Harper's Weekly for September 2, 2008

Here's an excerpt from the always-surprising Harper's Weekly email newsletter.

A United Nations investigation of last week's coalition airstrikes in Afghanistan found that the United States had killed 90 civilians, including 60 sleeping children, and Nigerian religious leader Mohammadu Bello Abubakar, who is 84, accepted an Islamic decree that would force him to divorce 82, or 95 percent, of his 86 wives. An Australian plastic surgeon who received oral sex from a patient before providing her with a nose job was fighting to keep his medical license. "Knowing her nose better than anyone else," said Dr. Martyn Mendelsohn, "I was in a unique position to take care of the problem." A man concerned that he had injected air into his veins while shooting cocaine tried to amputate his own arm with a butter knife, and then a butcher knife, at a Denny's Restaurant in California, and European officials warned that Botox injections could have dangerous side effects, including death. Nearly half a million people in developing nations were manufacturing virtual weapons and mounts to sell to players of online video games such as World of Warcraft, and the Pentagon launched a program that aims to create an artificial brain within the next decade.

Harper's Weekly for September 2, 2008

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Good ol’ Stand on Zanzibar…

• [angryf]

  yeah the Dennys thing happened here in Modesto… sigh

• [Jeff]

  I have a news flash: the Pentagon already has one. They just don’t know how to use it yet. Any “news” to the contrary is mis-direction, and weak at that.

• [Jeffrey McManus]

  I love what Harper’s does but I can’t stand that they feel compelled to express this in the form of one run-on sentence after another.

• [JamesMason]

  Why would they want an artificial brain? Real brains are pretty cheap, and are fun to make besides.

• [ed g.]

  Harpers? Quit kidding. That’s an excerpt from _Stand On Zanzibar_.

• [PeterMan]

  The magazine you quote from is not Harper’s Weekly, it’s Harper’s Magazine and it is published monthly.

• [Mark Frauenfelder]

  Peterman@6: You are wrong on three counts.

  1. I am not quoting from a magazine, I am quoting from Harper’s Weekly.

  2. Harper’s Weekly is not a magazine. It is an email newsletter is published by the same people who publish Harper’s Magazine.

  3. I did not quote from Harper’s Magazine. I quoted from Harper’s Weekly.

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• [dculberson]

  Oh, but Mark, how could you know what you quote from better than a complete stranger [possibly] half way across the world?