666 Broadway, Harper’s

The office television of Harper’s Magazine has been dethroned. The day I visited a person from Verizon had unplugged and replaced the set, a 1989 NEC model CT-2770S, with a flatscreen TV. The old television now sat, ignominiously, on the ground at the foot of the television table. It was one of the first things my tour guide, assistant editor Becky Zhang, took me to see when I arrived on a Wednesday afternoon in October.

The staff’s appetite for steampunk technology does not stop with the erstwhile television. Everyone has a landline at their desk. Whenever a writer files a draft, the managing editor prints out copies and puts them out on a rack near his door, where editors collect them to mark up by hand. The office has at least two fax machines. One of them belongs to the publisher’s assistant, Virginia Navarro, who in fact has her fax number (but not, to her consternation, her email) printed on her business card. She told me a few writers still file by fax, but mainly it spits out spam. As evidence, she pulled out a bundle of recent arrivals that she keeps at her desk for scrap paper: They included advertisements for financing, psychics, a roofing company, and an administrative assistant course.

Of course, many would consider publishing a print magazine to be as obsolete as a cathode ray tube. Harper’s dates back 175 years, and it maintains a print circulation of 98,000. But unlike almost every other magazine of its size, Harper’s commissions no online-only pieces. Instead, once a month, the web editor, Sophie Poole simply puts all the pieces from the new print issue online. She had in fact done just that the morning of my visit. She told me that she had just gotten Harper’s back online after an unusually viral article—about the practice of communal online masturbation—crashed the website. The commitment to print comes from publisher John MacArthur. He recently wrote an article in Air Mail declaring his fidelity to paper: “I’d rather be an oddball publisher and reader of print than a titan of TikTok or a sultan of social media.”

MacArthur—who goes by his middle name, Rick—pulled me into his corner office, which has a wall of books on one side and a commanding view up Broadway on the other. I asked him if he knew about the new television. He did not. We turned our focus to the architecture. “One day I said to myself, this is insane,” MacArthur told me, referring to the original design of the office. In 1980 he had encouraged his father to mobilize the MacArthur Foundation (which had been endowed by his grandparents) to buy the floundering monthly and turn it into a nonprofit. In 1984, Rick seized full control: “I ran a kind of board coup.” Figuring that “I can’t do worse than the people who ran this before,” he declared himself publisher. That December, MacArthur moved the staff thirty blocks south to the corner of Broadway and Bond, just north of Houston Street, leaving its midtown digs at 2 Park Avenue.

Harper’s owns the full eleventh floor of 666 Broadway, a twelve-story 1905 Renaissance Revival building that was redeveloped in 1983 as a cooperative to provide affordable office space for nonprofits. MacArthur insisted on the eleventh floor because it is the only one in the building with arched windows. He did not think much of the original layout: It was “a rabbit warren,” with all the windows monopolized by private offices. So, in 2004 he spearheaded a renovation.

The redesign prioritized bringing light into the interior. The floor plan is now a doughnut, with a looped corridor flanked by private offices along the windows and a cluster of cubicles on the interior. Almost all the private offices have frosted glass walls and doors, allowing daylight from the exterior windows into the central cubicle farm. The redesign also prioritized making the workers visible. Said MacArthur, “I want transparency up to a point.” That point is about 5’ 5”. At that height, MacArthur made the frosted glass clear “so you can peek in.” The walls of the interior cubicles are also 5’5” high, allowing people to peer over and check who is inside. Tall people. “There is a lot of getting on your toes” Poole (petite) tells me later. “And getting air!” interjects Chloe Arnold (5’10”), the production manager and designer. “Toes are never enough to clear the frosting.”^*

MacArthur’s light-filled personal office, on the other hand, has a solid, windowless door and is catty-corner to the office of his assistant Navarro, which is windowless and lacks a door of any kind—a detail she immediately pointed out to me. MacArthur prefers working in his office: “I hate remote work—there are one hundred reasons not to do your job when you work remotely.” The rest of the staff do not have a choice in the matter. MacArthur gained some Covid notoriety when in August of 2020—“as soon as it was legal”—he had the full staff return to the office full-time. He told me nobody got Covid—until they thought it was safe enough to have an office party at a bar. There are still air purifiers perched throughout the workspace, none of them on when I was there.

For the editors, working in the office may be compulsory, but the ones I met seemed pretty happy to be there—and to be finding lots of reasons not to do their jobs. It probably helped that they had just closed their December issue. After MacArthur concluded our interview so he could finish preparing his introduction for Sam Sussman’s book talk at McNally Jackson that evening, everyone else pitched in to make sure I had a thorough tour. I noticed one of my guides, associate editor Maya Perry, was drinking from a mug: “Are you drinking coffee?” It was whiskey. Just about the whole staff was in fact drinking whiskey, to celebrate the issue close. They poured me a mug.

The place is full of stuff. There are black-and-white photos of Kafka randomly taped to windows and walls. Nobody is quite sure who put them up or why. There is a card catalogue containing contract information for every Harper’s contributor going back to the 1960s. Along the south side, there is a whole forest of office plants, including a peace lily given to the office by David Foster Wallace. It has progeny, as over the years writers and editors have taken cuttings. There is a book pile that the interns regularly empty by piling its contents onto a dolly to sell to the Strand, ten blocks up Broadway. The editors showed me the candy bowl—“our only source of sustenance,” said Zhang. There is a periodical rack with copies of the major newspapers and the broadsheet County Highway, which is run by former Harper’s editor David Samuels. I learned that an associate editor of County Highway, Noah Rawlings, just joined the staff—it was in fact his first day.

Back in the klatch of editors, everyone was nursing a mug, still bemoaning the loss of the television. “I just loved watching tennis on there,” one said.

I learned there is such a thing as Harper’s time: The magazine always closes its issues one month before the month on the cover, meaning employees spend their November thinking about January and their December thinking about February. One editor reflected that when the actual month arrives, it feels as though you already lived it. Another quipped that this means “we are always avant-garde.” Within the Harper’s month, there are four weeks: “manuscripts,” “color close,” “ship,” and “blues.” We were in blues week, which means the texts were final (indeed already published online), but the art and layout were still in process. Kathryn Humphries, the art director, was striding purposefully between printers as she checked each page, literally stamping them once they met her approval. She did not have a mug.

The editors brought me back to the toppled television, explaining that traditionally the staff sat each cohort of interns down to watch a 60 Minutes interview from 2003 with the disgraced journalist Stephen Glass on the set. Then they took me to see the intern cubicle, referred to as “the Cube.” Each intern is given a cardinal direction, reflected in their email address (i.e., north@harper.org) and then a desk that is—for reasons nobody could explain—oriented opposite their direction, so that north sits in the southern corner facing south, and east sits in the western corner facing west. The desks are full of notes written by previous interns, and the cubicle walls and shelves are a dense ensemble of books, Post-it notes, pinned-up photos, and a set of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.

Will Augerot, the managing editor, brought me into his office. On top of a wardrobe sat a copy of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961). Augerot was not sure who put the edition there or why, but he did know that it was famously skewered in Harper’s by David Foster Wallace in his 2001 essay “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Maybe that is why it was placed out of reach.

I caught up with the editors one more time before making my exit. They were still talking about the television: “Did we tell you the staff watched 9/11 on the old TV?” They said Lewis Lapham wrote a piece about it. “We watched the inauguration, Kamala’s concession speech…” It was of a piece: the rituals and artifacts tangible reminders of the magazine ’s long, illustrious history; the spirited editors embody its spirited voice; the landlines and fax machines the physical manifestations of the contrarian attitude Harper’s encourages its writers to take.

As I prepared to leave, the editors made the hard sell, all talking at once: “We’re very much a ‘stop by my office’ office.” “Having less of an open plan cultivates more openness of spirit—mixes moments of privacy and moments of sharing.” “Isn’t it a cool office?” “Have we been the most gregarious?”

Honestly, it is a pretty cool office.