Harper's

“Everybody” reads the New Yorker, but for my money, Harper’s is where you should be if you want to break out of conventional wisdom. The latest issue is particularly rich: Mark Slouka wonders why Americans have become so subservient to “boss culture” authority, bootlicking and celebrity-worshipping, kissing up as we get kicked from above; Jonathan Rowe explains why a terminally ill man going through a divorce is the best thing for the Gross Domestic Product, that bogus and destructive way of measuring the economy (in the May issue, Kevin Phillips gave the history of the numbers racket, in which both Republican and Democratic regimes have fixed official statistics to mislead the rest of us); Garret Keizer examines the Episcopal Church’s battle over homosexual bishops, while Rome (the planet, the poor, etc.) burns. I’m half way through that last article, so I don’t know what else is to come, but I know it beats the shit out of the star-fucking that the Fleet Street hack Tina Brown debased the New Yorker with. Yes, I know she's gone, but the magazine remains largely what she made it: light, celebrity-oriented, fashionable, and soothing of its readership. There certainly are things worth reading it in, but they are few and far between.