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adam harris

@adamhsays

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- Dad; southern; author.
- co-host, Radio Atlantic
- wrote The State Must Provide; writing Is This America?; sharing pictures of things along the way

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I have a couple of pictures of my granddad around the house. I can’t remember when we had them printed; it had to have been between ‘99 and ‘05 when I had cornrows. I was reading a little while ago, looking at the one where he is standing in his garden smiling an impossibly cool smile, and wrote a poem about those things we can remember.

It’s called “Memories of Green” and it published at @theatlantic today. There’s a little teaser of it in the slides and the link to the full poem is in my bio: taken in Virginia by @adamhsays

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5 months ago

📚🎶we’re going, going.. back back.. to the archives

On today’s episode of Radio Atlantic, I spoke with my former colleague at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jack Stripling, about the upcoming academic year, the “call to action,” and how university leaders are trying to the answer the question that has historically animated so much of the conversation around college, and continues to today: What is it for?

In the spirit of that question, I went back into the archives to look at how W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington addressed it in the pages of the Atlantic at the turn of the 20th century.

And catch my full conversation w/ Jack on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you listen!

📸: Mike Pesoli by @adamhsays

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2 months ago

I was on the phone with my parents this weekend and as I was yapping I pulled a poetry collection off my shelves and flipped to one I’d been thinking about a lot lately: James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis” — (you might have seen I shared it to my story not long after). It’s worth a read. But I was thinking about the poem, and the appendix to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative on hypocrisy, and the Boston Massacre, and American inheritance, and the existentialists, and theories of action, and I started reading the poem out loud before I found myself fixated on the line I always pause at: “New occasions teach new duties.”

All that to say: I have a new poem in @theatlantic today, inspired by its first editor, that says our nation is the sum of the action of us all.

“Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?”

Many thanks to @althunter taken in Virginia by @adamhsays

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9 months ago

Is it the economy, stupid?

The Atlantic’s Adam Harris on how Trump’s policies are impacting the US midterms, live at Hay Festival Forum Dallas. taken in Texas Theatre by @adamhsays

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13 hours ago

Adam Harris from The Atlantic came to hang with the fellas — and left us with a word. 🎙️

When we devalue our public schools and community colleges, we’re not just devaluing institutions. We’re devaluing the next generation of Americans — and, ultimately, the American project itself.

Public education is an investment in who we become.

🎧 Watch the full conversation on Brothers’ Briefing. by @adamhsays

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13 days ago

spent last week in New York for an Atlantic Festival to remember. See you next year!

📸: Victor Arriola/BFA.com & Marc Patrick/BFA.com taken in New York City by @adamhsays

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24 days ago

Twelve years of celebrating the 13th of September, 2014, with you, my favorite day. I love you Tisa, dearly and more with each day. 😘 by @adamhsays

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a month ago

sure, I could do individual captions for each photo but where is the fun in that?

1. archives
2. paradise lost
3. a walk in the woods
4. old town
5. first day!
6. did I mention the archives? Both 📸: Mike Pesoli
7. CNN
8. ❤️
9. rollin, rollin, rollin
10. le shelves by @adamhsays

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2 months ago

The State Must Provide, my first book baby, turns five today. I wrote the book because I felt like I had to.

I had questions about HBCUs and American higher education and I wanted answers. I wanted to know why things were the way they were. I wanted to write a history of higher ed that did not consider Black students and the institutions they attended as afterthoughts but as central to the story. I wanted to really sit with the fact that this thing — this feature of our democracy that is often funded by public money and overseen by states and the federal government; this feature of our democracy that George Washington and his contemporaries found so important that he included it in his first and last addresses to Congress — this thing we call our higher education system was, for so long, legally unequal. And I wanted to consider how that legacy continues to impact the system we recognize today.

It is a first book in the sense that you don’t know what you don’t know — about the craft of writing or just, you know, life — until you know it. But there is nothing — save a couple of things I’d like to flesh out in the footnotes — that I’d change about it. Sometimes people expect concrete solutions out of a non-fiction book. (Some people expect concrete solutions from fiction too, but that’s for another day.) Oftentimes I do as well. “Okay, so what do we do about it.” We don’t just let the cancer eat away after the diagnosis without offering treatment plans. The State Must Provide has solutions, but it was, at its core, my attempt at a diagnosis: It was looking back at the system we created, with no illusions, and telling the truth about it and how it was made. As far as first kids are concerned, I think this one is alright.

p.s. in an article I think you should all read, “Why Reading Is Now Restless, @althunter wrote that “writer’s write from compulsion, from necessity. That’s why prose can feel hot on the page.” And boy did I feel that during this most recent re-read. 😅 by @adamhsays

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2 months ago

Hop in for story time from the archives!

One of my favorite things about The Atlantic is perusing its rich archives which can be insightful and fascinating (and enraging, at times).

On this week’s Radio Atlantic, we introduced a new segment where I report back on some of the things I find in there, like this essay from Robert La Follette Jr, writing about a dysfunctional Congress he served in — Congress the people were getting fed up with — three years before losing his seat to Joseph McCarthy in 1946.

Take a journey with me, will you?

This week’s full video episode, a conversation with Russell Berman about Michigan and “electability” is available on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

🎥: Mike Pesoli by @adamhsays

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3 months ago

A month of 35: Take a walk with me, will you? by @adamhsays

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3 months ago

@clintsmithiii joins me on Radio Atlantic this week to talk about the Trump administration’s military purges and his latest story in the magazine. Link to the full episode in my bio by @adamhsays

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3 months ago