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Recently in Salon People

People Feature
Courtney Love lights up Winnipeg
In which a wayfaring scribe innocently stumbles into a Hole concert, where a congregation of lager louts gets a quick, harsh lesson in timing.
By Steve Burgess
[07/30/99]

Nothing Personal
Virginity: Going, going, gone!
Love for sale on eBay? Goliath's hormone problems; Posh Spice gobsmacked by goblet larceny. Plus: Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, father of the year.
By Amy Reiter
[07/29/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Is the Mafia going the way of the great auk?
Pas de deux in dreamland with a working-class hero. Extinction alert: Goodfellas now an endangered species.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[07/29/99]

People Feature
Suite for heartbreak and name dropping
In the midst of a deathly tome overflowing with her dratted ego, Judy Collins attempts to tell the unembellished tale of a sad death. And she pulls it off.
By Lorenzo W. Milam
[07/29/99]

Nothing Personal
Farrah's flip-out was mom's fault
Fawcett shirks blame for wacko Letterman turn (but still takes responsibility for '70s hairdo); Jesse Helms has a big, big, big vocabulary. Plus: Israel says Tarzan's loincloth's gotta go!
By Amy Reiter
[07/28/99]

Complete archives for People

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Lapham's influence is felt throughout Harper's mix of original essays, fiction and "Readings" procured from zines, corporate memos, books and elsewhere. Lapham is the creator of the ever popular and widely mimicked Harper's Index and author of the magazine's National Magazine Award-winning "Notebook" column, where he takes to task the hypocrisy and corruption of our world leaders and social systems in crisp, lengthy prose. For the magazine's 150-year anniversary, he has been reprinting articles by former contributors such as Mark Twain and Leon Trotsky.

Like the magazine he edits, Lapham is simultaneously old-fashioned and current. His columns reflect a sharp understanding of contemporary politics and social mores -- yet, he explains, "I write in longhand, then I dictate it into a tape recorder. My secretary transcribes it on the computer. When I want it changed, she does all the editing moves." He added that if a computer is produced that he can "dictate to," he'll modernize his methods immediately.

His latest book, "Lapham's Rules of Influence," is a dark rendering of "Chicken Soup for the Soul"-type advice for success-minded college graduates on how to achieve wealth and fame. "A generation ago the graduates of the country's well-to-do universities might have mentioned the name of a dead poet, or said something about truth and its untimely betrayals. Not now," he writes in his introduction. "The philosophical questions have gone missing in action, rendered futile by the prices paid for New York apartments ... They don't talk about changing the system, only about the means of improving their access to it," he continues.

Underlying every snarky sentence is an indictment of "the widening chasm between rich and poor, or the increasingly obvious disparities between the civic-minded theory taught in school and the profit-making facts posted on the walls of the news and entertainment media."

As we sit down in the Redwood Room of the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, I suggest that his vision of the American Republic seems to be a plutocracy of the rich. "The plutocratic instinct has been with us since day one," he replies. "There were some people that came to 17th century New England to find God and then there were others who came to find fame, fortune, wealth and so on. And of course there was the ascendant plutocracy at the end of the 19th century, the Gilded Age, railroad barons and so on. And so what we see now is not particularly new in spirit.

"What's new is the scale. In the last 20 years or the last 30, the generation of wealth is more than mankind has generated in its entire history," he says, illustrating his point with descriptions of stock market wealth, people who only travel on their own planes, "the miracle of compound interest."

"A system like this can't sustain itself very long without collapsing," I say.

"I've thought that for the last 10 years and I've been consistently wrong," Lapham replies. "But I am like you. Historically, it doesn't last -- if history teaches us anything. Maybe history has been declared superfluous, or maybe history has been overruled."

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