A Knave and His Index

Lewis Lapham continues to wound our culture

WHAT was Karl Marx’s best line? My candidate is his mot, from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce. Consider: It was a minor cultural tragedy when Lewis Lapham trivialized Harper’s magazine beyond all recognition. Once upon a time, Harper’s was home to such eminences as Henry James, Winston Churchill, and Mark Twain. Under Lapham’s long stewardship, the magazine became a poster child for the dumbed-down limousine leftism that Lapham himself so effulgently personified. The infamous Harper’s Index, which Lapham introduced in an effort to pander to his readers’ diminishing attention spans and confusion of Trivial Pursuit with useful knowledge, epitomized the spirit of the enterprise. Disconnected observations, many of dubious authority, were jumbled together in a pathetic cocktail-game collage:

About the Author

Roger Kimball

Mr. Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books, and co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.

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Lewis Lapham continues to wound our culture

WHAT was Karl Marx’s best line? My candidate is his mot, from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce. Consider: It was a minor cultural tragedy when Lewis Lapham trivialized Harper’s magazine beyond all recognition. Once upon a time, Harper’s was home to such eminences as Henry James, Winston Churchill, and Mark Twain. Under Lapham’s long stewardship, the magazine became a poster child for the dumbed-down limousine leftism that Lapham himself so effulgently personified. The infamous Harper’s Index, which Lapham introduced in an effort to pander to his readers’ diminishing attention spans and confusion of Trivial Pursuit with useful knowledge, epitomized the spirit of the enterprise. Disconnected observations, many of dubious authority, were jumbled together in a pathetic cocktail-game collage: