Busy with allegory (allegorically busy?) but I wanted to point to the particularly fine new issue of Harper's—so good I might resubscribe. Check out Lewis Lapham's chilling parable of the reality of American fascism; a bleak account of the U.S. failure in Iraq by Edward Luttwak (all the "Readings" are great—one of my favorite features of the magazine, and a poem occasionally slips through); Rebecca Solnit's wistful exploration of the utopian moment kerneled inside the response to disaster; and of course Ben Marcus' skewering of Status-conscious Contract man Jonathan Franzen (currently excerpted on the Harper's webpage), a useful corollary to Andrew Ervin's long letter to The Believer on the very same subject last month.