Lewis Lapham Lights Up

This time, there was no ceremonial passing of the men's room key. "I just left the key in the drawer," Kinsley says.

In his second coming, Lapham arrived with a plan for radically revamping Harper's, which was born in 1850 and looked it. He introduced three new features: Harper's Index, an ironic compendium of statistics; Readings, a quirky collection of odd items-- letters, transcripts, rants, even suicide notes; and Annotation, a two-page spread with a document in the middle, surrounded by an expert's scathing commentary on it.

It worked. And the Harper's Index became perhaps the most copied magazine feature of the last quarter-century.

"That was a brilliant innovation," says Wolfe. "The Index is fabulous. Those things are antidotes to subscription guilt, like the New Yorker's cartoons: You open the New Yorker and you look at the cartoons and you feel you've read it even if you don't read anything else. The Index and Readings have the same effect in Harper's."

But for Lapham, the heart of Harper's remains the essay -- a writer tackling a subject with passion or wit. "I'm always looking for a voice in writing," he says. "I want to hear what the writer has seen or felt or thought. . . . I'm not looking for data, I'm looking for experience, wisdom, meaning."

He likes to take writers to lunch and get them talking until he learns what really interests them. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich remembers one such lunch in 1998.

"I wanted him to send me to the Super Bowl to study fan behavior," she recalls. "And the conversation went to welfare reform, and I said I wondered how these women were going to make a living on jobs that pay $6 or $7 an hour. I said, 'You should send somebody out there to get those jobs and try to live on that money.' And he said, 'Okay, Barbara, go out and do it.' "

She did, working as a maid, a waitress, a nursing home aide. The result was two articles in Harper's and the best-selling book "Nickel and Dimed."

Lapham published dozens of memorable pieces, including David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, Christopher Hitchens accusing Henry Kissinger of war crimes, Michael Paterniti on driving cross-country with Einstein's brain.

Quirky, unpredictable and consistently inconsistent, Harper's has won 12 National Magazine Awards during Lapham's reign and is a finalist for five more in this year's competition, the results of which will be announced on May 9. That's the good news. The bad news is that, despite a circulation of 228,000, Harper's still loses money -- more than $2 million a year. But Rick MacArthur, now the publisher, says the foundation will keep paying the bills.

After Lapham retires on March 31, his smoke-cured office will be occupied by Roger Hodge, who arrived at Harper's in 1996 as an unpaid intern fleeing from a PhD program in philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Since then, Hodge has moved steadily up the masthead. In 2000, Harper's published his satire on much-hyped artist Matthew Barney under the delightful title "Onan the Magnificent: The Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art."

Hodge, 38, is practically the anti-Lapham: He grew up on a ranch in Texas and avoids the literary cocktail parties that Lapham loves, preferring to ride his bike home from Harper's Lower Manhattan office to his kids in Brooklyn, where he likes to skateboard at night in Prospect Park. But he says he plans no major changes.