…when they come to hand in a dentist’s waiting room and we have nothing better to do. Harper’s, for example, which I have sort of lost track of–haven’t picked up a copy for at least a year.

My (very) vague impression is that the magazine has drifted further left since then. The current Harper’s (Feb. ‘06) has a well-written but tendentious piece by JoAnn Wypijewski on the Abu Ghraib courts-martial. The piece ends with a clarion call for us to “set America right again, on course as it was after the Vietnam War, a chastened empire still wielding a fearsome arsenal but with liberal intentions…” So Ms. Wypijewski wants to return us to… the Carter presidency? (And on reflection, I’m going to subtract five of those marks for good writing, since Ms. W employs the seriously tired how-to-boil-a-frog analogy. Anyone who doesn’t know the proper way to boil a frog by now, must have given up reading newspaper and magazine journalism a couple of years ago.)

That piece is followed by a report on the Dover monkey trial by Matthew Chapman, who tells us he is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. (Or, as the Intelligent Design crowd would put it, a spawn of Satan.) His report is not brilliant or inspired in any way, and you will either like it or not depending on your view of the underlying issues. Chapman caught my attention with a rhetorical question that strikes me as naughty to the point of being uncharitable, but which I’ll confess has crossed my own, deeply uncharitable, mind (and I bet a lot of other people’s minds, too). Of Michael Behe, star expert witness for the defendants (i.e. pro-I.D. side), and best-credentialed of prominent I.D. proponents, Chapman says:

“I couldn’t help wondering what Behe would be without Intelligent Design. The scientific community may despise him, but he is beloved on the other side. He gets invited to talk all over the country, and he has sold a lot of books.”

It’s not quite right as written, though. I am reliably informed that Behe’s academic colleagues regard his I.D. promotion with amused condescension–insulting enough, but not the same as despection. (Behe’s professional academic work, which does not touch on I.D., seems to be perfectly sound.) And if selling a lot of books is a crime, it is a crime I hope to be guilty of myself one day.