Latest news with #Harper's
New York Post
5 days ago
- New York Post
Meet the unhinged killer cowboys who made Texas legendary and the Old West ‘wild'
As much as the 'Gunfighter Era' of the Old West was characterized by shoot-outs in the streets, so too was it known for tall tales and quick quips. Consider the case of Pink Higgins. Higgins stumbled upon a cattle rustler who had just killed and butchered one of his herd, so he shot the man dead and stuffed him inside the steer. As Bryan Burroughs recounts in 'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild' (Penguin Press, June 3), 'then [Higgins] rode into town to tell the sheriff he should come see a miracle, a cow giving birth to a man.' 5 Wild Bill Hickok was one of the first and most infamous Texan cowboys, given mass attention in an 1867 article in Harper's, and claimed he had killed hundreds. Wikipedia/ Public Domain The first nationally known gunfighter was 'Wild Bill' Hickok, whose fame was cemented by a Harper's Weekly profile in 1867 that claimed he'd killed 'hundreds' of men. While that number was laughably exaggerated, Wild Bill killed plenty. The first was at a Nebraska stagecoach station in 1861, when Hickok was told to butt out of a loud dispute because it was none of his business. 'Perhaps 'tis,' he was said to nonchalantly reply, 'Or 'tain't.' Then he drew his pistol, killing one man and wounding two others. But to live by the 'Gunfighter's Code' of the Old West was to die by it, too. As a Kansas marshal in 1871, Hickok shot dead a cowboy who'd unexpectedly fired on him, but then when his own deputy came racing around a corner with guns drawn 'Wild Bill' accidentally killed him, too. Then in 1875 in Deadwood, SD, a man Hickok had beaten at poker executed America's most famous gunfighter with a cowardly shot to the back of his head. When gunfighters weren't killing or being killed though, a lot of time they were cracking wise. 5 Legendary cowboy Wyatt Earp and his brothers cut a murderous path through 19th century Texas. Wikipedia/ Public Domain Clay Allison was a fearsome 'shootist' likely suffering from Civil War PTSD, who once rode his horse through a frontier town wearing only a gun-belt. Before shooting one of his victims, Allison first invited him to dinner — the two eventually exchanging bullets right at the table. Asked why he would invite his victim to share a meal before killing him, Burroughs writes that Allison just shrugged. 'Because I didn't want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach.' 5 A scene from the barely developed streets of Deadwood in 1876. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration There's Mysterious Dave, who announced, 'You have lived long enough,' to a cowboy he then shot dead. And professional gambler Ben Thompson, who was told by a threatening gunfighter to avoid a certain city because men were waiting for him there. But the card shark was hardly scared, Burroughs writes. 'I'm Ben Thompson,' he purred. 'If I should go up there, I would serve the boys just so.' Ditto Doc Holliday at the O.K. Corral, who replied to an opponent's threat that he would shoot him down with a laconic 'you're a daisy if you do.' And at the end of that gunfight, it was the infamous Wyatt Earp who had the last word. Looking down at the dead men Earp and his brothers had just defeated in a dispute over carrying their weapons in town, Wyatt joked they no longer 'have to disarm that party.' Even local newspapers could kid about gunplay in the streets, with an 1872 story in Kansas noting the lack of shootings that summer with a headline announcing 'No One Killed Yet.' Another notable characteristic of the Old West's 'Gunfighter Era' was its exaggerated exploits. William 'Wild Bill' Longley claimed to have killed more than 30 men, but the more likely number was four or five. 5 'The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild' is written by Bryan Burrough. 5 Author Bryan Burroughs. And though Johnny Ringo was once considered the most fearsome gunfighter in the country, it was only confirmed that he'd fired his pistol twice. Once he wounded a man in a bar room argument, Burrough writes, with the other incident even less impressive. 'The only other time we're certain Ringo fired… he shot himself in the foot.' There were plenty of real gunfights in those days, though, over slights big and small, whether rustling a man's cattle or cutting in on his dance. One siege at a homestead went on so long that the farm's hogs eventually began devouring the bodies of dead combatants. Maybe the most incredible gunfight of them all occurred in New Mexico in 1884, when a sole, 19-year-old wannabe lawman named Elfego Baca took on 80 angry Texas cowboys. Wearing an unofficial, mail-order badge, Baca arrested and jailed one Texan for misbehaving in the town's streets. When a handful of the captive's friends demanded his release, Baca squared off with them and told them he would begin to shoot. The Texans laughed, but Baca began to fire. He killed one as the others fled, at least until they returned 80 strong. All alone, Baca then engaged the Texans in a gun battle, ultimately being chased into an abandoned home. The Texans unloaded so many bullets that eventually the house collapsed onto itself. Four hundred bullet holes were later counted in its front door alone, but when law enforcement eventually intervened, Baca had killed four and walked away unscathed. Writes Burroughs: 'Covered with dust, Baca emerged in his underwear, a revolver in each hand.'
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Our leading lights are embracing the political low road
Apr. 23—In 1992, Iowa U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin went searching for a gimmick to draw attention to his campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. The populist firebrand eventually settled on the use of profanity as a means of appearing authentic. Harkin failed as a candidate, eventually endorsing rival Bill Clinton. But he succeeded in drawing attention — both positive and negative — to his embrace of the then-un-embraceable: public use of profanity. Harper's magazine thought Harkin's vocabulary so unique that it counted the frequency of Harkin's use of the "B" word, an adjective intended to portray his opponent's positions as "misleading or deceptive." "Number of times Senator Tom Harkin used the word [expletive] in public speeches last summer: 17," it reported. In his own way, Harkin has proved to be a rhetorical trailblazer. These days, politicians in both parties routinely and publicly use what is considered foul language. In addition to calling his opponents "losers" and "scumbags," President Donald Trump has employed vulgar adjectives to make his points. Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin once professed to be scandalized because Trump, in a first-term private meeting, used a profane adjective to describe the country of Haiti. These days, Durbin's fellow Democrats fire one expletive after another at the political opposition. Illinois' junior U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth has dropped a series of "F" bombs to denounce Trump, chastise former cable program host Tucker Carlson and challenge the credibility of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In a recent interview, she added to her repertoire by accusing Trump of defecating (not her specific word) on the American flag. The insulting language has gone beyond profanity to meanness. Texas U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett recently lampooned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as "Governor Hot Wheels," an obviously demeaning reference to a disability that requires him to use a wheelchair. Forbes magazine in 2012 asked, "When Can a Politician Use Profanity, If Ever?" Seven years later, Politico answered that question with a story headlined, "F-bombs away: Why lawmakers are cursing now more than ever." It's nothing new for those who hold positions high or low to express themselves in vulgar terms. For some, it's part of their private vocabularies, and politicians are no exception, even if they pretend otherwise. When he was vice president, Richard Nixon praised President Dwight Eisenhower for restoring clean language to the White House, a clear reference to President Truman's expletive-laden vocabulary. Decades later, the White House tapes revealed a private Nixon who was so profane that the Rev. Billy Graham, a longtime friend, said the tapes revealed a side of Nixon he did not know. CNN has identified other famously foul-mouthed-in-private politicians including Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and John Kerry. But what's with the public displays? And how does it go over with their audiences? It's a sign of the times. National writer Noah Rothman said "these crass displays" could be interpreted as "earthy expressions of candor" that are applauded by those who agree with the speaker. But he said they are more likely a tactic that can be characterized as "an anti-intellectual shtick aimed at manipulating the audience into exhibiting an emotional response to otherwise deficient stimuli." In other words, those who cannot make a cogent argument engage in name-calling to state their cases. Loudness does not equate with logic, but the name of the political game is tapping into audience emotions, resentments and grievances by any means necessary. Some, of course, object on grounds of taste alone. But it's a new world, for good or ill, and that ship sailed long ago.
CBC
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
3 'thrilling' novels about women breaking free in midlife
When Miranda July's novel All Fours was released last May, it generated enormous buzz for bringing to light the fears, desires and longings of a middle-aged woman — touching on themes of motherhood, marriage, sexuality and perimenopause. Canadian journalist Alicia Cox Thomson says it has sparked a positive trend in the literary world, bringing about discussions that tackle a topic and perspective once considered taboo — and she brought two books to the table that also feature women in middle age. " Some women might not be comfortable talking about it, some men might not want to hear it. I feel like with this full force, these books are about a real important point in a woman's life," said Thomson. "Hopefully it'll normalize it, and then we'll start to see more — where the focus isn't 'This character is going through this,' it's just a book about a person who happens to be that age who might be experiencing that, but that's not the main point." On The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing, Thomson spoke about three literary novels that depict women in their midlife. All Fours by Miranda July All Fours follows an unnamed artist in her mid-forties as she grapples with the breakdown of her marriage and the physical and emotional toils of perimenopause. She escapes on a road trip — leaving behind her husband and son, and gets involved in extramarital affairs. Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. Her previous works include the novel The First Bad Man and short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. July's work has also been featured in The Paris Review, Harper's and The New Yorker, Alicia Cox Thomson says:"I'm a writer, and I do find that when you become a mother, your priorities shift, rightfully so. Did I work as much on my craft when I was in the trenches with young children? 'No.' Have I tried to return to it now that they're older? 'Yes.' I do understand that struggle between your passion for your art, or your creative life, or your journey and your passion for your children." The Change by Kirsten Miller In The Change, three different women navigate the changes and challenges of mid-life. While they're each battling their own issues — marriage breakdowns, career shifts, empty nests and loss of loved ones, they're brought together through one woman's ability to hear from the dead, which leads them to solve a string of murders. Kristen Miller is an author who was born and raised in North Carolina, but now lives in Brooklyn, New York City. Her previous works include Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books which was a GMA Book Club pick and the YA series featuring Kiki Strike. Alicia Cox Thomson says:"It's like a juicy thriller that you just want to turn the pages. It's a thoughtful work about women and power and coming into your own. It is a powerful discussion of what happens to powerful, wealthy men who are finally pushed back against." The Mother Act by Heidi Reimer The Mother Act depicts the tumultuous relationship between Sadie Jones, a famous actress and feminist, and her estranged daughter, Jude. Despite Sadie's fame from a one-woman show about motherhood, Jude has spent her life seeking validation from her mother. Two decades later, when they meet at Sadie's play premiere, they explore whether it's possible to balance motherhood with career. Heidi Reimer is a writer based in northern Ontario. Her work has been featured in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. Her debut novel is The Mother Act.
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America's unbeautiful suburban sprawl
In 1941 Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who reported from Germany in the lead-up to the second world war, wrote an essay for Harper's about the personality types most likely to be attracted to Nazism, headlined 'Who Goes Nazi?' 'Those who haven't anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don't – whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi,' Thompson wrote. Talia Lavin, a US writer, recently gave Thompson's idea an update on Substack with an essay of her own: 'Who Goes Maga?' The essay has since been taken down (I'm not sure why), but in it Lavin reimagined Thompson's original dinner party setting, with various archetypes in attendance, offering in one or two paragraphs a brief but empathetic explanation for why each person has or has not 'gone Maga'. Eventually arriving at Mr I, an academic and a frequent traveller to France with family money, Lavin wrote: 'Nonetheless, he will never go Maga and would spend his days in exile even if he got cut off from the family purse … because … he is a true devotee of beauty.' He finds in Maga 'a hatred of things that are beautiful and strange, as all the things he loves are. Power holds no attraction for him, only beauty.' Of course, power often tries to use aesthetics, and its own definition of beauty, to further its own purposes. Fascists and authoritarians are deeply aware of the ability of art to propagate ideas or oppose them. From architecture to rallies, Hitler and Mussolini favoured a type of massiveness, an imposing nature and uniformity to evoke a sense of the imperial eternal. Soviet aesthetics – though meant to be futurist rather than focused on a glorified past – also fell back on the idea of massiveness and uniformity to subjugate the individual and elevate the state. And, of course, all three authoritarian regimes repressed art, artists and aesthetics that were dissident. Trumpism, too, has an aesthetic. Allow me to pretentiously, subjectively, declare it not beautiful. The aesthetic of Trumpism is sprawl – which had already infected the United States long before the Maga movement metastasised. Last September I drove nearly 2,000 miles in the US with a French friend, Guillaume, zigzagging our way from DC to New Orleans and tracing, in part, the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. ('It might be our last opportunity to observe democracy in America,' I had said to him.) Through his non-American eyes, I saw even more poignantly the ways the physical manifestation of Hannah Arendt's 'atomisation' are scarred into the suburban and rural US landscape itself. Like fish in water, I wonder if Americans are even aware of how they swim in it. The hours-long stretches of chain stores in single-storey, flat-topped buildings. The cluster of gas stations, with functionally and aesthetically similar convenience stores selling rows and rows of sugary food and drinks. The big box chain stores, some of them matryoshka dolls that house other chains within – rectangular islands of stuff surrounded by parking lots leading to other little islands of fast food, also surrounded by parking lots, filled with rows and rows of the most enormous pickup trucks imaginable. And then, just as it starts to dwindle, another on-ramp/off-ramp, and the whole shebang starts all over again, until you've cycled through all of the possible chain permutations and you begin to repeat. Wherever there is grass, it will be impeccably mowed. No matter where you are in America's 3.8m sq miles, with its 340 million inhabitants, the sprawl will have followed the same driving logic as the chains it hosts – an utterly nondescript, completely indistinguishable look, feel and experience. Somehow, there is always still traffic on these six-lane roads, a trailing line of enormous vehicles that require parking lots that spill out like muffin tops, and with double-wide parking spaces. Everything about sprawl slumps outwards, like warmed jelly that can no longer hold its shape. There is no height except for the height of the signs advertising the chains; those rise several storeys into the sky, enough to be visible from the highway. Somewhere along the line, the American Dream became to live alone, surrounded by all of this, rather than living in connection with other people. In somewhat cryptic lines, the poet Keats put forward a nexus that goes beyond the subjective nature of what we, individually, find aesthetically pleasing. 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,' he wrote. He was hardly the only one to interrogate the two at the same time. Plato and Plotinus sought to link beauty to an equally ineffable truth that lingered somewhere beyond our material reality; Kant, too, placed beauty beyond taste, as a disinterested thing that radiated outward. In theology, Saint Augustine and Hans Urs Von Balthasar draw the two back to the same divine origin, as critical components to any human attempt to understand the transcendent. And if that's all too mystical for you, the British theoretical physicist Tom McLeish argues: 'As indications of the road forward rather than destinations achieved, beautiful experiments and theoretical ideas can, and even must, be celebrated, their aesthetic appeal unashamedly enjoyed.' I would add a third vector to the one between beauty and truth: art, which in his 1934 book, Art As Experience, John Dewey sees as something that is inherent in the everyday experience of life rather than something necessarily pushed into museums. As long as that living is authentic. 'Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality,' writes Dewey. Perhaps there is something authentic to suburban sprawl when experienced as spectator and anthropologist. But as everyday life, sprawl is deadening, ugly, fake. Devoid of art, beauty and truth alike. The United States has long bought into the idea that freedom is endless expansion. But slouching across land simply because it is there uplifts neither the land nor the people on it. In this instance in particular, abundance did a disservice to the US by drawing it into an absence of experience. What surprise that a moribund ideology would take root in physical spaces that radiate the peculiar desolation of too much? Given the number of artists, photographers, cinematographers and architects who have been willing to serve nefarious political movements, it would be simplistic for me to claim that artists are somehow immune to them. But art is an attempt to capture – and convey – something true about the world, and the human emotional experience of it. When the rational world has committed itself to a path that leads to destruction, perhaps those dedicated to beauty can, with what Keats called a 'negative capability' to perceive truth, bring us back to both. Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Your Stories Q&A: New plans for an old pizza and ice cream shop in Lysander
LYSANDER, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — You ask, we answer! Question: the closed Harper's Pizza & Ice Cream? After being opened for a few years, Harper's Pizza & Ice Cream on Lamson Road, closed at the end of 2024. Before Harper's served up cold cones on a hot day, it was previously Henderson Dairy. But, ice cream will no longer be on the menu. The man behind The Angry Pig BBQ food truck, just announced he purchased the Town of Lysander property, located near the Onondaga/Oswego County line. He plans on opening a private event space, known as The Pig Pen Catering & Events. Owner Josh Reynolds said he will use the space to host kids' birthday and graduation parties and corporate events. He thinks the acre of land, will be an ideal spot to have bounce houses, obstacle courses, and other fun activities for kids. While Reynolds is known for his The Angry Pig BBQ food truck, he said the catering menu won't necessarily include barbecue. He said pizza and other kid-friendly foods will be offered. He also said it would be a spot where people could even bring in outside food for an event. He said the former Harper's is the perfect location because it's only a mile from his new, The Angry Pig BBQ restaurant that's opening in neighboring Phoenix. He plans to open the restaurant inside the Phoenix Commons building, near the Oswego Canal Lock 1. He hopes to have the event space open in May and the restaurant serving up delicious barbecue this summer. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
