints--if they had their way, the editors would pack the courts, congress, and White House with liberals no matter the cost. This is a pluralist society and a magazine with the intellectual firepower of Harper's at its disposal should be strong enough to admit a range of views. Let the Harper's politburo have their funereal fun and read The New Yorker instead.
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Not for flip-throughs
I frequently change magazine subscriptions just to see what's out there. Harpers, however, is a staple and for the simple reason that its writing is the best and the most varied in terms of length and subject matter. The real measure of its success is that I will wade into articles, memoirs and discussions, whatever the subject, and find I come away with something to talk about with friends instead of an hour spent with teaser paragraphs and no payoff. You know the feeling from coffee table mags where your eyes wind up tired and inside your head a dull tom-tom begins to beat . . . Harpers is a strange amalgam of irreverence, analysis, personal revelation and humor that puts it somewhere between the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and Mother Jones--without the branding that the others cordon you with. Check it out and be sure to read the pieces not usually on your checklist. They'll take you places you haven't been.
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Simply the Best
Harper's is simply the best magazine around--thoughtful, critical, varied, insightful, challenging. It refuses to bow down and to pretend that the emperor is not naked, and yet it does not have a shrill or grating tone. In a world gone mad, it is the voice of reason and sanity, liberal in the finest and most liberating sense of the word. It is the only magazine I give as gifts--as of 2008, to seven different people, who have all come to love it, and to look forward to it, as much as I do.