In June, writers Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner joined Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll for a conversation and Q&A in front of a live audience at the NYU Skirball Center in downtown Manhattan. Listen to Cusk and Lerner read from their recent Harper’s essays and discuss the state of contemporary fiction, Cusk’s use of artists’ biographies in her newest novel Parade, reading in a second language, parenthood, the role of ego in writing, and much more. Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97 per year: harpers.org/save. “The Hofmann Wobble” by Ben Lerner, from the December 2023 issue of Harper’s “The Spy” by Rachel Cusk, from the October 2023 issue of Harper’s 11:31: “You can’t be both an encyclopedia and a news source without some kind of contamination.” —Ben Lerner 19:09: “First of all, I thought, God, if I’d never told anyone who I was, starting with my parents, if I hadn’t accepted that containment in myself, what would I have created? What would my relationship to reality be?”  —Rachel Cusk 25:18: “I mean this as a total compliment, but I read your books with a lot of dread.” —Ben Lerner to Rachel Cusk 26:36: “What the novel has tried to do, kind of wrongly, I guess, in the end, is for the act of reading to also be an act of shared experience.” —Rachel Cusk 28:34: “Being a good parent in the moment of composition, if you’re trying to take care of those imagined readers, can be deadly for the work – not always, but sometimes.” —Ben Lerner 28:49: “On the other hand, having kids for me, especially young kids, it does refresh your wonder before language.” —Ben Lerner 29:43: “If your work can change in the way you change, or people change, when you have children, I think that’s a really powerful thing.” —Rachel Cusk 32:10: “I’m really into animal vocalization stuff.” —Ben Lerner 34:23: “French has completely changed my English.” —Rachel Cusk 40:24: “My dad told me never to learn to type because I would end up being someone’s secretary, which was kind of feminist of him I guess, but typing is the thing I’ve done the best with in my whole life.” —Rachel Cusk 41:23: “I think there’s a lot of ego involved in the claim to disavow ego in writing.” —Ben Lerner 42:45: “What is a shame is the idea that examination of self is egotistical.” —Rachel Cusk

Inspired by the pulp collectors Gary Lovisi and Lucille Cali, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Joe Kloc embarked on a freewheeling search for a magazine lost to time: the inaugural issue of Golden Fleece Historical Adventure. In this week’s episode, Kloc joins Violet Lucca to discuss his adventures exploring the world of pulp magazines, the act of collecting, and Lost at Sea, a book based on a previous feature Kloc wrote for Harper’s, slated for release in 2025. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “The Golden Fleece”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/the-golden-fleece-kloc/ “Empathy, My Dear Sherlock”: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/empathy-my-dear-watson-netflix/ “Lost at Sea”: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/lost-at-sea-richardson-bay/ 3:55 “What appealed to me about Gary and pulp collecting in general is, this is really for the love of the game.” 4:06 “I was interested in the idea that people would be so passionate about those objects when it didn’t have that same monetary incentive.” 16:20 “Pulps technically mean only the magazines, not the paperbacks.” 19:00 “These pulp writers became those comic book writers. Those comic books become comic book movies, and these comic book movies are constantly competing for your attention.” 25:52 “It gives you a feeling of being a child and remembering a time when all was before you and anything could happen.” 27:28 “These objects carry a deeper meaning, even if they’ve been destroyed or lost.” 37:18 “It’s hard to describe the power of Sherlock Holmes in the pulp collecting world.” 41:02 “I’m not going to let go of my imagination. It always has been fun to think like this and it always will be fun to think like this.” 44:40 “It’s a form of vernacular creativity.”

With Trump as the forerunning Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party appears to be falling back on the same familiar logic: better than the alternative. But certain progressive candidates are still looking to disrupt the status quo, however unlikely support from the establishment left may be. In this week’s episode, Harper’s Magazine’s Washington editor, Andrew Cockburn, joins senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to survey the landscape of the 2024 election with a focus on three insurgent candidates: Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Andrew Cockburn’s article “Against the Current”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/against-the-current 3:03: “Popping up on the picket line is actually a very hard turn for him as a president.” 4:08: “It’s Trump all over, fake populism as usual.” 5:40: “It’s only when the DNC decided to throw its full weight behind him … then Biden was popular for a while.” 7:42: “He’s really not that old.” 12:10: “I can’t think of any example where a president nominates a strong alternative. Instinctively no leader wants to be encouraging a potential rival.” 14:39: “You don’t get anywhere by promising to make people’s lives better. The only thing you can do is convince people the alternative is worse, which is an infinitely depressing point of view.” 17:30: “Obviously the candidate who has gotten the most attention has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he has evoked a hysterical response.” 19:14: “Marianne Williamson, who has gotten much less attention, has detailed proposals on everything.” 19:53: “Cornel West has the most straightforwardly progressive agenda.” 26:58: “She said the Republicans were like the dog who caught the car, and it was a car full of angry women.” 28:44: “When people are asked why they don’t support Biden, they always cite the economy. The economy seems to be doing well, and yet, people are hurting.” 31:38: “It’s getting late now for any kind of insurgency.” 39:40: “The other fear is that people who would never vote for Trump can’t be bothered to vote for Biden or stay home.”

Today we’re rerunning an episode from 2018 featuring two interviews with Harper’s Magazine’s former New Books columnist, Lidija Haas, and with our current Easy Chair columnist Rachel Kushner. Listen in advance of our event tonight at the Center for Fiction, “What Happened to Gen X?,” which will see Harper’s editor Christopher Beha in conversation with his generational peers Rachel Kushner and Ethan Hawke as they explore the question at the center of our September issue. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, the event illustrated how we are socialized to perform and understand gender, race, and class. In this episode, New Books columnist Lidija Haas joined Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss a handful of recent publications that deal with these issues: Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, and Kristen M. Ghoddsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. In the second segment, Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and Telex From Cuba joined Lucca to discuss an essay she wrote that was included in the October 2018 issue’s Readings section, pulled from her memories of the late Nineties New York art world. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Learning to Wait,” Rachel Kushner’s latest column for the October issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/learning-to-wait/ Rachel Kushner’s latest book, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Hard-Crowd/Rachel-Kushner/9781982157708 Lidija Haas in the Harper’s archive: https://harpers.org/author/lidijahaas/ Lidija Haas’s review of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad for Bookforum: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2503/rebecca-traister-s-case-for-feminist-rage-20155 “Red Letter Days,” Rachel Kushner’s 2018 essay on the late Nineties New York art world: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/red-letter-days/ “What Happened to Gen X?”, our event tonight at the Center for Fiction: https://centerforfiction.org/event/the-center-for-fiction-and-harpers-magazine-present-what-happened-to-gen-x/

Isolated for years by strict censorship laws, community infighting, and language barriers, the writer Amir Ahmadi Arian often turned to Hamed Esmaeilion’s work for solace. In addition to authoring short stories and two novels, Esmaeilion chronicled mundane moments with his family on a blog that resonated deeply with Arian, someone of the same generation also working and living in the Iranian diaspora. Following the tragic death of Esmaeilion’s wife and daughter in the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, Arian witnessed his friend publicly mourn his family and transform his fury into action. Arian sat down with Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, to discuss Esmaeilion’s journey into activism and the responsibility of Iranian diasporic artists. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Waiting for the Lights,” Amir Ahmadi Arian’s report in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/waiting-for-the-lights/ Arian’s English-language debut novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him Esmaeilion on his memoir, It Snows in This House: https://bookshop.org/p/books/then-the-fish-swallowed-him-amir-ahmadi-arian/8025040 Canada’s response to the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 tragedy: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/flight-vol-ps752.aspx?lang=eng 7:24: “Before thinking about how to develop your characters, or how you structure the story, or the themes you want to focus on, the first thing you had to consider was: Will the book I am writing survive the censorship office” 9:01: “I think it’s kind of a miracle we still have a literary culture, given the circumstances.” 13:00: “The whole process is made to intimidate you, to show you that they know more about you than you would think and actually use it against you.” 13:29: “He was being interrogated when his father-in-law passed away.” 26:52: “So you go through all this difficulty, all this trouble, to just have an ordinary life.” 28:31: “It’s not so much a decision that he made to pursue justice, it’s just an inevitable turn of events. There’s nothing else left to do.” 33:12: “There was this hunger for any figure outside of Iran that could bring people together.” 37:52: “All walks of life, all stripes, they were there, they were together shouting the same thing.” 40:05: “The thing about the government in Iran is they have mastered the art, if you can call it the art, of containing any kind of revolutionary mass protest.” 44:43: “The way out of Iran has been pretty much a one-way road.” 47:17: “I have the freedom to tell what I want to tell, to tell the stories that I think are untold and unknown, while carrying the life that I had in my chest.”

Reviewing Zadie Smith’s The Fraud for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Kirsch takes stock of Generation X as a literary phenomenon. He finds “Gen X lit” to be composed of two distinct waves, between which Smith is caught. The younger wave, including writers Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, and Tao Lin, has formed its ideas about art, culture, and society partly in opposition to predecessors like David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Dave Eggers—who claimed a great moral power for art—and partly in response to the younger millennials, who question whether art has any value at all. Kirsch is joined in this episode by Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss how Smith’s historical fiction operates within this literary lineage, why autofiction came to succeed the confessional memoirs of the Nineties, and what the novel form can do for us. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Come as You Are” Adam Kirsch’s review in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/come-as-you-are-kirsch/ “My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/ 6:01: “Instead of rushing up to the reader and giving them a bear hug and saying, ‘This is who I am, please love me,’ which I think is a sense that I often get from David Foster Wallace, these younger writers are a lot more complex and ironic and elusive.” 8:46: “Autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide.” 14:21: “Smith is writing about things that have come up in her fiction since the beginning—things like: Is it my job to be politically virtuous as a writer? Or am I supposed to be telling some other kind of truth? Is there some sort of artistic mission that is somehow removed from political virtue?” 18:44: “If you step back and make it an alternative reality—in this case, something in the past—you can make more of an effort to see all the way around the subject. And that’s something that Smith does very well in The Fraud.” 31:06: “So much of it is about this sort of solidness and resistance to getting involved in things … As we get older and assume different roles in life, something of that remains, the desire to be a sort of Bartleby and say no rather than yes—maybe that’s what Gen X will be remembered for.”

In his September cover story for Harper’s, Justin E. H. Smith sets out to define Generation X, that nameless cohort wedged between boomers and millennials whose members, in midlife, now face “an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us.” Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/ “Permanent Pandemic” Justin E. H. Smith’s piece from June 2022 about the endurance and overextension of COVID-19 digital infrastructure: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/permanent-pandemic-will-covid-controls-keep-controlling-us/ 2:24: “my ideal audience is Harper’s readers” 3:22: the relationship between art and politics 19:07: “as a teenager in the 1980s, there was a widespread sense that our era was kind of a weak aftershock of what our parents had experienced.” 27:04: “I think one way to think about this generation is a generation that came of age intellectually and emotionally and perhaps politically before the September 11 attacks.” 37:06: “If we think that the state of emergency requires of us that we stop thinking about art as an autonomous sphere of creation … once you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

Stephen Sondheim may have brought the cryptic crossword to America, but Richard E. Maltby Jr. brought it to Harper’s Magazine. The lyricist, director, and cryptic creator sat down with Harper’s and one of his checkers, Roddy Howland Jackson, to talk about the history of the puzzle, the declining use of dictionaries, and the rise in word puzzle fascination. After all, “What holds the country together is the diversity of different nerd populations.” Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s puzzles in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/sections/puzzle/ A link to uploads of Stephen Sondheim’s Crossword Puzzles: http://blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/putting-it-together.html Christopher Tayler on T.S. Eliot’s legacy: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/t-s-eliot-legacy-an-hallucinated-man-the-wasteland/ Ryan Ruby on Nabokov: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/ 4:01: Stephen Sondheim’s cryptic crossword legacy 7:51: The musicality of the cryptic 14:14: “If you’re going to do something that is tricky, you have to be fair.” 17:44: There’s no such thing as the English language.” 26:26: On getting stumped by your own puzzle 33:56: Modernist poetry’s puzzles and contemporary poetry’s…plain prose 38:09: Clues are “designed to be read wrong.” 39:56: Nabokov’s crossword legacy 47:06: The dictionary as Bildungsroman 55:26: Wordle! Spelling Bee! “As the language gets more and more debased, people seem to be more interested in language.” 1:02:41: A cryptic proposal

In the spring of 2001, Benjamin Hale’s six-year-old cousin went missing in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting one of the largest search-and-rescue missions in Arkansas history. Her miraculous discovery is a story in itself, but in a long Folio for the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hale also tells of the loss of another young girl in the same woods, decades prior, that seems eerily connected to his cousin’s. In conversation with Harper’s editor, Christopher Beha, Hale tackles questions of belief raised by a sequence of events so uncanny that they have prompted listeners—as well as those intimately involved—to search for other explanations. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Who Walks Always Beside You?” Benjamin Hale’s essay in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/who-walks-always-beside-you/ “The Last Distinction?” Benjamin Hale’s piece from August 2012 about monkeys: https://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/the-last-distinction-talking-to-the-animals/ 2:10: “I try to give the nutshell version and end up giving a story for an hour” 10:50: Having to live in order to save another 13:51: “My militant atheism was more informed by Carl Sagan” than Richard Dawkins 17:00: There are certain things I don’t understand, I will never understand, and I’m okay with that.” 20:54: The ethos of Arkansas 25:16: “Go to the water, go to the river” 30:42: On the 5,000 words that didn’t make the cut

In “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s story for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, a woman visits an old friend whose husband has recently died, only to discover that the nature of her friend’s grief is more chilling than she could have imagined. Oates is joined by her former student Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s, to discuss the connections between writing and teaching, and between writing and time. Revisiting stories by Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, and more, they consider the ghosts that haunt Oates’s story, the ghosts that haunt fiction, and the ghosts we would argue with if given one more chance. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s short story in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/joyce-carol-oates-the-return/?logged_in=true A complete collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories Short stories by John Updike: https://bookshop.org/p/books/trust-me-short-stories-john-updike/11077187?ean=9780449912171 Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Borges and I”: https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-gabriel-garcia-marquez/286337?ean=9780060883287 Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: https://bookshop.org/p/books/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/581281?ean=9780679723424 John Gardner and William Gass’s debate over literature: https://medium.com/the-william-h-gass-interviews/william-h-gass-interviewed-by-thomas-leclair-with-john-gardner-1979-e6de4d424107 Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” A Void by Georges Perec: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-void-georges-perec/623575?ean=9781567922967 James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.: https://bookshop.org/p/books/ulysses-james-joyce/1408797?ean=9780679722762 https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce/17762276?ean=9780142437346 4:00: Teaching allowed you to “open a door, step into that other world of people” 7:01: “It’s such a pleasure to read with other people” 10:38: On being a “puppet-like dummy” 14:06: “Not everyone is reading autofiction” 23:00: “I find myself going into a surreal world, because the lost person is still real to the deeper self” 25:21: Even in postmodernism, “there’s always that core of the lone beating heart” 31:03: “If I’m writing a novel, it stretches out to the horizon” 41:31: “If people came back from the dead, they would be the same people they were before”

In his August cover story for Harper’s Magazine, Jason Blakely argues that an overreliance on scientific authority, or “scientism,” only furthered the divide between those who adhered to and those who disobeyed public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of engendering legitimacy through dialogue, Blakely says, policymakers passed down “neutral” doctrines in the name of science and often at the expense of other social values. Blakely sat down with Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss his piece and its implications as we’ve gained hindsight on the pandemic. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Read “Doctor’s Orders,” Jason Blakely’s piece in the August edition of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/ Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: https://bookshop.org/p/books/we-built-reality-how-social-science-infiltrated-culture-politics-and-power-jason-blakely/13834194?ean=9780190087388&gclid=CjwKCAjwt52mBhB5EiwA05YKo3uXmyJK8wby9dq8EZ2OL-QjWDi1IHNN9iiqOVTd9recWt0-_anIkBoCKfgQAvD_BwE The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism-max-weber/11609371?ean=9780486427034 Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: https://bookshop.org/p/books/homo-sacer-sovereign-power-and-bare-life-giorgio-agamben/10913759?ean=9780804732185 4:32: How could these two opposite positions “shed light on our situation” 8:12: “Some very extreme human experiences happened at that time” 15:11: It’s the economy, stupid! 17:02: “Humans are a weird animal; we can become like the things that describe us” 23:20: “People have to be listened to in order to understand what’s guiding their life” 27:26: RFK Jr., and the blurred lines between anti-scientism and anti-science 37:09: “As daunting as it is to say politics must start from the bottom up, there’s no other way”

An estimated one out of every four Nigerians is a silent carrier of sickle cell disease, a hemoglobin disorder that can cause serious health problems and even death. With recent advancements in genetic testing, many Nigerians won’t take the risk of reproducing with other silent carriers or people with the disease. But, as Krithika Varagur reports, love doesn’t always accord with the Punnett square. Providing a snapshot of what our “genetic responsibility” could be as prenatal tests proliferate, Varagur sat down with Harper’s Magazine senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to discuss one couple’s story of public health, family, and most of all love in Lagos. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease,” Krithika Varagur’s story in the August edition of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/love-in-the-time-of-sickle-cell-disease/ Krithika Varagur’s book, “The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project”: https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-s-poetics-hippocrates-g-apostle/17272634?ean=9781950071036 Larissa MacFarquhar on the family court system: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/when-should-a-child-be-taken-from-his-parents Katherine Boo’s piece, “After Welfare”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/after-welfare Aristotle’s Poetics: https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-s-poetics-hippocrates-g-apostle/17272634?ean=9781950071036 3:35: The story started as “an aside my friend in Nigeria made” 8:10: “I am a romantic, and I don’t think I would write this story about people who don’t choose love” 13:25: “In a lot of traditions, unlimited choice is not the one way route to a good life” 14:52: There’s been a “revolution” in sickle cell treatment over a single generation 17:35: “Sickle cell is no longer a death sentence,” which complicates responsibility 22:30: A range of possibilities is “closer to our reality with genetic testing” than a yes/no 26:00: “Genetic responsibility shouldn’t turn into a genetic blame game” 34:25: The best story is one that would be powerful at the dinner table 37:55: To quote Carl Sagan, “If you want to invent an apple pie from scratch, you have to create the universe”

Christopher Carroll, the reviews editor at Harper’s, sits down with the former New Books columnist, Claire Messud, and her successor, Dan Piepenbring, to discuss the history, challenges, and pleasures of the storied column. The three critics go over their influences, the changes in publishing today, and, above all else, the great opportunity the column has given each writer to “go on a walk through your own mind.” Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Claire Messud’s “New Books” columns: https://harpers.org/author/clairemessud/ Claire Messud’s “New Books” column on Kurt Wolff, Phillipe Sands, and Tom Stoppard: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/02/reviews-endpapers-the-ratline-tom-stoppard-wolff-hermione-lee-phillippe-sands/ Chris Carroll’s “New Books” column for July: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/new-books-harvey-sachs-henry-bean-martin-cruz-smith/ Dan Piepenbring’s premier “New Books” column for August: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/dan-piepenbring-new-books/ Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 “The Decline of Book Reviewing” essay in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/1959/10/the-decline-of-book-reviewing/ Claire Messud’s novel, The Emperor’s Children: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-emperor-s-children-claire-messud/8718221?ean=9780307276667&gclid=CjwKCAjwhdWkBhBZEiwA1ibLmNLXWamvWO_e0R14ztZIVsKTiCbUXZ1kfgM81EXmTzIizusWfIz4ChoC2tgQAvD_BwE Dan Piepenbring’s book CHAOS: https://bookshop.org/p/books/chaos-charles-manson-the-cia-and-the-secret-history-of-the-sixties-tom-o-neill/113666 “New Books” columns, including Zadie Smith, Joshua Cohen, and John Leonard: https://harpers.org/sections/new-books/ Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Perchance to Dream” from April, 1996: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/04/perchance-to-dream/ 0:49: History of “New Books” coverage 3:38: What goes into choosing a book 7:36: Writing fiction as a critic 9:10: Changes in publishing today, “gone are those days” 13:59: “Centripetal vs. centrifugal forces” in book criticism 15:45: “If you care enough about what happens, then the book has already won you over.” 17:16: The critical pan, and why they’re less necessary now 29:10: The pleasure of connecting different titles, “serendipitously”

Braucherei, a form of healing used in Amish and Mennonite communities, might seem like an appropriately antiquated practice for a traditional culture. But the writer Rachel Yoder returned to her Mennonite roots to investigate the practice’s modern uses. Embodying all the contradictions and complexities of the much-discussed Amish community overall, Braucherei might be most significant because of its commitment to an ancient practice: someone honoring your pain. “What could be more valuable?” Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “In the Glimmer,” Rachel Yoder’s essay in the July issue of Harper’s The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts and Remedies 1:36: The origins of Braucherei 4:25: The “flattening” of Amish and Mennonite communities in media 14:20: An alternative solution to chronic pain: “pain itself can be so mysterious to modern medicine” 19:33: The power of it: “Being two bodies together in a place and caring for each other.” 26:59: The “evolution” of these communities 33:40: Being interested in “the mysterious” as a direct link to being a writer 35:52: Writers as a “secular clergy” 37:17: Goop-mystics on the Upper West Side and the Amish healer 43:04: Returning home

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, yet the nuclear panic of the 1960s feels like history. Jackson Lears, who served as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship during the Cold War, discusses how we have embraced the myth of technological prowess to detach ourselves from the horrors of war. “War is the most unpredictable, least controllable enterprise that human beings are capable of, and yet it’s the one to which we pay the most technological homage,” he writes. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Behind the Veil of Indifference,” Jackson Lears’s story in the July issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/behind-the-veil-of-indifference-lessons-from-a-nuclear-life 2:35: 9/11 security state and its doomsday undertones 6:40: The government has “given up on diplomacy” 10:25: Stalin was less demonized than Putin today 13:45: “The media is more like a stenographer for the security state now” 16:45: “There was genuinely more interest in, curiosity about, and public awareness of the danger of nuclear war in the 1960s.” 21:03: Faith in technology allows for a distance between the soldier and the target 29:05: “Algorithmic rationality” protects the soldier from the “dreaded human error” 37:38: The religiosity of the American military 46:15: Assange, Ellsberg, any hope for whistleblowers?

After the Titan submersible imploded last week, Matthew Gavin Frank’s journey to the depths with Karl Stanley, a friend of Stockton Rush’s, took on a new meaning. (Frank rode in Stanley’s sub in February of this year; his essay, in which Frank meditates on the eternal dangers and allure of deep-sea exploration, went online the day after the OceanGate sub went missing.) He discusses Stanley’s warnings to Rush, mass fear, and whether he regrets his experience. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Submersion Journalism,” Matthew Gavin Frank’s essay in the July issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/submersion-journalism-homemade-submarine-honduras-deep-sea-diving [8:46] Submersible enthusiasts ignore the all-encompassing danger of the sea [13:57] The psyche of a submersible enthusiast vs. the psyches of the rest of us [16:13] “There is a malign quality to this certain and particular breed of wonder.” [19:32] The Titan tapped into “a fuse of our greatest, fearful hits.” [20:31] How the countdown aspect made us “keenly aware of how much closer we are to our own deaths” [22:38] Joking out of love, joking out of spite, and roasting someone after they’ve died [25:53] The media’s endless quest for ratings [32:15] “If there is such a thing as an expert in risk assessment in one-off, uncertifiable, deep-sea manned vehicles, my resume is hard to beat.” [35:28] Going for a walk, as an antidote to submersible addiction

Exploring 2,000 feet below the sea’s surface is something only professionals—or billionaires—are able to do. However, the writer Matthew Gavin Frank found Karl Stanley, an eccentric submariner, to take him to the depths in a DIY sub off the coast of Honduras. Frank dived to the bottom of the sea against his own anxieties and explored not only bioluminescence and sharks, but also the sublimity of being “completely quieted” as a writer. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Read Frank’s essay, “Submersion Journalism”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/submersion-journalism-homemade-submarine-honduras-deep-sea-diving

Only the good die young—no, really. The historian and Harper’s Magazine contributor Daniel Bessner joins Violet Lucca to discuss the series of love fests for Henry Kissinger, and Christopher Hitchens’s “The Case Against Henry Kissinger,” an iconic two-part takedown of the statesman published in early 2001. You can read this masterwork—and everything else Harper’s has published since 1850—for only $16.97 a year: harpers.org/save The first part: https://harpers.org/archive/2001/02/the-case-against-henry-kissinger-part-one/ The second part: https://harpers.org/archive/2001/03/the-case-against-henry-kissinger-part-two/

It’s a familiar story, but one no less tragic because of its familiarity: a female author makes a huge splash with her debut novel, but despite her promise, the doors slam shut and she fades from view. Nancy Lemann, author of the cult novel Lives of the Saints (1985), discusses the experience of that career trajectory, as well as the recent, renewed enthusiasm for her writing in the pages of Harper’s, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. With candor and her distinctive sensibility, Lemann also lays out her myriad influences, from Walker Percy to Evelyn Waugh. Read Lemann’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/lion-and-daughters/

On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America called a strike. While this may seem far afield from an august magazine that specializes in literary nonfiction, the WGA’s demands are in-line with the mission of Harper’s: to uphold the rights and unique voices of writers. As the balance of power in Hollywood has shifted away from traditional studios and toward streaming companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, their plan for “disrupting the industry” is almost identical to what tech companies did to journalism in the aughts. Tom Bissell, a member of the WGA and a contributing editor to Harper’s, discusses the finer points of the strike, the mood on the picket line, and the false menace of A.I. Read Bissell’s latest essay for the magazine: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/meditations-marcus-aurelius-stoicism/

What is it about Tucker Carlson that unites the divergent ideologies of national conservatism? In July 2019, the writer and historian Thomas Meaney attended the first National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and other right-wing thinkers sought to expand on Donald Trump’s politics. One reason that Carlson is so effective, Meaney remarks, is his consistent attack on two common foes of national conservatism: neoliberalism, and the neoconservatism of the Bush years. “It’s the shared enemy rather than any kind of shared mission among themselves,” Meaney says. And while these shared enemies (and the National Conservatism Conference itself) are nothing new, they are newly relevant as Carlson relaunches his program on Twitter, declaring, “You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true.” ● Read Meaney’s report: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/ ● Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save ● [11:44] Why is Tucker Carlson such an exciting figure for national conservatism? ● [16:46] Nationalism is a big tent. What is the common root to all these groups? ● [20:29] The fractured nature of national conservatism in some ways reflects the internet ● [30:33] There’s a profound strain worse than xenophobia ● [37:39] How do national conservatives resolve the difference between what Trump says he’s doing and what he’s actually doing

Do non-indigenous people have a right to perform or practice indigenous rituals? There’s no single answer, as Native Americans are not a monolithic group with a single opinion on the matter. Sierra Crane Murdoch reports on a group of religious organizations that purportedly offer “authentic” ceremonies—run by people with dubious claims to indigenous heritage—and give their participants peyote, a medicinal plant considered a sacrament by many Native Americans. Read Murdoch’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/a-native-american-church-without-native-americans-take-the-medicine-to-the-white-man/ Take our podcast survey: harpers.org/survey Subscribe to the magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

“The reason it’s so hard to write a cruise piece is because of David Foster Wallace,” explains Lauren Oyler, a critic and the author of the novel Fake Accounts. In her recent Harper’s Magazine cover story, she takes on Wallace’s 1997 cruise essay, also published in Harper’s, as she describes her experience aboard the Goop cruise. “But I didn’t want it to just be a work of criticism reckoning with David Foster Wallace’s reputation,” Oyler adds. So her essay goes beyond reputation to discuss “male feminists,” class dynamics on cruise ships, and the tired nature of materialist critiques of wellness in order to—as she puts it in her essay—“unite irony and sincerity once and for all.” Oyler’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/ Wallace’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/01/shipping-out/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save ● [3:16] Some problems Oyler takes with David Foster Wallace ● [10:08] How the public understanding of David Foster Wallace reflects on the popular understanding of the essay as well as contemporary women’s literature ● [15:41] “The male feminist” and women’s writing in relation to David Foster Wallace ● [24:05] The confusing economic class of people who goes on cruises ● [31:51] On the tired nature of materialist critique of wellness (Goop) ● [46:40] Oyler’s unification of irony and sincerity ● [55:35] “Didn’t anything good happen to you on this cruise?”

Internet culture has made different types of neurodivergence—particularly anxiety—more visible than it has ever been. Michael W. Clune, author of White Out, offers an account of how difficult it was to understand what a panic attack was before mental illness was instantly diagnosable with Dr. Google. More remarkably, his essay eloquently and accurately expresses what the experience of a panic attack is like. He speaks about the process of writing this memoir, discovering Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and creating types of narratives about anxiety. Read Clune’s memoir: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-anatomy-of-panic/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Take a survey about the podcast: harpers.org/survey

In the May issue, Erik Baker and Hari Kunzru debunk the conservative and leftist visions of the “crisis of work.” Rather than automation and quiet quitting, the problem lies with the shared feeling that the American experiment is failing. The all-consuming entrepreneurial drive we’ve been taught will give our lives meaning has revealed itself to be false, as stagnation abounds in all aspects of work: technology hasn’t made us more productive, nor has greater effort made us richer. With an eye toward the historical, Baker and Kunzru consider the true roles that technology, ideology, resources, and finance play in contemporary work culture. Where Tomorrow Meets Today, by Hari Kunzru: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/where-tomorrow-meets-today/ The Age of the Crisis of Work, by Erik Baker: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-age-of-the-crisis-of-work-quiet-quitting-great-resignation/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

A little after the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, Lewis Lapham discusses three essays he wrote during the George W. Bush era. With fine prose and razor-edged contempt for war, lies, and complacent members of the commentariat, each article captures a distinctive historical moment. “The American Rome” (August 2001): https://harpers.org/archive/2001/08/the-american-rome/ “Cause for Dissent” (April 2003): https://harpers.org/archive/2003/04/cause-for-dissent/ “Going by the Book” (November 2006): https://harpers.org/archive/2006/11/going-by-the-book/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

The unprecedented has happened: a former president was arrested and charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records. Though some of Donald Trump’s supporters dismiss it as spectacle, others see it as the fulfillment of prophecy. Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of the new book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, discusses what this latest development means to Trump’s faithful flock, and his years of reporting on the right-wing extremists who have become the new center-right. Read Sharlet’s past reporting for Harper’s: https://harpers.org/author/jeffsharlet/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, explores modern pilgrimage from a secular perspective, attempting to comprehend the force of conviction that motivates someone to eschew all worldly possessions. Ann Sieben, a middle-aged pilgrim from New Jersey who has walked through conflict zones and remote wildernesses in winter with only the clothes on her back (and, more recently, a COVID pass), is Wells’s guide of sorts. In what ways does the pilgrim find freedom? What role does gender play in the journey? Can it be a metaphor—for motherhood, say, or for storytelling? When you steep yourself in narratives, whether of saints or the secular, the distance between reader and story gets thinner. You begin to inhabit stories in a new way. “I think that’s maybe the crux of the whole thing for me,” said Wells, of pilgrimage. “That it can be a gift to let go of the romantic story so you can, with clear eyes, encounter the embodied reality of your situation.” Read Wells’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/numinous-strangers-pilgrimage/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

What’s wrong with a little bit of climate optimism? Kyle Paoletta discusses how the pendulum of climate coverage swings between catastrophism and heavy-handed reassurance, and has a chilling effect on climate resilience. Like doom-scrolling, catastrophism can be paralyzing—and sweeping optimism can make an equally harmful impression on the public, whose trust in the media may erode as they experience the whiplash of moving from the doomsday to the sanguine with little explanation. Paoletta describes some red flags in climate journalism: the more global a story grows, and the more into the future it predicts, the more we readers ought to take it with a grain of salt. “The only real path I see is being very engaged with people’s day to day lives and the actual things that they’re facing,” Paoletta adds. His book on cities of the Southwest will be published by Pantheon in 2024. Read Paoletta’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/the-incredible-disappearing-doomsday-climate-catastrophists-new-york-times-climate-change-coverage/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Mass demonstrations have swept through Israel since January 4, when Yariv Lenin, Israel’s justice minister, announced proposed changes to the country’s judiciary. If enacted, this so-called “Supreme Court override” bill would limit the Court’s power, as well as the power of government legal counselors; in their place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition would be granted a majority on the committee that appoints judges, thereby limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to rule against the executive and strike down legislation. Why is this happening now, and how much is at stake? The most common explanation is that Netanyahu is (yet again) under indictment, and this judicial overhaul plan would undermine the people and institutions likely to put him in prison. But Bernard Avishai, a professor at Hebrew University and Dartmouth College, the author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic, and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, explains that this is “only half the truth,” and the full explanation is far more complex, requiring an understanding of a culture war between theocracy and democracy that has persisted since Israel’s founding. Read Avishai’s past essays for Harper’s: https://harpers.org/author/bernardavishai/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani

Anne Fadiman unpacks her latest essay, “Frog,” a 6,000-word piece about Bunky, her family’s African clawed frog. Although he was easy to care for, this “unpettable pet” raised a number of philosophical and ethical questions about pet ownership. For nearly two decades, Bunky lived inside a too-small aquarium on Fadiman’s kitchen counter, ribbitting for a mate that could never come. Fadiman probes her continued guilt over whether this animal had lived a decent life—after all, you can’t spay or neuter a pet frog. Suffused with this unease, Fadiman’s essay departs from the typically saccharine or sentimental approach to writing about pets and death, respectively. As she explains in this episode, “Death is hard to face, so it’s interesting to face. It’s a literary challenge. And not all deaths are the same.” Bunky’s departure lends lessons on writing, caretaking, connections, confinement—in a word, relationships. Read Fadiman’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/frog-what-happens-to-the-pets-that-happen-to-you/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani.

Christian Lorentzen sat through the entirety of United States v. Bertelsmann, et al., an antitrust case taken up by the Department of Justice to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. In this episode, he discusses the industry—born in the 1920s as part of a middlebrow revolution, and consolidating in the 1970s to ultimately become today’s Big Five publishing houses. “This corporate agglomeration seems almost inevitable,” Lorentzen explains. “If we lived under a different intellectual property regime and a different system that wasn’t capitalism, maybe things would be different.” But does lack of competition between publishing houses really harm authors? This is the question at the heart of the trial and Lorentzen’s argument. Though the government ultimately blocked the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the trial made public some questionable practices of the Big Five, such as how publishers can prevent their imprints from upping bids against one another. For better or worse, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins are here to stay, influencing all parts of the world of books—what readers read, and what writers create for the mass market. Read Lorentzen’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/at-random-simon-and-schuster-bertelsmann-merger-trial-penguin-random-house/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Caitlin Chandler talks to Violet Lucca about the nature and purpose of the largely unremarked U.S. military presence in Niger. They discuss the history of the conflict in Niger and the way that U.S., European, and Russian interventions in the region have exacerbated the problems left behind by colonial borders. Chandler explains what the U.S. military’s increased reliance on remote warfare after the Iraq War has meant for Nigeriens. She also shares the difficulties of reporting the piece, including the need to hire an armed guard to travel outside the capital. Chandler’s letter appeared in the December 2022 issue. Read Chandler’s report: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/niger-the-next-frontier-in-the-war-on-terror/ Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

“Every New Yorker deserves dignity, and we are demonstrating that this is possible,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams in May of 2022, shortly after rolling out an initiative to remove homeless encampments throughout the five boroughs. In the following months, Adams implemented other policies—including involuntary hospitalizations for the mentally ill and/or homeless—that granted more power to police and less to the unhoused. However, as Wes Enzinna reports in the February issue, criminalization isn’t the only solution. In 2020, in Philadelphia, unhoused activists squatted in vacated properties, and eventually created a land trust that provided stable housing to dozens of people in need. This unconventional solution defied conservative-liberal thinking, which for decades has been caught in an impasse over whether to criminalize homelessness or boost public benefits. Enzinna, author of a forthcoming book about an Oakland tent city, discusses the replicability of the Philadelphia experiment—and the current state of homelessness discourse, which has increasingly (and inaccurately) focused on mental illness and addiction over economic factors. Read Enzinna’s reporting on Philadelphia in the February issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/02/no-vacancy-homelessness-land-trust-homes-philadelphia/ Enzinna on the Minneapolis Sheraton: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/the-sanctuary-sheraton-minneapolis/ Enzinna on shack living: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/gimme-shelter-ghost-ship-fire-san-francisco/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Google’s domination of internet search is a fact of life. What’s less apparent—if you don’t work in publishing or advertising—is Google’s control of internet ad sales. It’s estimated that the company pulls in nearly 30 percent of all digital advertising dollars. The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that it “abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches.” In the past, the determinant for antitrust laws is whether or not anticompetitive practices have raised prices for consumers; here, publishers and advertisers have been harmed, which has led to a different—but arguably more malicious—impact on the public. Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, talks through this landmark case. Read Lynn’s story from 2020: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Michael Robbins explores the shape that apocalyptic thought has taken in American Christianity (despite its slim textual basis) and in contemporary secular contexts like climate catastrophe. Robbins also draws on systems analysis to bring out the structural factors that could be pushing us to the edge of apocalypse. He discloses his own attitude, which is neither optimistic nor defeatist, but rather informed by religious and leftist commitments, which in his view share a “structure of feeling.” Read Robbins’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/apocalypse-nowish/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Violet Lucca talks to Sasha Frere-Jones about the signs and symptoms of audiophilia. Frere-Jones explains how Spotify Wrapped, yearly best-ofs, and other attempts to quantify and rank music have disfigured the listening experience. He criticizes the assumption underlying audiophilia: that there is a Platonic ideal of what an album is supposed to sound like. Instead, Frere-Jones compares audiophilia to addiction in its obsession with re-creating a certain prior experience—in this case, a certain sound—to the detriment of new experiences. The podcast ends on a personal note, as Frere-Jones reflects on his need for vibey spaces during the pandemic. Read “Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon,” which appears in the December issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/corner-club-cathedral-cocoon-audiophilia-and-its-discontents/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: https://harpers.org/save

Kate DiCamillo—the author of Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Beatryce Prophecy, and many other novels—speaks with Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Beha about discovering her vocation in children’s literature. DiCamillo discusses how her writing for children is shaped by a sense of responsibility toward them, and what children’s literature can offer to adults. Rather than trading on double entendres and other devices that enliven children’s stories for the parent reading at the bedside, DiCamillo recovers a child’s sense of magic for adult readers—one that isn’t displaced into a realm of fantasy. Read “On a Winter’s Night”: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/on-a-winters-night-kate-dicamillo/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.79: harpers.org/save

Clare Bucknell talks to Violet Lucca about Giacomo Casanova, the man whose surname is synonymous with romance. Bucknell discusses the difficulty of separating fact from self-invention in his memoir, Histoire de ma vie. She identifies the novelistic tropes that eighteenth-century readers would have recognized in Casanova’s writing and discusses whether the way the Histoire blurs genres prefigures autofiction. Bucknell does not avoid the “challenge of Casanova” and disentangles the ways that Casanova’s readers have tried to apply ethical judgment to the simultaneously entertaining and alienating narration of his life. Bucknell’s review of Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova by Leo Damrosch appears in the November issue. Read Bucknell’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/the-thoughtful-prick-adventurer-the-life-and-times-of-giacomo-casanova-leo-damrosch/ Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

Ryan Ruby talks to Violet Lucca about Vladimir Nabokov’s Berlin period. He describes seeing Berlin through Nabokov’s eyes and noticing the quotidian texture of the city in the author’s novels from this period. He recalls the birth of his own son, in the same neighborhood where Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, was born, and learning to appreciate Nabokov’s non-linear notion of time, a notion that Ruby believes can help us consecrate everyday life, not just life’s “milestones.” The conversation ends with Ruby’s defense of Lolita, which he argues intentionally re-creates the way art can seduce the reader into excusing immorality. Read Ruby’s memoir: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

It’s expensive to run for any elected office—something that’s reflected in the highly educated, wealthy individuals who make up most of our representatives. Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, joins Violet Lucca to discuss the potential outcome of the midterm elections. With voting, abortion, and the economy on the line, will the “blue wave”—itself a reductive term—be reversed? They discuss outsider candidates, issues impacting rural voters, and Smarsh’s own experience of being asked to run for Senate—and why she decided not to. Read Smarsh’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/in-the-running-sarah-smarsh-almost-running-for-office-kansas/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Stephanie Hou.

Elizabeth Barber and Matt Johnson speak to Violet Lucca about the politics and methods of factory farming. Barber and Johnson offer insights into the subject from the perspective of a not entirely neutral observer and a criminally liable activist, respectively. Barber discusses the difficulties of writing about a subject that intrudes uncomfortably on people’s lifestyles and routines, while Johnson notes the difficulty of attracting media attention to the subject at all. They both discuss what ethical consumption means for them. “Standing Trial” appears in the October issue; read it here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/10/standing-trial-should-we-care-about-animal-liberation-ag-gag-laws-iowa-slaughterhouse/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: www.harpers.org/save

Charlotte Shane speaks to Violet Lucca about the state of abortion rights in post-Dobbs America. Shane expresses her frustrations with pro-choice arguments based on the right to privacy or on medical prudence. Instead, she argues that the right to abortion follows from the principle of bodily autonomy. Shane also touches on the difficulty of writing about abortion in an authoritative but not impersonal tone. “The Right to Not Be Pregnant” appears in the October issue; read it here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/10/the-right-to-not-be-pregnant-asserting-an-essential-right/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani. Get an entire year of Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Claire-Louise Bennett speaks to Violet Lucca about Louise Bourgeois’s work and the process of free association she chose to document her experience of it. Bennett discusses what it means to regiment pain—the persistent subject of Bourgeois’s work, her “business”—to the demands of form in writing. She follows other threads of association that weave together the artist’s life and her own. Bennett’s review of Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child and The Artist’s Studio: A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020 appears in the September issue. Read it here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/louise-bourgeois-the-artists-studio-a-formal-feeling/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Madeleine Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

There are many monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate and politician who founded the DeBeers Company, around Cape Town, South Africa. These statues have been vandalized and reconstituted, respectively, by his detractors and supporters—the latter camp embedded a GPS device inside concrete within a replacement for a Rhodes statue’s decapitated head. In the December 2021 issue, Hedley Twidle, a professor at the University of Cape Town who teaches Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose” every semester, adopted a unique approach to this ongoing battle. In this episode, Twidle discusses the physical and political landscape that remains from Rhodes’s era, the frustrations of a long-unresolved history, and new approaches to writing and thinking about intergenerational traumas. Read Twidle’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/to-spite-his-face-what-happened-to-cecil-rhodes-statue-nose/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Only 13 percent of Americans receive treatment for substance abuse disorder. The reasons for this alarming gap are, like the causes of addiction itself, multifarious. In West Virginia, the state hardest-hit by the opioid epidemic—where the number of deaths outpaces births—four people who struggled with long-term addiction underwent an experimental procedure in which a microchip was implanted to deliver electrical shocks to the part of the brain involved with processing desire, motivation, and reinforcement. For the September issue, Zachary Siegel, himself a recovered opioid addict, spoke with two participants from the surgical trial. In this episode, Siegel and host Violet Lucca discuss the shortcomings of abstinence-only treatment, received wisdom about sobriety and relapse, issues raised by deep-brain stimulation, the lack of urgency around the opioid crisis, and much more. Read Siegel’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/can-a-brain-implant-treat-drug-addiction-neurostimulation/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani.

“Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, a man whose afterlife on YouTube has come to define the entirety of his decades-long career. Though Hitchens always pilloried the existence of a higher power and those who believed in one, his earlier output—defined by his elite education, Marxism, and savvy deployments of Beltway gossip—seems at odds with his later years as a road-show atheist. In this episode, Christian Lorentzen, a freelance critic who reviewed a collection of Hitchens’s writings from the Nineties for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Maureen Tkacik, a Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, and Luke Savage, a staff writer at Jacobin and the author of The Dead Center, reflect on the evolution of Hitchens’s style as a writer, thinker, and speaker. Read Lorentzen’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/the-enemy-of-promise-christopher-hitchens/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Ian Mantgani

In August 2021, Fred Bahnson accompanied Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk dedicated to preserving religious texts in zones of conflict, to Gao, Mali. One year later, Bahnson and Stewart reflect on their journey in terms both spiritual and tangible. Stewart tells the story of his life’s work and details the importance of digitizing texts—regardless of faith—and of forming human connections across religious boundaries to overcome historical bias and inaccuracy. Bahnson and Stewart delve into their shared interest in the role of memory in a digital world and the dangers that arise when we undervalue listening. Read Bahnson’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/the-quest-to-save-ancient-manuscripts-gao-mali/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum.

Daniel Bessner, author and professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington, sits down with web editor Violet Lucca to discuss his Harper’s Magazine cover story about the future of the United States and its place in the world during an era of shrinking economic and material might. Bessner suggests a path forward that aims to be practical at the cost of optimism, at a moment when the individual seems to lack any semblance of political agency. Adopting the language of Marx, he posits that “we might be in the era of mutual ruin,” and that a shift toward military and political restraint—rather than misguided liberal interventionism—must begin with a brutally honest diagnosis of the state of the world before any solutions can take shape. Read Bessner’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/07/what-comes-after-the-american-century/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani.

Although “tree poaching” sounds like a niche, victimless crime, this multibillion-dollar illicit trade contributes to climate change in vulnerable parts of the world and, more often than not, harms humans and animals alike. Environmental scientists and advocates have long understood the potential that lies in tree DNA but have lacked the resources to utilize it. Now, with the assistance of volunteers, researchers are assembling a database that can match stolen wood to stumps. Lauren Markham joins Violet Lucca to discuss her report on black market lumber, the perils of viewing human life as separate from the rest of the natural world, and the dire economic conditions that motivate tree thieves. Read Markham’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/tree-sleuths-how-dna-is-transforming-the-fight-against-illegal-logging/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani.

We’ve all been scammed in some way. Yet when we hear stories about somebody else getting taken, our knee-jerk reaction is to ridicule their gullibility and deride them for not seeing through the lie. In believing that it’s the victims and not the grifters who err, Hannah Zeavin writes, “We do what Americans do best: project the demands of a vulnerable age onto its casualties.” As anyone who has been defrauded can tell you, this bias is reflected in the limited channels for official recourse: unless you were scammed in a very particular way, the police or your bank will pass it off as your fault. Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Zeavin about her essay, the tension between the need for and abuse of trust, how fraud reflects weaknesses in our social and economic systems, and how thinking differently about scams could make a better world possible. Read Zeavin’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/07/the-victim-cloud-gullibility-in-the-golden-age-of-scams/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

It sounds so romantic: fighters who answered President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for help and traveled halfway around the world to uphold democracy in Ukraine. However, as Seth Harp reports in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, there is no real Ukrainian foreign legion. Harp, who traveled to the war-torn nation in March and stayed through all of April, found that these would-be freedom fighters were untrained, unorganized, and unaffiliated; though units of soldiers (mostly older American or British veterans) exist now, they don’t match the numbers touted by the Ukrainian government or international media. In this episode, Harp—himself a veteran—describes what separates this conflict from other wars that have taken place over the past twenty years, the benefits that can be reaped from claiming a false foreign legion, and what it’s like to get high in a war zone.

Ottessa Moshfegh (Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation) discusses her latest novel, Lapvona. Born out of the seclusion of the pandemic, Lapvona is a work whose perspective-shifting, fable-like narration and medieval setting differ from much of the author’s previous work. During the conversation, Moshfegh deconstructs her characters and goes beyond the text at hand to address her writing more broadly, exploring the importance of tone in building genre and systems of information, and her relationship with the grotesque. Read an adapted excerpt of Lapvona: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/ina-ottessa-moshfegh-lapvona/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani.

It has always been difficult to parse the experience of war. Following two decades of “forever wars” in the Middle East and an accompanying surfeit of information, that challenge has deepened for reporters. Yet the artful, mournful, and devastating images photojournalist Nicole Tung has sent back from Ukraine can break through the din of struggle—if you simply take the time to look closely. Tung, who has shot four photo essays for Harper’s Magazine—two in print, and two online—joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss representation’s ethical complexity. How can an outsider portray a conflict they aren’t part of? How can difficult images preserve respect for those involved? When does bracing shock become deadening sensationalism? And how has Tung’s experience in war zones informed her balance of art and journalism? See Tung’s photo essays: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/the-matter-of-war-ukraine-kharkiv-bucha-kyiv/ https://harpers.org/archive/2022/05/a-way-out-of-irpin-ukraine-war-russia-photos/ https://harpers.org/archive/2022/04/days-at-war-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-bucha-kyiv-odesa-kharkiv-trostyanets/ https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/the-battle-for-kyiv-ukraine-photo-essay-nicole-tung/

For over a century, carnivals have provided a unique mix of seedy, woozy, all-American fun. Where else can you knock down milk bottles for prizes, see a man breathe fire, and ride the Tilt-a-Whirl until you throw up fried Oreos? But in a world where entertainment options are vast, what motivates the performers who take on the backbreaking labor and constant travel of the carnival life? In the May issue, author and podcaster David Hill hits the road with the World of Wonders sideshow, a traveling band of sword-swallowers, knife-throwers, and escape artists who remain devoted to the carnival lifestyle, even though their talents might bring them greater fame or riches on TikTok. He joins web editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of his carny ancestors, the history of the midway, and the pleasures of suspending our cynicism and enjoying the hustle, even if that involves spending five bucks to win a teddy bear worth five cents. Read Hill’s article about World of Wonders, the oldest traveling sideshow in the United States: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/05/down-the-hatch-on-the-road-with-the-last-american-carnival-sideshow/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Humanity has long sought to literally and metaphorically banish darkness. But as poet and novelist Suzannah Showler writes in the May issue, succeeding in that aim poses great spiritual and biological risk. Showler describes her journey to Grasslands National Park, the darkest place in Canada, to commune with obscurity. Her essay examines the cultural and philosophical history of light and darkness, as well as the burgeoning movement to reclaim the night. What Showler finds in the sky is more intricate than just a beautiful starscape: it’s a confrontation with herself and what lies far beyond. She joins web editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of the human instinct to colonize the night, the possibilities for global health and happiness offered by the fight against light pollution, and the idea that chasing away darkness isn’t the only path to illumination. Read Showler’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/05/in-the-land-of-living-skies-reacquainting-ourselves-with-the-night/

Although video porn, webcams, and teledildonics have existed for decades, rapid advancements in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics mean that a new era of digisexuality is—please forgive us—coming. In the May issue, Sam Lipsyte explores the “warm, sticky horse carcass” of technological intimacy with a trip to the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas, where he meets a sex robot named Emma, as well as two scholars who’ve coined the term digisexuality, a new type of identity. He joins web editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of technology’s potential to both offer succor and create stupor, the ethical questions raised by child sexbots and non-consenting AIs, and how the future of sexuality might be monetized by tech moguls. Read Lipsyte’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/05/ghosting-the-machine-humans-robots-and-the-new-sexual-frontier-sam-lipsyte/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Although Thomas Edison is usually credited with the invention of the movie camera, as with so much surrounding the Wizard of Menlo Park, the truth is more complicated. Louis Le Prince, a French-born artist and inventor, made a short film six years before Edison, but mysteriously disappeared before he could get a patent for the device he used to shoot it. In the April issue, Nat Segnit reviews Paul Fischer’s The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, a book that focuses on Le Prince’s life and his contributions to cinematic history. Segnit joins web editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of film’s contested origins and its rise and fall as the preeminent popular medium. In addition to possibly making the first film, Le Prince was unique among cinematic pioneers in seeing film as more than a gimmick or a product—he understood film’s cultural value, its capacity to unite audiences. Segnit and Lucca discuss this “communal swoon,” a rapture in the presence of film’s massive, unpausable images, and debate whether different forms of moving pictures, from magic lanterns to television to smartphones, have brought more isolation than interconnectedness. They also discuss the nature of invention—whether advances are more often the product of single, heroic creators or of smaller contributions by countless sources, and hypothesize about how the history of Hollywood would have been different had Le Prince lived. Read Segnit’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/04/who-killed-louis-le-prince-on-the-forgotten-father-of-film/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Modern American secessionist movements are commonly perceived as buffoonish or quixotic. Yet when their members take up arms after failing to achieve independence by electoral means—and openly state that they have no other recourse than violence—they cannot be so easily dismissed. James Pogue joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss his reporting from the proposed State of Jefferson, a swath of counties in northern California and southern Oregon that wish to become the 51st state. Since the early 1940s, the Jeffersonians, united by a shared rural identity centered on mining and logging, have agitated for independence in search of better representation and infrastructure. During the COVID-19 pandemic, government health policies and a wave of new arrivals who bought second homes in the area, driving up rents, led many residents to conclude that their way of life was under threat. Their quest to recall three county board members was mocked in the media and treated as illegitimate, which only heightened their sense of persecution, leading many to view violence as the only alternative. Pogue and Lucca discuss how the situation in Redding reveals problems in American democracy, exacerbated by the end of local newspapers and the rise of social media. They also look towards the future: What’s next for the State of Jefferson, and will their recall efforts become a model for others? Read Pogue’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/04/notes-on-the-state-of-jefferson-secession-northern-california/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Benjamin Kunkel, a novelist and co-founder of n+1, joins Violet Lucca to discuss his review of Richard Zenith’s biography of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa, a Portuguese author who was “too faithful to his imagination to spoil it by fraternizing with the actual world,” wrote poetry attributed to an array of heteronyms—elaborate, invented personalities who each possessed a singular background and point of view. Together Kunkel and Lucca examine Pessoa’s body of work, and how his method of writing (and living) oddly echoes contemporary life. Read Kunkel’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/11/i-multiplied-myself-fernando-pessoa/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

There’s nothing new about the desire to control our dreams. After all, these highly subjective, intense, yet easily forgettable nighttime experiences have offered artists and spiritual leaders insights to their respective professions throughout history. In the April issue, Michael W. Clune writes about the profound insights offered by the Dormio, a device that offers users the opportunity to influence the content of their dreams. Its lead designer, Adam Haar Horowitz, hopes to create a community of dreamers Clune joins web editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of the relationship between dreams and the brain’s capacity for creativity and feeling, as well as how embracing subjectivity can open new ground for dream research. Along the way, they touch on psychedelics and addiction and imagine the possibilities for communities and rituals built around “dream incubation” as well as the lasting effects of Clune’s experiences with this new kind of dream machine.

Of all the manifestations of love described in philosophy, eros—the sensual, the passionate—is often the most exalted. But in its power to override rational and ethical impulses, eros can become monstrous, throwing you into a cycle of misery in which you’re impervious to common sense. Philosopher Agnes Callard, author of Aspiration, joins web editor Violet Lucca for a cathartic conversation about her own encounters with eros and the feasibility of ethical erotic relationships. Callard and Lucca trace depictions of eros through history, from Plato to modern novels, and reevaluate the concepts of civility and loneliness. They also explore the possibilities and strictures of writing about eros: the space it creates for reflection, the illusory fulfillment of depictions of sex, and whether it’s ever possible to treat the topic with anything approaching objectivity. Read Callard’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/the-eros-monster-agnes-callard/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

How do birds make breakneck turns in perfect formation as they soar thousands of feet above the ground? Nobody knows. But the answer could allow us to better comprehend numerous natural systems, from subatomic particles to schools of fish to ourselves. In the March issue, Vanessa Gregory writes about a group of physicists investigating a similar mystery: how certain species of fireflies synchronize their flashing as part of an elaborate mating ritual. Gregory joins web editor Violet Lucca to delve into the myriad implications of complexity science, the history and methodology of firefly research, and whether systems in nature communicate in ways that don’t remotely resemble how humans do. Read Gregory’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/bright-flight-fireflies-collective-behavior-blink/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Anyone who has cracked a smartphone screen or needed to replace a failing laptop battery knows the frustration that awaits. Devices that are vital to our daily lives are nearly impossible to fix ourselves, and manufacturer repairs are often so expensive that it makes more sense to trash it and buy a new one. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her article in the March 2022 issue on the Right to Repair movement, which seeks to empower users to fix ailing devices rather than consign them to the trash heap. Dickinson and Lucca discuss the scope of the problem, which pertains to everything from smartwatches to dishwashers to tractors, and how corporations have progressed from ceasing to publish technical manuals to using nonstandard parts that render their products impenetrable black boxes. They delve into the environmental impact of these corporate decisions and trace the progress of the Right to Repair movement from small online tinkerer communities to federal legislation and executive orders. All the while, Evitts Dickinson and Lucca plumb some of the deepest issues raised by the movement, including the role consumer behavior played in creating the current situation and the very nature of ownership. Read Evitts Dickinson’s annotation: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/your-own-devices-right-to-repair-movement-ifixit/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

It’s often thought that world-famous athletes hype themselves up into a fit of frenzy or descend into a state of serene calm in order to excel in front of huge crowds. But many athletes can’t help but hear one voice inside their heads—that of their coach, who seems to guide them every step of the way. Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann spent two years interviewing elite athletes about what went through their heads while competing, and she joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her findings. Lucca and Luhrmann discuss the lingering effects for athletes who cede internal authority, as well as how others groups of people—such as evangelicals and those with schizophrenia—experience the voices that guide or threaten them. These relationships are often complex, and Lucca and Luhrmann explore the idea that hearing voices isn’t necessarily cause for alarm, but a part of our rich mental landscape that often goes undiscussed. By understanding how culture and human intention affect our interior world, we may come to a deeper understanding of the mind. Read Lurhmann’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/voice-lessons-how-coaches-get-in-athletes-heads This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Nicolas Cage—who draws inspiration from Elvis, superhero Luke Cage, Edgar Allen Poe, and others—has an unmistakable dramatic style that has garnered a cult following. Dan Piepenbring joins web editor Violet Lucca to analyze Cage’s “neo-shamanic” acting, how he stands apart from other actors who revel in bigness (aka hams), and how he has used the press to cultivate eccentricity and has made himself into something more interesting than, yet inseparable from, the characters he plays. Their discussion stretches across Cage’s massive filmography, from David Lynch’s Wild at Heart to Nick Powell’s Outcast, a direct-to-streaming release. Read Piepenbring’s review:

The broad strokes of the Jim Crow South are well-known: the laws, the cruelty, and the protest movements that ultimately brought the era to an end. But as Adolph Reed Jr. argues, less attention is paid to the quotidian details of everyday life within that socio-economic system. Reed, whose book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is excerpted in the February issue, joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss his attempt to access historical truth through his own memory, and the implications of different ways of understanding America’s racial history. Reed and Lucca explore questions related to recent efforts to make slavery the essential formative black American experience, and Reed advocates for the preservation of the open-endedness of history—of seeking to understand the past as it was, rather than as a source of inspiration or moral superiority. Read the excerpt of The South: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/separate-and-unequal-the-south-jim-crow-and-its-afterlives-adolph-reed-jr/ Class Matters podcast: https://classmatterspodcast.org/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Permitless carry is the law in more than twenty states, even though it’s unpopular with the vast majority of gun owners. Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her latest report on the small, vocal groups of gun activists who are agitating to expand this right. The two also break down the false ideas that shape gun legislation in the U.S.—of the typical gun owner, a good guy with a gun, and of a purer past of gun ownership—along with an upcoming Supreme Court case that could lead to more armed people than ever before. Read Monroe’s cover story: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/free-country-permitless-carry-new-guns-rights-extremism/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Jessica Camille Aguirre joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss “Another Green World,” her piece in the February issue that explores a new experiment inside the infamous Biosphere 2 facility near Tucson, Arizona. Together, they discuss the relationship between climate change, the desire to travel in space, and a failure to confront the lingering colonialist tendency to control and exploit earth’s natural resources until they are exhausted. Does the impetus to find another home for humanity betray a discomfort with our ecological interdependence? Is it an attempt to absolve ourselves for harming the planet when there’s still time to make it livable again? Issues around science and climate reporting are also discussed. Read Aguirre’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/biosphere-2-ecosystem-space-exploration-another-green-world This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss Findings, one of the most iconic sections of the magazine, and his recent short story, “An Errand.” Together, they explore his process for finding Findings and carefully juxtaposing recent scientific studies to form an alternately juvenile and highbrow comedic chronicle. They also delve into the world of Old Delhi to examine Kroll-Zaidi’s short story from the January issue, which finds a brother and sister on a quest to find a seller of hearts. They discuss the ways in which the story blends contemporary reality with folklore, and how Kroll-Zaidi’s work on Findings informs his fiction. Findings: https://harpers.org/sections/findings/ “An Errand”: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/an-errand-rafil-kroll-zaidi/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

This year, resolve to think differently about habit. Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, discusses the spiritual, cognitive, and creative benefits of embracing routine in an increasingly automated world. O’Gieblyn dispenses with narrow notions of life hacking and argues that habits can free us from rigid algorithms to create space for contemplation. Routine doesn’t have to mean killing all spontaneity, but instead can function as a bulwark against mindlessness.

What does advice from the world’s most notorious consulting firm look like? Ian MacDougall discusses the McKinsey mystique, its work culture, the inner workings of its project to reduce violence at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, and how the firm has shaped American capitalism over nine decades. You can read MacDougall’s annotation of one of McKinsey’s PowerPoint slides, created for the Rikers Island project—along with the entire presentation—here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/a-firm-hand-mckinsey-goes-to-rikers-island This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Writer Scott Sayare discusses his most recent piece for Harper’s Magazine, which addresses what little we know for certain about our ability to smell, as well as the secretive world of the fragrance industry and our tendency to take olfaction for granted. Sayare also explains new methods of helping those who’ve lost their ability to smell, a common lingering effect of COVID-19.

Critic and novelist Lauren Oyler discusses her conflicted feelings about the work of W. G. Sebald, an author whose influence and place in the canon is well established. Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca and Oyler talk through Sebald’s similarities to contemporary novelists, his feather-ruffling academic career, and what Carole Angier missed in her new Sebald biography, Speak, Silence. Read Oyler’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/desperately-seeking-sebald-lauren-oyler-speak-silence-carole-angier/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Will Self, author of Umbrella, How the Dead Live, and a new memoir, Will, discusses his provocative argument that trauma—in literary, historical, and cultural criticism—is wildly overused and misapplied. Rather than it being a phenomenon that has persisted throughout human history, Self contends that it is a product of modernity; while past injustices and injurious experience (war, slavery, abuse) may seem to have produced trauma-like symptoms, we have no way of judging whether they resemble trauma as we now conceive of it. Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca talks through the finer points of Self’s thesis. Read Self’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/a-posthumous-shock-trauma-studies-modernity-how-everything-became-trauma/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is an expatriate writer and a former Harper’s Magazine Easy Chair columnist. He joins editor in chief Christopher Beha to discuss his essay, “Continental Divide,” in which Williams travels to Leukerbad, Switzerland, to retrace James Baldwin’s journey in “Stranger in the Village.” The two reflect on the rewarding perspectives gained from living outside one’s home country, and survey the souring relationship between the United States and France. Read Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”: https://harpers.org/archive/1953/10/stranger-in-the-village/ Read Williams’s “Continental Divide”: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/continental-divide-stranger-in-the-village/ Read Williams’s final column for Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/under-the-surface

Rachel Riederer joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss Riederer’s November cover story about the potential for military conflict in space. At present, there is no common understanding of what constitutes an act of war in space, nor are there clear guidelines for private companies entering orbit. In this episode of the podcast, Riederer and Lucca parse these inadequacies, the vulnerabilities of military and commercial satellites, recent attempts to update the rules that govern space, and the question of whether the Pentagon is inflating these threats. Read Riederer’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/11/ad-astra-the-coming-battle-over-space/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Sierra Crane Murdoch, author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, discusses her latest essay for Harper’s Magazine, which asks a simple yet provocative question: What makes a good mother? Murdoch, a childless white woman, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about the process of affirming to the state her belief that her friend and the subject of her book Lissa Yellow Bird, a Native woman, would make a good foster parent. Murdoch and Lucca discuss the colonized notions that haunt not only foster care but also journalism, and how, for nonwhite women, surviving trauma can be viewed as a liability rather than resiliency.

Memoirist and critic Vivian Gornick joins Violet Lucca to discuss Gornick’s essay “Put on the Diamonds” with novelist Sigrid Nunez, whose review of Italo Svevo’s A Very Old Man also runs in the October issue. Together Gornick and Nunez consider the inescapable evil that is humiliation; the unevenness of power; its connections to vulnerability and vengefulness; and the dire need to think well of ourselves. Later they unpack the concept of “sturdiness” in one’s voice and discover the lines in storytelling through a surrogated versus an unsurrogated self. Read Gornick’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/put-on-the-diamonds-notes-on-humiliation-vivian-gornick/ Read Nunez’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/a-very-old-man-italo-svevo/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

In this episode of the podcast, Lisa Wells, the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, discusses her latest report for Harper’s Magazine, “To Be a Field of Poppies,” with Ann Neumann, the author of The Good Death, and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. The trio’s discussion of death is profound and unorthodox, yet humor-filled as well. Wells lays out the process of natural organic reduction (NOR), Neumann delves into society’s fascination with the dead rather than the dying, and Lucca opens a conversation about the role of capitalism in the funeral industry. This episode is unquestionably life-affirming. Read Wells’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/to-be-a-field-of-poppies-natural-organic-reduction-composting-corpse/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Joseph Bernstein, senior reporter at Buzzfeed and 2021 Nieman Fellow, joins Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca to discuss “Bad News,” the cover story of the September issue. Together they explore the misconceptions surrounding disinformation; the mythical power of digital advertising according to Big Tech; the idea that social media itself has the capability to slow the spread of fake news; and the role that preexisting social conditions play in which misinformation goes viral. Read Bernstein’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Andrew Quilty is a photographer and reporter who has lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, since 2013. In “When the Raids Came,” his article for the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Quilty follows the story of one family in rural Wardak province over nearly twenty years of war, offering a holistic view of the U.S. military’s impact. Quilty joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to survey Afghanistan’s transition to Taliban control; its media ecosystem; the cultural factors that are often ignored by outside analysts; and the role that the international community—not just the U.S. military—has played in reshaping the country and fostering rampant corruption. Read Quilty’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/when-the-raids-came-afghanistan-war-toll-on-one-afghan-family/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

In the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Wyatt Mason makes the startling claim that the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Septology, a challenging and experimental work about the chaos of interiority and the fragmented nature of the self, begins a fresh chapter in the development of the novel: “With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.” In this episode of the podcast, Mason and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca unpack what exactly makes Fosse’s work so innovative. They situate Septology within the larger trajectory of literary history, comparing its peculiar narrative structure to the strategies that writers like Woolf and Nabokov developed for representing interiority. Their discussion ranges from Buddhism to Darwin’s little-known contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace as they explore Fosse’s unique approach to concretizing the spiritual aspect of human existence; the mystery of personal identity; and the place of emotions in the reader’s experience of literature. Read Mason’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/jon-fosse-septology/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

No other twentieth-century political philosopher dominated Trump-era discourse like Hannah Arendt. In the mainstream and on the fringe, writers quoted Arendt with abandon, signaling again and again to their baffled readers that she was the thinker best equipped to help us understand Trump’s strange ascent and imminent destruction of democracy. Amid the endless cavalcade of sloppy think pieces, Arendt’s ideas lacked crucial context. “Men in Dark Times,” Rebecca Panovka’s essay in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, argues that these articles obscured “the way his lies operated, and what they were: not totalitarian world-building so much as boardroom bullshit.” No essayist has historicized Trump more succinctly than Panovka. This week, she joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to help us understand the great distortion of Arendt. Panovka contends that, though Arendt was not known as the most scrupulous with the facts, twenty-first-century readers should pay close attention to her idiosyncratic word choices and the particular political ethos of her time before making sweeping claims about her relevance today. Of course we should mine great thinkers’ work for insights, Panovka says, but we should also remember what Arendt learned a hard lesson when one of her early mentors, Martin Heidegger, turned to Nazism: the haphazard application of philosophy to politics is always a risky business. Read Panovka’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/men-in-dark-times-hannah-arendt-post-truth/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Land and sea meet in a dance of littoral literature on this week’s episode, in which two writers train their minds on overlooked expanses. Gillian Osborne considers the American lawn, a private buffer expressing our nostalgia for common spaces. Leanne Shapton takes us into open water, where swimmers find vulnerability, wonder, and a sense of scale. They examine how great writers have drawn inspiration from the outdoors and crafted lyrical prose that unsettles the barriers between humans and nature, past and present, death and life. First, Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Leanne Shapton about the work of the writer, activist, and filmmaker Roger Deakin, which Shapton reviewed in the August issue of Harper’s. Like Deakin, Shapton is an experienced swimmer (she once participated in two Olympic tryouts), and she uses her marine inclinations to understand Deakin’s travel memoir Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, as well as his life and politics. Only a lucky few can swim regularly from a young age, and Shapton discusses her desire that the experience of open-water swimming—as one means of being “with” nature, rather than “in and on it”—might be made available to people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. Next, Lucca speaks with Gillian Osborne. Last month, Nightboat Books published Osborne’s first essay collection, Green Green Green, which was excerpted in the July issue of Harper’s. Osborne declares that the color green’s “layering of possible meanings is uncanny,” then launches into a poetic history of the American lawn. As she testifies in her conversation, she is interested in the lawn’s ability to evoke absence or emptiness—a quality she also finds in great short poetry. For Osborne, who seeks to make space for “responsive” rather than merely “responsible” reading, the experience of literature is always entwined with what writers and readers are not presently looking at—the vibrant vegetal world in which they sit. Read Shapton’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/writ-in-water-roger-deakin-waterlog/ Read the excerpt of Osborne’s essay collection: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/green-green-green-gillian-osborne/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Every presidential campaign is accompanied by news reports that attempt to frame existing realities as new developments or special insights. One prominent recurring story is about the fact that more and more Latinos are voting for Republicans. This realization then leads a journalist—who is usually not Latino—to attempt to pin down why that is, and to explain what exactly the “Latino vote” is. But the term “Latino” is capacious, encompassing people from dozens of countries and territories who don’t necessarily speak Spanish and might have had the border cross them instead of the other way around. How could there possibly be a singular, unchanging Latino vote? In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Héctor Tobar, a novelist and veteran journalist who went on a 9,000-mile road trip across the United States to visit a variety of Latino communities. Tobar’s reporting complicates received wisdom about what it means to be Latino, and revels in the diversity—political and otherwise—of the identity. Read Tobar’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/home-country-latino-latinx-hispanic-hispano-united-states/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

This summer marks a jolting return to socializing with friends, family, and seas of strangers. On the street, in museums, in restaurants, and in theaters, many people are faced with a painful contradiction: we want to be around one another more than ever, but months of isolation have made us hostile, exhausted, and even pained—probably more than most of us are willing to admit. Isolation affects the body in a similar way to stress, and in the wake of the pandemic, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two. Yet even before COVID-19, loneliness and stress were epidemic in societies that organized themselves out of interdependence in the name of efficiency and individuality. In the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert writes about her own experiences during the pandemic (a “slow-motion crisis of the self”) and the scientific evidence that supports our need for all forms of human interaction. In this week’s episode of the podcast, Gabbert candidly speaks with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca about her essay and our collective struggle to recover from the lockdown.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Jon Meacham, a former editor in chief at Newsweek and author of many popular histories about the United States. His books are ubiquitous and regularly make bestseller lists. Yet the ideas in them are frequently reductive, incorrect, and strangely in thrall to a distinctly American version of the great man theory. Meacham is committed to fetishizing the role of the president and the men who have filled it, arguing that the office ennobles its occupants more than it corrupts them. Meanwhile, he conspicuously ignores the bottom-up social movements and profound economic tensions that historians have long recognized as crucial forces in American history. That is how Thomas Frank sees it, anyway. In his combined review of Meacham’s new book, The Soul of America, and the HBO documentary based on it, Frank skewers a centrist hero who has become expert at whetting the MSNBC crowd’s thirst for neoliberal platitudes. For Meacham, once a staunch Reaganite, the close alliance he enjoys with President Biden is only the latest evidence of a commitment to subordinating matters of policy to a nebulous politics of character and “soul.” This week, Frank explains to web editor Violet Lucca Meacham’s overly romantic approach to history and what it elides, his connections to President Biden, and how his popularity reflects a larger shift away from the projects that once defined American liberalism. Read Frank’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/jon-meacham-thomas-frank-soul-of-america/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Tales of the harrowing—and often degrading—working conditions at Amazon have spread far and wide. Yet the company has successfully circumvented attempts to change its ways. With the aid of extremely accommodating local, state, and national officials, America’s second-largest company (right after Walmart) has developed an elaborate system of workplace surveillance and anti-union propaganda to prevent its low-wage workers from organizing. In the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Brook relates the concerns of workers in and around the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. The warehouse attracted national attention this spring when it played host to a fierce battle over unionization. Pro-union workers lost by a margin of more than two to one, but Brook shows that the internal deliberations were far more complicated than the results suggest. Both pro- and anti-union workers in the area also struggle with the legacy of Reconstruction, when racist and socioeconomic controls on working class people were codified into law. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Brook unpacks the lessons of his trips to Bessemer with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. In their conversation, Lucca and Brook speculate on what lies ahead for the Amazon precariat—and for the consumers who depend on their labor. Read Brooks’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/hard-bargain-amazon-unionization-bessemer-alabama/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

What if we conceived of the fight against climate change as a “just war”—as both the biggest fight in human history and a global search for meaning? As fires rage, oceans rise, and pandemics ravage, the demands for international solidarity and world-scale deployments of resources are readily apparent. But in the face of ideological divisions wrought by centuries of capitalist and colonial destruction, it’s not always easy to envision what solidarity really is, or what it needs to be. In “Prayer for a Just War,” published in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Greg Jackson urges us to see the “first comprehensive global challenge” as an opportunity to define our global character by our collective grit, humility, and trust. In addition to outlining the many counterattacks we must mount on political and technological fronts, Jackson imbues the mythic concept of the “existential threat” with historical and spiritual meaning. In this episode, Jackson delves into those ideas with web editor Violet Lucca, then gestures toward ways we might help each other step out of the deadly (and dull) alienation we all seem to share. Read Jackson’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/prayer-for-a-just-war-finding-meaning-in-the-climate-fight/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

For those who make, or might once have made, a living as artists, the pandemic and the economic depression that followed it took away two vital sources of revenue: in-person events and day jobs that sustained creative endeavors. Yet, as William Deresiewicz describes in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, all sectors of the arts economy were already vulnerable for collapse: years of declining public arts funding and education, as well as the rise of “free content,” had fundamentally destabilized the ability for expression. The ways in which COVID-19 sharpened and highlighted existing social failures harkens back to another global health crisis: the AIDS epidemic. Writer, activist, and historian Sarah Schulman’s newest book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, tells the story of activists who waged some of the most effective political campaigns of the century to force politicians, the populace, and drug companies into acknowledging and addressing AIDS. An excerpt of Let the Record Show also appears in the June issue. In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca moderates a conversation between Sarah Schulman and William Deresiewicz, author of The Death of the Artist, exploring links between the two crises. Among other topics, they discuss the aesthetic and societal costs of confining art making to the margins of the workday, the new challenges of organizing against Big Tech, and the value of artists to social movements. Read Deresiewicz’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/stages-of-grief-what-the-pandemic-has-done-to-the-arts/ Read the excerpt of Schulman’s book: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/blood-ties-sarah-schulman-let-the-record-show/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

According to Hollywood legend, director Mervyn LeRoy “discovered” Lana Turner when she was sixteen, at the soda counter of Schwab’s Pharmacy in Los Angeles. While the tale is apocryphal, the notion that anyone could be a star motivated untold hordes of youths to go west for decades afterward. (Let’s be honest: most of them turned out like the “grotesques” of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.) So is it so surprising that, according to a 2019 poll, 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight say they would become social-media influencers if given the chance? For the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Barrett Swanson spent five days at a TikTok collab house: a plush Los Angeles mansion, funded by two Silicon Valley investors, where a group of conventionally beautiful, college-aged influencers lived rent-free, tasked only with posting videos of themselves for their millions of followers. Yet, as sultry as this sounds, Swanson found that these young men struggled with anxiety, depression, and an inability to think critically about the forces driving them to generate content. The pressure to please, gain followers, and get good ratings is creeping into all of our lives, regardless of industry. (Even doctors get star ratings now.) In this episode, Swanson joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss the alternately surreal and sad reality of life inside of the collab house; the pressures of the “passion economy”; algorithms; and the critical thinking and digital literacy that everyone—not just the young—are sorely lacking. Read Swanson’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-house-the-anxiety-of-influencers/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Shortly before he left office, Donald Trump reactivated the federal death penalty—putting an end to a seventeen-year hiatus and executing an unprecedented thirteen people in less than a year. While the brutality of this killing spree is well-documented, the byzantine legal process through which it was authorized has received little attention. For the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Caroline Lester traveled to the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the execution of Dustin Higgs, illuminating the brutishness of state power. As an appeals lawyer put it: “I’ve never been more afraid of the government than I was after those seven months.” The story she tells of Higgs’s attempts to negotiate with a government bent on killing its citizens implicates the entire legal system, from the Supreme Court to Obama’s attorney general. In this episode, Lester joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her harrowing reporting process, the long and bipartisan history of state violence, and the inequity of the death penalty.

Whether or not you remember anything from high school biology, the word “species” seems fairly self-explanatory: a kitten isn’t the same thing as a crab. Yet what distinguishes a particular species from its subspecies is a far trickier determination to make than “cat ≠ crustacean.” The act of taxonomic classification has befuddled biologists regardless of specialization or era. “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience,” wrote Charles Darwin. In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Zach St. George tracks the saga of the California gnatcatcher, a gray bird that sits at the center of a dispute between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which decides which species merit Endangered Species Act protection, and the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm arguing that the bird is functionally indistinct from any number of other gnatcatchers. Even if Pacific Legal’s motives are less than purely scientific, its case highlights legitimate criticisms—echoed by many biologists—about the imprecise way the Endangered Species Act codifies what counts as a species. St. George explains how this argument has led to further questions about the bill, such as how it might be changed to better suit an era in which the environment is deteriorating faster than ever. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca talks with St. George about the ESA, the philosophical and scientific questions prompted by the practice of taxonomy, and the more proactive ways we might approach the likely irreversible damage of climate change. Read St. George’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/birds-of-a-feather-endangered-species-list-revision/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

As work subsumes leisure time, worldwide anxieties mount, and a pandemic reshapes comfort and togetherness, meditation has been touted as a panacea. People who are stressed out (are there any other kind?) can take a meditation course, read an article, go on a retreat, or use an app; the hope is to gain from meditation peace, health, productivity, focus, or a good night’s sleep. It comes almost universally recommended and has precious few public detractors. David Kortava’s article “Lost in Thought,” from the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, is an investigation into the possible negative side effects of meditation. Kortava reports on a practitioner’s bout with psychosis during an extended stay at a vipassana meditation center that had her wishing for death. Kortava presents evidence of meditation’s potential to distress and harm. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Kortava about the experiential gap filled by meditation, the perils of a one-size-fits-all approach, and the gulf between the origins of meditative practice and its modern-day deployment. Read Kortava’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The photographer Richard Rothman spent more than a decade taking pictures in a small town along the Front Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The resulting monograph, Town of C, was published by Stanley/Barker, and a selection of the photographs appears in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. The book’s scope is comprehensive, documenting the grandeur and the despoliation of the region’s geography and the lives and spaces of its poorest—and richest—residents. “Through portraits and landscapes,” the critic and curator Lyle Rexer writes in his introduction, “Rothman presents the paradox of expansiveness and confinement, of possibility and crushing limitation.” In this episode of the podcast, Violet Lucca brings Richard Rothman and Lyle Rexer together for a conversation about Rothman’s new work and the current state of art photography. They discuss how the focus and narrative structure of Town of C changed over time, the role of art photography in a culture oversaturated with images, and the hundreds of minute decisions that go into composing a photograph. Look at photographs from Town of C and read Rexer’s introduction: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/town-of-c-richard-rothman/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the pavement, the beach!”) was the rallying cry of the May 1968 protests in France. As demonstrators tore up paving stones in order to build barricades or to hurl at the police, they discovered that there was sand beneath the streets. Though this was a typical building practice, it reinforced the protesters’ belief that everyday life wasn’t quite what it appeared to be, but was rather an illusion manufactured by modernity, capitalism, and consumerism. During the early months of the pandemic, we were all confronted with the same truth. The levels of noise, garbage, and greenhouse-gas emissions pumped into the environment were drastically reduced because so many schools, workplaces, and restaurants were shuttered. Just as people abruptly changed where and how they spent their days, all sorts of wildlife began venturing into public places they’d previously avoided: deer roamed the streets of Paris while coyotes wandered around San Francisco. But these incursions weren’t really incursions at all: the natural world had been there all along. It became clear that animals, rather than living apart from human society, had always been living alongside us—our belief in absolute anthropocentric control was an illusion. In “The Crow Whisperer,” which appeared in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Lauren Markham writes about the ways we might rethink our relationship with the environment. Following an incident involving some friends, their dog, and a murder of dive-bombing crows, Markham delves into the world of animal whisperers—specialists who serve as translators, negotiators, or arbiters between members of different species. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca talks with Markham about the complexity of animal psychology, epigenetics, climate change, and a crow’s talent for nursing a grudge. Read Markham’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/the-crow-whisperer-animal-communicators/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

This month will see the release of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography—the authorized biography of the famous novelist, who died in 2018. Roth himself selected Bailey to write his life story. In addition to many long conversations, Roth granted Bailey complete access to his personal archives and helped set up interviews with many of his friends, lovers, and colleagues. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, the novelist and Harper’s contributing editor Joshua Cohen imagines how Bailey’s book might be received by Roth himself. From the comfort of his writing studio beyond the grave, Cohen’s Roth ruminates on the strange, perhaps self-destructive decision to commission his own biography, and proceeds to lament the result, which, he argues, downplays the literary production that made up most of his days (“MY BIOGRAPHER HAS NO INTEREST IN MY WRITING!!!!”) in favor of “interminable chapters and decades of reputation management, alternating with, if not relieved by, sexual transgressions.” Cohen’s ventriloquism of Roth is a gambit one has to think the author would have admired. As Cohen points out in this interview, Roth, too, had a penchant for throwing his voice. In this episode of the podcast, Violet Lucca talks with Cohen about Philip Roth’s long career and his unclear legacy. Among other things, they discuss Roth’s late decree that “the book can’t compete with the screen”; his often unacknowledged influence on today’s American immigrant writers, as well as writers of autofiction; and an afterlife—or do we find ourselves there now?—in which everything will be as it is, just a little different. Read Cohen’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/the-possessed-philip-roth-the-biography-blake-bailey/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

“Sometime in late 1991,” Don DeLillo told a Paris Review interviewer in 1993, “I started writing something new and didn’t know what it would be—a novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing, and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing I’ve done.” The result was the novella “Pafko at the Wall,” first published as a Folio in the October 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine, making up a third of the issue’s length. “Wherein the Giants clinch the pennant, Bruegel descends, a bomb explodes, Sinatra sulks, and a Harlem boy plays his own game,” read that month’s cover. A slightly revised version would later become the prologue to Underworld, a novel often described as DeLillo’s masterpiece. The story takes place during the National League playoff game of October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a pennant-winning home run over the head of Brooklyn Dodgers left fielder Andy Pafko—an event known to baseball fans as the “Shot Heard ’Round the World.” Here, though, the famous game serves mostly as background, its action serving to repeatedly bounce the reader’s attention back into the stands. DeLillo, a writer who has always been fascinated by the mechanics of spectacle, wants us to watch the watchers—some of whom, such as Frank Sinatra, the radio announcer Russ Hodges, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, are spectacle makers (and manipulators) themselves. Hovering over the proceedings, meanwhile, are suggestions of darker energy: the secret knowledge, possessed by only the paranoid Hoover, that the Soviets have just performed a successful nuclear-weapons test, and racial tensions, briefly transcended by fandom, that are unloosed in the scramble over a suddenly famous ball. In this episode of the podcast, we bring you excerpts of “Pafko at the Wall,” which was performed live at the 92nd Street Y by Billy Crudup, Zachary Levi, and Tony Shalhoub, interspersed with commentary by the novelist Jennifer Egan and the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips. The full recording of the performance will be released on March 30 by Simon & Schuster Audio. A video of the performance will be available for two days at 92y.org/pafko beginning on Sunday, March 28, in anticipation of the audiobook’s release. This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

In 2002, a new crop of Dead Sea Scroll fragments that were said to have come from the Swiss vault of the late antiquities dealer Khalil Iskander Shahin went up for sale. These fragments were bought by a number of evangelical institutions, including the Museum of the Bible, which was founded by the family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and-crafts stores. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Madeleine Schwartz describes the odd provenance of the fragments and evaluates whether they could be forgeries. In this episode, Schwartz and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca discuss the tendency for self-delusion in the antiquities market, as well as the slow process by which counterfeit goods can be distinguished from genuine artifacts. They also consider the complex issue of ownership, given the colonial violence that has historically allowed Western countries to acquire relics. “[Knowing where objects came from] is hugely important for the ethical implications,” Schwartz says. “It’s also really important for the financial implications, because, in general, no one wants to think that what they own is either fake or going to lead them to having to deal with a lawsuit.” Read Schwartz’s annotation: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/false-prophets-forged-dead-sea-scrolls/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Mike Pence is a pedophile who has been replaced by a clone. But Mike Pence also had the power to reject Electoral College votes and overturn the 2020 presidential election results. In April 2020, the U.S. military liberated 35,000 sexually abused children from hidden tunnels beneath Central Park. There’s a video of Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton ritually killing a child for its adrenochrome. The pandemic isn’t real, and Bill Gates has created a vaccine that will change your DNA and control your mind. This is just a sample of QAnon supporters’ many beliefs, some of which openly contradict each other. As Hari Kunzru observes in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine, QAnon is less concerned with finding the root cause of society’s purported ills than it is with laying out, in ever more intricate terms and with ever more involved symbols, how entrenched those ills are. If the guesswork and speculation surrounding the Kennedy assassination provides a benchmark of popular American suspicion, then Q has “the feel of something new, a blob of unreason against which the Kennedy narrative seems quaint, almost genteel,” Kunzru writes. Various preconditions figure into the rise of Q at this historical moment—the aesthetics of contemporary political theater, the accelerant nature of the internet—but beneath them all is a human yearning for simplicity, for an incomprehensible world to make sense according to our preferred terms. In this episode, Violet Lucca talks with Kunzru, a novelist and Harper’s new Easy Chair columnist, about the antecedents and present-day mechanics of QAnon. They discuss the myths of its origins, its fraught internal logic, and its “impoverished understanding of how power actually works.” Read Kunzru’s column here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/01/complexity-qanon-conspiracy-theories/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Edmund Gosse. Thomas De Quincey. James Baldwin. For Vivian Gornick, what connects these writer’s disparate oeuvres is that although each pursued other genres—poetry, journalism, novels, or plays—their “significant work turns out to reside in a memoir” (or personal essays, in Baldwin’s case). In an essay in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, Gornick nominates to this list Storm Jameson, a prolific English novelist whose autobiography, Journey from the North, is a prime example of a writer finding her voice—all the more striking in Jameson’s case because she made the discovery near the end of a long and, in Gornick’s estimation, otherwise middling career. In the immediacy of self-disclosure, something clicked for Jameson—but why? Gornick, who struggled at novel writing herself before hitting her stride in memoirs such as Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City, has “something of a vested interest in this mysterious matter of a writer’s natural métier.… I was well into my thirties,” she writes, “before I understood that I was born for the memoir.” In this episode of the podcast, Gornick begins with a reading from the arresting first pages of Journey from the North. In the conversation that follows, she and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca discuss Jameson’s life and legacy; the perennial excuse of “writing down” to make ends meet; the questionable value of the “autofiction” label; and Gornick’s reading (and rereading) habits during the pandemic. Read Gornick’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/storm-jameson-if-only-i-could-begin-again/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

When Dusan Simien, a San Francisco native with a knack for technology, enrolled in a two-year coding program at the for-profit Holberton School, he financed it with an income share agreement: a contract in which he agreed to pay the school 17 percent of his income for a set period after graduation. But before long, Simien found himself struggling with Holberton’s instructorless education model and its cheaply designed curriculum. And when he was expelled on a dubious charge of plagiarism, he found himself owing the school a percentage of his paycheck from the same job he’d had when he enrolled. Simien’s case typifies a growing trend. As Avi Asher-Schapiro documents in the December issue, income share agreements (ISAs) have taken off in the past few years as a means of financing education, and they’ve caught the attention of policymakers—and investors—across the political spectrum. To their proponents, ISAs are an answer to traditional financing options that have left many poor Americans, especially African-American students like Simien, unable to attend college without taking on exorbitant debt. These financial tools could theoretically make institutions more accountable, by tying institutional profits to alumni success. To their detractors, ISAs can be predatory loans in disguise, ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous institutions such as Holberton. By tying contract terms to projected earnings, they also increase the pressure on students to seek careers that are likely to be financially lucrative. In this episode of the Harper’s Podcast, Violet Lucca talks with Asher-Schapiro, who covers technology and human rights issues at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, about these and other hopes and concerns for the growing ISA market. They discuss the origination of the ISA idea by Milton Friedman, parallels between ISAs and the charter school movement, and the potential ramifications of “treating students like startups.”

Today, more than 270 million people live outside their country of origin. Many of them are forced to live in legal limbo, protected neither by citizenship nor by official refugee status. Lebanon, which has the highest per-capita refugee population, exemplifies this no-policy policy. The influx of refugees from Syria—three for every ten Lebanese citizens—have been referred to euphemistically as “displaced,” as “guests,” and, increasingly, as “enemies.” Although they are granted some rights by the Lebanese government, refugees are permitted to work only in construction, agriculture, and sanitation, and are consigned to live in makeshift camps. There, they are at the mercy of shawishes, who broker their most basic needs. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by journalist Alexander Dziadosz to discuss his piece “State of Exception” from the November 2020 issue of the magazine; the two cover the shawish system, Lebanese politics, the impact of climate change on mass migration, and the future of the Syrian refugee crisis. Read Dziadosz’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/state-of-exception-lebanon-refugee-crisis/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

When Garth Greenwell was growing up in Kentucky, the LGBTQ section of his local bookstore was a lifesaver: a refuge, even in the pre-internet era. But the implications of that categorization—keeping LGBTQ authors’ books separate from the rest—suggested that the experiences of queer people and other traditionally marginalized groups were somehow inaccessible to the general public, that they failed to speak to any “universal” truths of human life. Years later, Greenwell would have his work described by a professor as “a sociological report on the practices of a subculture,” as though his choice to focus on queer subjects was a hindrance to artistic resonance. Since then, of course, the cultural pendulum has swung the other way, and stories featuring white, male, cisgender protagonists are increasingly derided as irrelevant and shopworn. In the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, Greenwell questions the meaning of “relevance” and its place in our cultural discourse, disputing the idea that art must be “relevant” to be resonant, and even that “relevance” is a fruitful ground for analysis in the first place. In this episode of the podcast, Greenwell, author of the novels What Belongs to You and Cleanness, reflects on his essay and discusses with host Violet Lucca the concept of universality, the high speed of Twitter discourse, the way dating apps are anathema to the true nature of desire, the future of art in our current political climate, and the LGBTQ section of a bookstore near you. Read Greenwell’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/making-meaning-garth-greenwell/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The first chapter of Don DeLillo’s new novel, THE SILENCE, performed aloud. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo, read by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland, Robin Miles, Jay O. Sanders, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Copyright © 2020 by Don DeLillo. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Last year, 43 of the 50 most-watched television broadcasts in America were football games—despite the fact that the NFL season lasts a mere six months. For decades, entrepreneurs have been trying and failing to fill that off-season void with professional football leagues that start play after the Super Bowl. The most recent—and perhaps most successful—attempt was made by Vince McMahon, the CEO of WWE and founder of the XFL. McMahon’s league, which aspired to the theatricality of professional wrestling, debuted and then folded in 2001. In 2018, McMahon revived the XFL in a less-goofy iteration that focused on fast, enjoyable games and actively encouraged fans (and announcers) to wager on them. Alas, the new league’s first season began this February. Across the country, football fans gathered ironically or earnestly to consume the sport—but their numbers dwindled each week. Undone by COVID-19 and low ratings, the league folded, but the XFL has promise of returning once again: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a former WWE wrestler, purchased it for a mere $15 million. In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by the essayist Kent Russell to discuss his article “America’s Game,” from the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. The two discuss ironic nostalgia, McMahon’s business acumen and entertainment aesthetics, the spiritual mysteries of American football, and the Holy Grail that is six more months of professional play each year.

In 2018, an Irish technologist by the name of Dylan Curran downloaded all the data Google had collected about him—the equivalent of more than three million Word documents—and sifted through it, revealing the extent to which Google had surveilled his online activity over the course of a decade. All of his Google searches, emails, YouTube views, website visits, and more were preserved in 5.5 gigabytes’ worth of detail—part of the tech giant’s massive effort to turn individuals’ data into advertising revenue. Criticism of companies like Google has only mounted in recent years, including a series of antitrust hearings this past summer that saw Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon defending themselves before Congress. In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by Barry C. Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute and author of “The Big Tech Extortion Racket,” an article in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine that was adapted from his forthcoming book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People. They discuss the ways in which tech companies have circumvented and rewritten the laws that govern our markets. In his description of how tech companies enact discriminatory pricing, Lynn reflects on the principles behind common carrier rules, the end of net neutrality, the rise of tech monopolization, and the future of our democracy under these troubled circumstances. Read Lynn’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

In February, Naomi Jackson entered Mount Sinai Hospital to give birth to her son. But when the baby finally came, at her side were only her doula and her sister; the ob-gyn hadn’t believed Jackson when, twenty minutes earlier, she had assured the doctor that the baby was coming soon. This was not the first time that Jackson’s wishes and intuitions had been ignored during her pregnancy, or even during her labor. Only hours earlier, a nurse had upped her dosage of Pitocin shortly after Jackson had asked her to stop. But Jackson is not alone in experiencing such dismissiveness. Such treatment is typical of the care black mothers receive. They experience maternal complications and adverse outcomes at a shockingly high rate. Black babies today are substantially more likely to suffer infant mortality than white babies; the rate surpasses that recorded during slavery. And the dearth of black female medical professionals means that black women struggle to secure culturally responsive care, with its accompanying better outcomes. Black mothers—Jackson included—carry this heavy burden with them into labor. In this episode of the podcast, Naomi Jackson—an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark and the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill—reflects on her narrative essay in Harper’s Magazine’s September issue, “A Litany for Survival.” Jackson and host Violet Lucca discuss her reasons for sharing her birth story, the all too often dire experiences that black women have in the birthing room, and the multifarious sociocultural factors that prevent black women from receiving proper care even as awareness of these experiences grows. Resources for black mothers that were mentioned in the episode or are recommended by Jackson: Bronx Rebirth & Progress Collective - https://www.bxrebirth.org/ Black Mamas Matter Alliance - https://blackmamasmatter.org/ National Black Midwives Alliance - https://blackmidwivesalliance.org/ Jamaa Birth Village - https://jamaabirthvillage.org/ Ancient Song Doula Services - https://www.ancientsongdoulaservices.com/ Dr. Sara Whetstone, University of California, San Francisco - https://meded.ucsf.edu/people/sara-whetstone Dr. Deirdre Cooper-Owens, University of Lincoln, Nebraska & author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology - https://history.unl.edu/deirdre-cooper-owens Nubia Martin, midwife & founder of Birth from the Earth - https://birthfromtheearth.vpweb.com/ Nicole Jean-Baptiste, Sese Doula Services - https://www.sesedoulaservices.com/ Linda Villarosa, journalist & contributing writer to New York Times magazine https://www.lindavillarosa.com/ Dr. Dana-Ain Davis, CUNY Graduate Center and author of Reproductive Justice: Racism, Pregnancy & Premature Birth - http://qcurban.org/faculty/dana-ain-davis/ Dr. Pooja K. Mehta, Women’s Health Lead, CityBlock Health - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pooja-mehta-1b891689/ Dr. Toyin Ajayi, Chief Health Officer & Co-Founder, CityBlock Health - https://www.linkedin.com/in/toyin-ajayi-ba57b078/ Chanel Porchia-Albert, founder of Ancient Song - https://www.chanelporchianyc.com/about-me Malaika Maitland, doula, artist & yoga teacher in Grenada - http://malaikamaitland.com/birth Andrea Jordan, midwife, cofounder of Better Birthing in Bim and The Breastfeeding and Child Nutrition Foundation - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-jordan-4832b3127/ Dani McClain, journalist and author of We Live for the: The Political Power of Black Motherhood - https://danimcclain.com/bio Dr. Lynn Roberts, CUNY School of Public Health - https://sph.cuny.edu/people/lynnroberts/ Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, author of Killing the Black Body - https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/roberts1/ Efe Osaren, doula & midwifery student, https://www.linkedin.com/in/efe-osaren-959824113/

The opening line of Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic” was written nearly one hundred years ago, but it holds bitter relevance to our current moment: “America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire.” Yet the poet’s verse doesn’t simply take aim at the United States’ imperial ambitions—it takes aim at human civilization as a whole. Over the course of his career, Jeffers grappled with humanity’s ugliness and its detrimental impact on the environment, never arriving at sentimental conclusions. As Erik Reece argues in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Jeffers’s work—both its line of argument and its focus—is worth reappraising at a time when climate catastrophe looms. In this episode of the podcast, Reece speaks with web editor Violet Lucca and discusses deep time, extinction, and hope. Read Reece’s article here: This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Annie Hylton’s “In Plain Sight,” published in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, explores the efforts of Syrian refugees to bring the war criminals of the Assad regime to justice. Hylton’s article centers on a refugee and human-rights lawyer named Anwar al-Bunni, who escaped to Germany in 2014 after being detained and tortured by Assad. But after a Vertigo-esque encounter with his former captor, an ex-colonel in the Assad regime who had also happened to settle in Berlin, al-Bunni was inspired to continue his lifelong mission of holding war criminals accountable under the law. Hylton follows his efforts to prosecute former regime officials in Europe using the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which offers legal recourse for atrocities committed abroad. In this episode of the podcast, Hylton joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her piece. They unpack al-Bunni’s story and the continuing progress of his lawsuits; the current situation in Syria amid the pandemic and a fresh round of sanctions; and Hannah Arendt’s insights on using the legal system to punish crimes against humanity. Read Hylton’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/in-plain-sight-syrian-war-criminals-in-europe/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Over the course of their careers, war reporters often end up spending more time in conflict zones than active-duty soldiers do, and many suffer from profound psychological trauma as a result. In “On Moral Injury,” published in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Janine di Giovanni sheds light on the alarming incidence of trauma among journalists. She focuses on an often-overlooked variant called moral injury, which is distinguished by the victim’s belief that they have failed to live up to their own ethical standards. Journalists who witness terrible atrocities face choices between their obligation to help and their duty to observe, and many remain haunted by their decisions for years afterward. Di Giovanni illustrates the psychological damage inflicted by these ethical dilemmas with harrowing stories from her own career as a frontline journalist. In this episode, di Giovanni joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to explore some further dimensions of moral injury. They discuss the protections that news organizations should offer their reporters; the responsibilities that journalists have toward their subjects; and the moral injuries that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely inflict on us all. Read di Giovanni’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/on-moral-injury-ptsd/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

In “False Dawn,” the poet Khadijah Queen narrates her experience of the pandemic through a zuihitsu, an ancient Japanese form that interweaves poetry with personal reflections. She shares intimate anecdotes from her quarantine while grappling with the broader political issues thrown into relief by the coronavirus. In this episode of the podcast, Queen joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to dig deeper into some of the larger questions her piece raises, underscoring the impossibility of returning to “normal” after the pandemic is over. They discuss the work of Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman on the commodification of black suffering; the value of slowing down as a method of resistance; and the capacity of poetry to catalyze political change.

The community land trust is an ownership model in which land is collectively controlled by community members, and it has garnered attention in recent years as a promising solution to the affordable-housing crisis. In “We Shall Not Be Moved,” published in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, Audrea Lim tells the story of the country’s first community land trust: a farming cooperative in Albany, Georgia, called New Communities. She unearths its origins as a pioneering effort to build economic power among poor black farmers, and explores the challenges it has faced over the years, including discrimination and persecution. In this episode of the podcast, Lim joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to delve into the lessons that contemporary community land trusts can learn from New Communities. They discuss the group of activists that spearheaded the formation of New Communities; the strengths and limitations of the different types of community land trusts; and how collective ownership can spur further grassroots organizing and cultural revitalization. Read Lim’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/we-shall-not-be-moved-collective-ownership-black-farmers/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Peat extraction in Ireland is at once an ecological catastrophe that destroys a piece of the country’s heritage as well as a tool of economic sovereignty that frees Ireland from depending on foreign coal. The industry has also provided good jobs for energy workers. “Bogland,” William Atkins’s article in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, is an attempt to untangle a thorny contradiction: that “even despoliation can look like an act of largesse in certain circumstances.” In this episode of the podcast, Atkins joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to share more details from his journey through the bogs of Ireland. They discuss the odes to peatland penned by Seamus Heaney and Tim Robinson; the journalistic ethics of travel writing; and the litany of crazy things lurking in the bogs’ depths. Read Atkins’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/bogland-bog-of-allen-ireland-peat-bog-bord-na-mona/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Disaster City is the name of a training compound in College Station, Texas, where first responders prepare for catastrophic scenarios through hands-on practice. In “This Is Not a Test,” his July cover story, Barrett Swanson visits Disaster City to participate in a simulated catastrophe, uncovering in the process the dark side of our society’s fixation on disaster preparedness. In narrating his experience as one of the simulation’s “Victim Volunteers,” Swanson ferries us through the compound’s funhouse-mirror vision of America, complete with elaborate replicas of real disasters such as a bombed-out parking garage and a tornado-shredded motel. But there’s something disturbing lurking within this “Disneyland for first responders.” Much like the real Disneyland, Swanson suggests, the function of Disaster City is to obscure the way the world outside the park really works. As the emblem of the American preparedness mindset, Disaster City “seems to sanction and sacralize the inevitability of catastrophes”—at the expense of a deeper reckoning with the structural problems that produce them. According to this mindset, there can only ever be triage, as opposed to true prevention. In this episode, Barrett Swanson joins Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca to explore the lessons he learned while reporting from Disaster City, and how they might apply to the disaster in which we now find ourselves. The two discuss the inspiration Swanson drew from his personal experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder; the lessons we failed to learn from the Gulf War and Hurricane Katrina; and how French critical theory anticipated our current system of disaster capitalism. Read Swanson’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Public housing has had an embattled history in the United States. It’s been a constant site of political struggle, from its heyday in the Thirties to its erosion under the Reagan Administration in the Eighties. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Ian Volner explores that struggle through one of its principal characters: his grandfather Kelsey Volner, who began his career in public housing and ended it in disgrace in the private sector. In telling his grandfather’s story, Volner finds a parable for the fate of affordable housing in this country. But there has been a sea change in recent years. Responding to rising discontent with skyrocketing real estate prices, advocates have renewed their efforts to build affordable developments. In the face of a myriad of obstacles—“from local opposition to byzantine funding requirements and state-level interference,” as Volner writes—they have employed a variety of canny tactics to piece together their projects. Volner tells the stories behind new affordable housing complexes in Queens, Austin, Texas, and Jackson, Wyoming, to illustrate the way that “designers and developers have learned to adapt, grafting an entire subeconomy onto a warped bureaucratic rootstock.” In this episode, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca and Volner delve into the broader issues surrounding the contemporary housing crisis, epitomized by the condo boom and brought to a boil by the coronavirus pandemic. They discuss public housing’s aesthetics and socioeconomic demographics; its stigmatization at the hands of the right; and where we go should from here to guarantee housing for all. Read Volner’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/grand-designs-affordable-housing/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The June issue marks the 170th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine. As Harper’s editor Christopher Beha notes in his new column, Editor’s Desk, the magazine has published “more than two thousand issues, few of them produced under such challenging circumstances.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Beha about the challenges of creating a magazine while the world is on lockdown, as well as the larger question of how to begin processing the enormity of this pandemic and its economic and political fallout. Read Beha’s column: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/tests-of-time-covid-19/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Political organizing during a worldwide lockdown is hard if not impossible, and embattled authoritarian regimes the world over are surely breathing sighs of relief. In the United States, surging unemployment rates continue to break records, and a world-historical depression seems inevitable. Op-ed columnists everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post have taken the opportunity to publicly wring their hands about another impending surge of “populism”—their favored name for a tendency that is said to encompass both the rise of anti-democratic demagogues like Donald Trump and the mass appeal of the progressive Bernie Sanders. Where did this word come from, and how can it mean so many different things? In his May cover story for Harper’s Magazine, the historian Thomas Frank tells the story of the term’s optimistic invention by members of the People’s Party of the late nineteenth century—a mass movement of farmers and factory workers who mounted what Frank calls “our country’s final serious effort at breaking the national duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats.” While the Populist movement is seldom remembered today, Frank’s excavation of the era’s anti-Populist rhetoric shows that the hatred and fear that class-based politics inspired—even including some specific insults—have never really gone away. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Thomas Frank—author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas?—about the roots of his interest in Populism; the undeniable charm and pernicious wrongness of Richard Hofstadter; what to do with the momentum of the Sanders campaign; and the research that went into Frank’s new book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, soon to be available from Metropolitan Books. Read Frank’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

The film maudit (“cursed film”) is a genre that everyone is familiar with, even if you’ve never heard its name. They are movies—usually very expensive ones—that were derided upon their initial release, but came to be appreciated many years later by scholars and cinephiles. Jacques Tati’s PlayTime (1967) is one of the most prominent examples, and its reputation only continues to grow. Following the success of his Academy Award–winning Mon Oncle, Tati, the writer, director, and star, decided to skewer the excesses and alienation of modern city life on a grand scale: he had a miniature city built on the outskirts of Paris, complete with paved roads and skyscrapers built from glass and steel. For eighteen months, Tati shot complicated visual gags on extra-wide 65-mm film stock and mimed the actions for every one of the hundreds of extras so that they could copy his movements; he also designed and recorded much of its soundtrack. Despite this painstaking work, PlayTime was dropped by its American distributor, while in France, the film’s critique of modernity was written off as shopworn. The comedian made two more feature-length films on increasingly smaller scales, but he never recovered—financially or emotionally—from the rejection of PlayTime. Now, PlayTime regularly appears on lists of the best films of all time. It has been restored multiple times, and gets special runs at art houses around the world. Tati’s notorious film maudit has also gone on to inspire directors such as David Lynch and Wes Anderson. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca discusses PlayTime, as well as the director’s other work, with Geoffrey O’Brien, whose review of the book The Definitive Jacques Tati appeared in the May issue. As their conversation reveals, Tati’s filmography has eerie and fascinating echoes in today’s world. Read O’Brien’s review here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/constant-delighted-astonishment-jacques-tati/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

In June 2019, mass protests erupted in Hong Kong in response to a bill that would have allowed the extradition of fugitives to mainland China. As the protests continued throughout the year, the objectives shifted, and a broader, more complex, and increasingly violent movement emerged. The movement quickly converged around five key demands: the complete withdrawal of the extradition bill, the establishment of an independent inquiry to investigate police brutality, withdrawal of the label of protesters as “rioters,” release of those arrested at protests, and universal suffrage in Hong Kong. While it has drawn on the tactics of political movements from the past, including those of anticommunist activism in Eastern Europe, the movement is distinctly contemporary. Decisions are made through encrypted chat apps, and Hong Kongers from diverse sectors of society participate. Yi-Ling Liu reports on the evolution of these protests in “Dream State,” published in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, and reveals that though the protesters have five demands at the moment, far more sweeping changes could be realized. Born in Hong Kong to parents from mainland China, Yi-Ling Liu grew up moving between multiple worlds. In her early adolescence, Liu’s cultural ambiguity remained unremarkable. But as the number of mainland tourists in Hong Kong grew, the perception of mainlanders as rude and uncivilized (they are sometimes called “locusts”) spread. In “Dream State,” Liu describes Hong Kong during the protests from the perspective of a Hong Konger with a mainlander’s name. In this week’s episode of the podcast, Liu discusses her article with host and web editor Violet Lucca. They discuss the origins and evolution of the Hong Kongers’ demands, the ways that the COVID-19 outbreak has changed the protests, how xenophobia has spread with the virus, the generational rift in the movement, and surveillance as a component of protest. Read Liu’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/dream-state-hong-kong-protests/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The Federal Reserve, the central banking system of the United States, was created in response to the Panic of 1907, a depression caused by a crisis in the country’s banks. Signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the 1913 Federal Reserve Act established twelve Federal Reserve Banks, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Open Market Committee. The unique private-public structure of the Fed was the result of political compromise between President Wilson and one of his cabinet members, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, who was known as the “Great Commoner,” argued that the Fed should be run by officials who acted in the public’s interest. His efforts resulted in an elected board of governors, but that has not been enough to hold the Fed accountable. The Fed is not subject to the same checks and balances as other governmental institutions; us commoners have no democratic recourse against it. As Christopher W. Shaw writes in “The Money Question,” published in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, “the notion of absolute Fed independence is as old as the institution itself.” In this week’s episode, host Violet Lucca speaks with Shaw about the question of Fed independence. They discuss the Fed’s structure, its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and ways to hold the institution accountable. Read Shaw’s revision: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/the-money-question-federal-reserve/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Five years ago, Ishion Hutchinson went searching for paradise in the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, a small town in northern Ethiopia. The multilevel houses of worship, carved out of the rocky ground, are attributed to King Lalibela, who set out to create a New Jerusalem during his reign. The site is a marvel for even the most jaded fan of history and architecture, but Hutchinson, who was raised in a Rastafarian family in Jamaica, wasn’t sure what he would encounter there. Ethiopia occupied a unique place in Hutchinson’s childhood imagination: a central tenet of Rasta is the belief that Ethiopia is a paradise to which one hopes to arrive—both in this life and in the afterlife. In “Dreams of Stone,” published in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hutchinson recounts the transcendent experience of exploring a place that in his boyhood had seemed unreal to him. In this episode of the Harper’s Podcast, Hutchinson joins web editor Violet Lucca to explore the sometimes intangible relationship between Jamaica and Ethiopia; his experience in Lalibela and Ethiopia at large; and how poetry and writing can be a form of religious expression. Read Hutchinson’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/dreams-of-stone-lalibela-ethiopia-rastafarian/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

James Pogue hated gun culture. Having spent much of his career reporting on paramilitary groups, he especially disliked how often the “gun guys” he’d met were “small-minded or cruelly callous about the blood that guns spill, [and] evasive about the reason people actually own guns.” As Pogue points out in the April cover story of Harper’s Magazine, that reason is almost always to provide the owner with “the option to commit acts of violence.” Nevertheless, Pogue also felt that gun ownership was a right, and an American tradition, worth upholding. As he saw it, the real misfortune had to do with how completely gun culture has been monopolized by the political right—which tends to see guns as instruments of “personal security”—and with the mainstream media’s unhelpful tendency to flatten the debate into “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” positions. When Pogue went looking for leftists who felt as he did, he discovered, and had soon joined, the Socialist Rifle Association, a fast-growing group of mostly rural, working-class gun owners organizing around a new ethic of “community defense.” In this episode of the Harper’s Podcast, James Pogue, author of Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West, joins the web editor, Violet Lucca, to talk about his essay, “Good Guys with Guns.” After addressing some likely objections to the idea of leftist gun ownership, Pogue and Lucca discuss how the SRA is bucking the stereotype of socialism as an ideology of coastal elites; ways in which right-wing gun owners may be better prepared than liberals for society-shifting disasters like the coronavirus outbreak; the disproportionate impact current gun laws have on black Americans; and the important difference between supporting gun rights and supporting the unrestricted flow of handguns into poor neighborhoods. Read Pogue’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/good-guys-with-guns-socialist-gun-club/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

In May 1942, six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, General George C. Marshall gave a commencement speech at West Point in which he stated, “We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.” In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Andrew J. Bacevich demonstrates how Marshall’s proclamation became the essential premise of American foreign policy. This “terminal inertia” has persisted in the face of multiple forever wars, and it shows no sign of ending even under the self-proclaimed isolationist Donald Trump. As we attempt to come to terms with and move on from the conditions that led to Trump’s election, we must reckon with both freedom and power, and how densely intertwined those concepts are. In this week’s episode, Bacevich, who is the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about his cover story, “The Old Normal.” Bacevich and Lucca discuss the centrality of expansionism to American foreign policy, the uniquely American failure to learn from our past mistakes, the origins of executive power, and the opportunity the United States has to redefine its core values.

“Until the news can say, ‘We have no show (or paper) today because there is nothing of significance to concern you,’ the news will build its monument to truth on a lie.” So writes Greg Jackson in “Vicious Cycles,” published in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine, an essay that looks past the transfixing plotlines of the news cycle to question the inherent limitations of the news. For Jackson, a fiction writer, the unacknowledged imperative to keep audiences engaged shapes every aspect of the news, from its sense of what’s important to the way pundits help relieve us of ideological uncertainty. As for a response to the problems the news presents us with each day, it tends to offer just one: stay tuned for more. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Jackson to discuss the work of the media theorist Neil Postman; how a “facts versus falsehoods” approach to analyzing news outlets ignores their more fundamental influence on our worldview; the difference between ideology and education; and whether culture itself can help us turn away from the noise of the attention economy. Read Jackson’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/vicious-cycles-theses-on-a-philosophy-of-news/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

If you’re reading this, you already know that over the past five years both the quantity and the popularity of podcasts have exploded. Non-fiction podcasts—particularly those about true crime and history—have cultivated devoted audiences. Yet these shows are largely exempt from the standards of veracity, sourcing, and ethics to which newspapers and magazines are held. When a podcast does plagiarize or get facts wrong, this often goes unnoticed, and shows that have been caught in the act haven’t suffered a decrease in listenership. In this week’s episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Hugh Eakin, a senior editor at The New York Review of Books and author of “Selective Hearing,” published in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine. Lucca and Eakin discuss the experiential nature of podcasts, their fan-driven culture, and the limits of fact-checking. Read Eakin’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/selective-hearing-specious-history-in-new-podcasts/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Evangelical churches in Brazil’s favelas serve as a source of redemption for many, and there are many pastors who work earnestly to save the souls of gang members, whose numbers have grown significantly in recent years. Yet some pastors in Rio de Janeiro have become entangled in violence, the drug trade, political corruption, and the exploitation of Brazil’s poor. Complicating the issue of faith further, conversion allows gang members a path to safely exit a world of violent crime—something that might be more pressing than spiritual salvation. In this episode, Alex Cuadros, author of the book Brazillionaires and the article “‘My Gang is Jesus,’” featured in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine—explains how these narratives coexist in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. In his conversation with web editor Violet Lucca, Cuadros discusses the politics of evangelicalism, tensions between evangelicalism and Afro-Brazilian religions, and other factors that have contributed to the spiral of violence in Brazil. Read Cuadros’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/my-gang-is-jesus-brazilian-evangelicals/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Whether Donald Trump wins or loses the upcoming presidential election, the shift in Republican values he has ushered in is sure to outlast him. What aspects of Trump’s legacy will the next generation of conservatism cling to, and under whose leadership? In July, historian and writer Thomas Meaney braved the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., for the inaugural National Conservatism Conference, where a diverse group of pundits and thinkers of the nationalist right gathered to argue these questions, hoping to extract a winning ideology from the jumble of recent history; his report is the cover story for Harper’s Magazine’s February issue. Amid speeches by futurist tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, talk-show host Tucker Carlson, and former national security advisor John Bolton, Meaney depicts an exuberant and contradictory scene, bound together less by a specific platform—for now, at least—than by a common enemy, the “cosmopolitan” liberal elite. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Thomas Meaney about the resuscitation of the right-wing political theories of James Burnham, the degree of relation between national conservatism and white nationalism, and why an event like the National Conservatism Conference might be the best place to read the future of the movement. Read Meaney’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The Comoro Islands, an archipelago off the eastern coast of Africa, offers a glimpse into the future of the global climate crisis. After the islands’ natural resources were depleted, the local economy failed—except on the island Mayotte, which is an overseas department of France. In search of an escape, citizens of the independent Union of the Comoros embark on a potentially fatal journey to Mayotte on tiny fiberglass boats. Unable to work and forever evading French authorities, these migrants’ lives are only marginally improved; asylum seekers from African and Middle Eastern nations who have made it to Mayotte find themselves in a similarly dire position. In this week’s episode, host Violet Lucca speaks with the British journalist and photographer Tommy Trenchard, the author of an article about this ongoing crisis that was published in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine. Their discussion explores how this environmental and economic devastation is likely irreversible, and how the emphasis on security has only made the situation worse. Read Trenchard’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/oceans-apart-comoro-islands-migrant-crisis/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

In July 2018, local police informed Alexis Stern, a recent high school graduate in Big Lake, Minnesota, that there was reason to believe someone wanted her dead. A hit had been requested, for a little over $5,000 in bitcoin, through a website called Camorra Hitmen, a dark-web market advertising gun-for-hire services to anonymous buyers. As it turned out, the site was a scam operation, designed to lure credulous buyers into paying for an act that wouldn’t really be carried out. But for Stern—whose case remains largely unaddressed by police investigators even now—that fact has never been all that reassuring. Stern’s story, and the story of the white-hat hacker who spends his off-hours battling and exposing these assassination markets, is the subject of Harper’s Magazine’s January cover story, an investigative report by writer and journalist Brian Merchant. In this episode of the Harper’s Podcast, host and web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Merchant about the deep ambiguity of online assassination requests, what it’s like to come face to face with the disinhibition effect, and the frustrating slowness of police agencies to apprehend this new form of crime. Read Merchant’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Many of this decade’s pop culture juggernauts—from Orange Is the New Black to Caitlyn Jenner—have highlighted the lives of trans people. These artifacts have helped popularize the narrative of “switching” from one gender to the other, or feeling “trapped” in your body. But while this narrative has made transitioning easier for many, it has also reinforced the notion that people are either male or female, and that there is no middle ground. For genderqueer or gender nonconforming people, that narrative is insufficient, and they’re often left struggling to explain to TSA agents, to clothing retailers, even to close friends that neither pronoun reflects who they are. That understanding is slow in coming. As Alex Marzano-Lesnevich wrote in their January essay in Harper’s Magazine, many people still ask, “I mean, what am I supposed to think of you as?” In this week’s podcast, Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about why it’s so hard to convey a nonconforming identity to a society trained to sort everyone into one of two bins. Historically, they argue, this gender essentialism is relatively recent, a product of a simplex Darwinian worldview that reduced everything to the biological elements of reproduction. Through this essay and conversation, Marzano-Lesnevich says, they hope to open more space for those who feel confined by the gender binary, and illustrate how the quotidian minutiae of their experience add up to a life that we have the language to understand. Read their essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/body-language-genderqueerness/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Though you might’ve been raised not to talk about politics at Thanksgiving dinner, food itself has always been political. The questions of who grows it—and for whom—are loaded, especially in the United States, a country that took its farmland from indigenous people and built its wealth from the labor of slaves. These imbalances of access and ownership have persisted through contemporary times, with food deserts and stagnating wages restricting what poor people eat. On November 7, Harper’s Magazine and UNC Press presented a conversation between Rhonda Y. Williams, a historian and the series editor of UNC Press’s “Justice, Power, and Politics” books; Lana Dee Povitz, author of Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice, about the history of food activism in the United States; and Monica M. White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, which tells the story of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative. In this episode, the three academics discuss historical and modern inequalities surrounding food accessibility and production, as well as the power of telling the long-obfuscated stories of farmers.

Each wave of feminism in the United States has been met with a rise of men’s groups, which have sought to “heal” men and reconnect them to traditional masculinity. These movements—such as Robert Bly’s Iron John—have attempted to adapt to or resist the societal changes that have come along with increased rights for women. Now, YouTube gurus such as Jordan Peterson are not only responding to the concept of toxic masculinity and the #MeToo movement, but to the fact that men make up the majority of the nation’s suicides and have been disproportionately affected by the opioid epidemic. In the November cover story of Harper’s Magazine, Barrett Swanson reports on an Evryman, an organization that hopes to create a space for men to open up about past traumas and their feelings. Swanson details his personal experience during a weekend retreat, as well as the larger goals and practices of the organization. In his conversation with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca, Swanson discusses how the organization markets itself, questions the effectiveness of catharsis as cure, and assesses the limitations of approaching all of men’s (or women’s) issues exclusively through the lens of gender. Read Swanson’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/men-at-work-evryman-barrett-swanson/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Today, November 13, 2019, as witnesses take the stand in the first public hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, the Harper’s Podcast looks back to another major report on presidential infraction. The Department of Justice released its redacted version of the Mueller Report almost seven months ago, on April 18. Although the 448-page document revealed new depths to the chaos of the Trump presidency, its inconclusiveness was a disappointment and a setback to those who had hoped to see clear grounds for impeachment. On May 30, Harper’s Magazine organized a discussion about the report’s implications between four experts—Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School; Elizabeth Holtzman, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives who recommended three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon; James Oakes, an American historian specializing in slavery, antislavery, and the Civil War; and Brenda Wineapple, author of a recent book on the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. In a conversation that takes on new relevance during the current prosecution, the panelists discussed common misunderstandings of the impeachment process (at least one of which was shared by Donald Trump), the narrowness of the argument that impeachment proceedings might perversely “help” the president, and the provision’s larger historical importance as a means of reasserting the limits of presidential power. The panel took place at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and was moderated by Harper’s president and publisher John R. MacArthur. This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Last week, on October 28, Boris Johnson—the British prime minister who said he would “rather be dead in a ditch” than request another Brexit extension from the European Union—requested and received such an extension from the European Union, making this the third time that Brexit has been delayed since the June 2016 referendum. In anticipation of the deadline, the Harper’s Podcast convened four experts and participants in U.K. politics—David Renton, James Foley, Cat Boyd, and Richard Seymour—to discuss the complex political landscape of Brexit, its possible implications for different sectors of the population, and the hope that may lie in the situation’s vast and continuing uncertainties. This forum is an extension of a conversation between socialist writer Ashley Smith and University of Glasgow professor Neil Davidson that was published in New Politics. An excerpt from that interview was reprinted in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. The episode was co-moderated by Smith and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. Cat Boyd is a trade-union organizer in Glasgow. James Foley is a postdoctoral researcher at Glasgow Caledonian University and the author of a forthcoming book on Scottish independence, which will be published by Verso in 2020. David Renton is a barrister, historian, and long-standing anti-fascist activist. Richard Seymour is a founding editor of Salvage magazine and author of The Twittering Machine. His writings can be read on Patreon. Read the excerpt of Smith’s interview here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/left-of-europe-brexit-european-union/ This episode was produced and edited by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Public service, stewardship, restraint: these were among the watchwords of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, a group nearly synonymous with the American ruling class from the late nineteenth century through roughly the late Sixties. Compare these ideals with the ruthless exhibitionism and unabashed nihilism of today’s elites, and one can see how a temptation might arise to feel nostalgic for old-fashioned WASP supremacy. But is it really wise to hearken back to the days of boat shoes and blue bloodlines? What was the nature of WASP power, and to what ends did they really wield it? Doug Henwood pursues these and similar questions in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, in an essay that explores the rise and fall of WASP leadership and its often disastrous contributions to American life, from the popularization of eugenics to the document that initiated the permanent war economy. In this episode, host Violet Lucca speaks with Doug Henwood—former publisher of the Left Business Observer and current host of KPFA, Berkeley’s Behind the News—about the WASPs’ legacy of polite brutality, the decay revealed in Washington by the failure to rein in Trump, and the opening this could create for challenges from the left. Read Henwood’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/to-serve-is-to-rule-wasps-doug-henwood/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, philanthropists and New Orleans education reformers saw an unprecedented chance to completely restructure a failing school system. As a result, New Orleans has become the only city in the United States where charter schools have completely replaced public schools. It’s the most dramatic test case for the claims of the self-styled, traditional school choice movement—a nationwide push, led by a slew of major philanthropists and by current secretary of education Betsy DeVos, to privatize education and treat schooling as a business like any other. As Andrea Gabor documents in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, the experiment is not producing the desired results. The skewed incentives of the portfolio model, which stakes school survival largely on standardized test scores, have caused many schools to treat students like prisoners while deliberately discouraging or underserving children with special needs. In districts where charters and public schools coexist, competitive pressure and poor funding can make public schools dysfunctional “dumping grounds” for harder-to-teach children, victims of a system that values profitability over community needs. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Andrea Gabor—author of After the Education Wars and the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York—about the reality of school choice, the mind-set of Big Philanthropy, and the often-neglected tipping point at which charter schools begin harming nearby public schools. Read Gabor’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/the-k-12-takeover-charter-schools-new-orleans/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The Constitution of the United States is a foundational element of national mythology, an exceptional document for its time that, unlike other constitutions, is still cited in contemporary political discussions. In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, five lawmakers and legal scholars—Donna Edwards, five​-​term congresswoman from Maryland, serving in the House of Representatives; Mary Anne Franks, President and Legislative and Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and author of the new book The Cult of the Constitution; David Law, Charles Nagel Chair of Constitutional Law and Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Sir Y. K. Pao Chair in Public Law at the University of Hong Kong; Lawrence Lessig, professor at Harvard Law School, specializing in constitutional and comparative constitutional law; Lewis Michael Seidman, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in constitutional law and criminal justice; and Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks—participated in a forum that went beyond speculations about what the framers would want and considered, among other questions, how the Constitution could be changed in an era of partisan polarization, and whether the whole thing should be scrapped and rewritten. This week’s episode is an excerpt from the forum that did not appear in print, and which begins with a very topical issue: impeachment. The legal scholars and lawmakers discuss the functions and limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment, and how we could think differently about the relationship between the constitutionality and democracy of impeachment. Read the forum: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/constitution-in-crisis/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

At this year’s Emmys, the biggest names in television presented their usual awards, while the show itself represented an industry in flux. The hostless proceedings saw record low ratings even as new television shows and streaming services continue to infinitely expand. In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Wilson considers the market and technological forces that gave rise to the “Golden Age of television,” and how it has subsequently led to “Peak TV.” Wilson asks how shifts in the consumption habits of the small number of viewers who watch “prestige” television (rather than comedies on the Big Three networks) have changed the ways the major players do business—and whether they truly have. In this episode, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca talks with Wilson, the author of three books, including the forthcoming novel Sensation Machines, about the questionable label of prestige television, experimentation in visual narrative media, and the shifting nature of stardom—i.e., what it’s like to get tweeted at by Lizzo. Read Wilson’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/good-bad-bad-good-golden-age-of-television/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

September is here, bringing with it a new school year, the first day of fall, and the start of football season in America. After weeks of preseason games and predictions, the thirty-two teams of the N.F.L. begin five months of competition culminating in the Super Bowl, the televised broadcast of which drew an estimated 98.2 million viewers in 2019. Winning a Super Bowl is a dream for N.F.L. hopefuls across the nation. But, for individual athletes, what does it take to get there? In the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rich Cohen takes readers back to before preseason and the draft to the N.F.L. Scouting Combine. Cohen discusses the combine’s history, its current procedures, its blind spots, and what the results mean for N.F.L. teams and their players. In this episode, Cohen, the author of Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football and a contributor to Rules of the Game, speaks with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca about the combine and subsequent draft, about football’s inherent violence, and about seeing the game as a scale model of the best—and worst—of American capitalism and the country’s identity as a whole. Read Cohen’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/the-wood-chipper-nfl-draft-combine/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Each year, the City of David, the archaeological site believed to be the ancient core of Jerusalem, attracts some six hundred thousand tourists, who come to see the place where King David may have ruled in the 10th century BC. The problem is that, as Harper’s Magazine senior editor Rachel Poser explains in our September issue, the City of David is no scientific operation. Elad, the organization that manages it, is in fact “a right­wing settler group that employs archaeology as part of a long-term effort to strengthen Israeli control over Jerusalem,” and the City of David is only one of many such projects that, taken together, constitute a threat to the legitimacy of archaeological research throughout the region. Poser, who once trained as an archaeologist herself, charts the uneasy history of archaeology as a “national vocation” in Israel, from the country’s founding to the current use of excavations as both justification and method for evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. In this episode, Poser speaks with Israeli archaeologist Rafi Greenberg—a vocal critic of Elad, a professor at Tel Aviv University, a cofounder of the nonprofit Emek Shaveh, and a subject in the article—about his political disillusionment, the possibilities and limitations of the archaeological record, and an experiment in decolonized excavation. Read Poser’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/common-ground-archeology-israel-palestine/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

If you have an email account, you’ve almost certainly received an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince. Yet despite the notoriety of this scam, it continues to net billions of dollars every year—and, as Sean Williams explains in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, these scams constitute just a fraction of the criminal activity committed by Nigerian cults like the Black Axe. Though its membership now focuses on accumulating as much wealth and turf as possible, the group grew out of a pan-African movement that endeavoured to embrace the richness of Nigerian culture. In this episode, Williams speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about the social, economic, and political factors unique to Nigeria that contributed to the unfortunate evolution of this particular organization, its ties to the Italian mafia, and the internal and external attempts to curb its violent activities. Read Williams’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/the-black-axe-nigeria-neo-black-movement-africa/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of American democracy; Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Yet there have been plenty of people who’ve tried to erode that boundary, or at the very least work around it. In the March 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Jeff Sharlet published a story that revealed (some of) the inner workings of one religious organization that has been at the task for decades: the Family. Since 1953, the Family has organized the National Prayer Breakfast—a seemingly innocuous nonpartisan event. Yet this annual celebration has allowed leaders from around the world—including dictators, warlords, foreign agents, and legitimate clergy—to covertly access the halls of power and exert influence. Espousing the ambiguous philosophy of “Jesus plus nothing,” the Family’s willingness to work with powerful but diabolical leaders arises from their interpretation of predestination—if you’re in power, it’s because God said so, and isn’t it better to have the wolf king on your side? Jeff Sharlet’s reporting on the Family has led to several more articles and two books: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. Netflix and Sharlet recently adapted this reporting into a five-part documentary. Web editor Violet Lucca spoke with Sharlet and director Jesse Moss about adapting this wealth of material into a documentary, the difficulties of getting straight answers out of deeply secretive Family members, and the organization’s ascendant power. Read Sharlet’s “Jesus Plus Nothing”: https://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/jesus-plus-nothing/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Misremembered histories are often more powerful than fact—look no further than the Tea Party, a political movement that wealthy donors and disaffected cranks built upon stacks of unused high school textbooks. However, the United States isn’t alone in such wonky mythologizing. Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, has embraced Turanism, which entails a bogus story of his nation’s founding, in order to further the success of his political party, Fidesz. This revision, which asserts that Hungarians are descended from triumphant Turkic barbarian empires from the East, has grown a culture in direct opposition to the European West. With state support to fund false anthropologists (and to silence critics), Turanism’s aggressive nationalism takes priority over neoliberal multiculturalism—and keeps Orbán in power. As Jacob Mikanowski discovered when he visited Hungary to report for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, this feedback loop is equal parts kitschy and dangerous. Equestrian pageantry and yurt exhibits draw crowds to the Great Kurultáj, an annual festival, while Orbán and Fidesz rewrite the Hungarian constitution. In this episode, Mikanowski speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about gerrymandering, tribal politics, and Attila the Hun T-shirts. Read Mikanowski’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/the-call-of-the-drums-hungarian-far-right/

The American West has historically attracted defiant, self-sufficient people who are suspicious both of being asked for and of receiving help. In our August cover story, Ted Conover describes the months he spent among a modern crop of homesteaders in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, who have chosen to live off the grid with their guns, marijuana, and solar panels. Following Matt Little, a homesteader who’s also a case manager for a nonprofit that provides assistance to many of these fiercely independent souls, Conover documents how he and other homesteaders carve out an existence. This part of the West, where BLM stands not for Black Lives Matter but for the Bureau of Land Management, is not famously diverse, but Conover’s reportage reveals the wide array of sensibilities, lifestyles, and identities that coexist on these swaths of prairie. In this episode, Conover, an author and journalist who has gone undercover in slaughterhouses and penitentiaries, talks to web editor Violet Lucca about medical deserts, bartering with homegrown marijuana, and the second season of Deadwood. This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Like Occupy Wall Street, the Gilets Jaunes movement was born of an economic crisis, and has been driven by a desire for systemic change; the media has tarred supporters of both as anti-Semitic and misogynistic. But are the yellow vests’ protests also fated to fizzle out under the weight of their aspirations? In the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christopher Ketcham takes issue with such misrepresentations. Ketcham was beat up and teargassed alongside the Gilets Jaunes earlier this year while reporting on the origins and dynamics of the movement. He celebrates the Gilets Jaunes for both their politesse and their purposeful destruction of property. In this episode, Ketcham, author of the new book This Land, talks with web editor Violet Lucca about the cultural gulfs between the American and French traditions of protest, the military-industrial complex’s inordinate contributions to climate change, and Hillary Clinton, the “faithful servant of mammon.” Read Ketcham’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/a-play-with-no-end-gilets-jaunes/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

As time goes on, the world seems increasingly cruel and absurd—the president tweets hateful memes that originated on Reddit, which are then analyzed by the media and archived by the Library of Congress. But as Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Nicotine, and the forthcoming Doxology argues, it’s not that things are getting worse, but simply that they’ve never been in such clear, horrific focus. Her commitment to realism in her upcoming novel, excerpted in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, captures the brutal irony of modern life with care. Pam and Joe are caught in the genuine optimism of the early Nineties, and they attempt to become revolutionary rock stars and make love aimlessly and earnestly. When the gyre widens, they struggle against an overdetermined world that, as Zink puts it, “refuses to show its face.” Herself an ex-post-punk guitarist, Zink lived through the decade’s nascent hopefulness and bathetic turns. In this interview, she recalls the bygone era with candor and touches upon fluffy idealism, pet-centric zines, and her 10-hour writing days. Read “Marmalade Sky,” the excerpt from Doxology: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/07/marmalade-sky-nell-zink/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

2019 has been a banner year for xenophobia. Before news broke of lice-ridden migrant children forced to sleep on frigid cement, before the racist jokes Border Patrol officers traded on private Facebook groups were made public, President Trump sowed fear over “migrant caravans” headed for the land of the free—caravans that might’ve had “Middle Easterners” among their ranks. Such bald-faced lies conspired with long-sublimated national myths to obscure the actual crisis at our border, and to obscure the identities of those suffering the consequences. In the interviews and photographs that compose William T. Vollmann’s cover story for the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, people on both sides of the border—migrants, volunteers for charitable organizations that seek to help them, Trump fans, merchants, and others—come into focus. Their indivisible testimonies—of coyotes and ankle bracelets, of assaults and soup kitchens—build to a humble but unflinching indictment. In this week’s episode, Vollmann—a National Book Award–winning novelist and journalist—sits down with web editor Violet Lucca to talk about covering the region at this crucial moment. Read Vollmann’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/07/just-keep-going-north/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The mainstream fight for gay rights—for inclusion, for marriage equality—has been waged over fraught territory. Its victories—a changed and changing culture, legal and political leaps unimaginable half a century ago—are nothing short of monumental. But rainbow flags are as double-edged as they are fabulous. Visibility often means complicity; normalization can mean collective amnesia. At the Stonewall Inn in 1969, diverse queer folks rioted and danced, birthing the Gay Liberation Front and the Pride marches of today—many of which have become corporatized. The June issue of Harper’s Magazine featured “Stonewall at Fifty,” a forum of eight writers and artists across the L.G.B.T.Q.+ spectrum who offered personal and political reflections about a place that has become more symbol than structure. In this week’s episode, three of the forum’s contributors unpack Pride with web editor Violet Lucca. Novelist-essayist and Whiting Award¬–winner Alexander Chee insists on conceiving of the queer community not as a monolith but as an amalgam of queer communities: plural, overlapping, in challenging but transformative conversation. T Cooper, novelist and director of the award-winning 2018 documentary Man Made, charts empowerment for people of difference, which can move from the streets to the screen to the classroom, an activism as polyphonic as the identities it emboldens. And T Kira Madden, author of the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, encourages us to be buoyed, rather than dismayed, by the contradictions that the next fifty years of Pride and Stonewall will carry in tow.

Common sense seems to dictate that the rise of automation will bring about the economic demise of the working class. But need this be true? This assumption draws on a history of economic thought, from Malthus to Marx, that accepts laws such as the labor theory of value and the iron law of wages—laws that imply poverty as a necessary consequence—as inevitable. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Marilynne Robinson examines this history. Drawing upon Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, she explores economic theories that might support alternate modes of creating and distributing wealth across society. Robinson argues that, rather than being a corollary following from the laws of economics, “the creation of poverty is as fully intentional as the creation of wealth.” If poverty is not necessary but merely a consequence of how our current cultural beliefs and economic systems, how might we alter our notions of who creates value, and who benefits from it, in order to live in a more humane and just society? In this week’s episode, Christopher Beha, executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and the editor of “Is Poverty Necessary?,” speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about Marilynne Robinson’s self-education in economics, why poverty persists even as nations get richer, and whether a “third way” beyond Marxist theory and classical economics might exist. Read Robinson’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/is-poverty-necessary-marilynne-robinson/

Over the past few weeks, the legislatures of Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Utah have passed bills that have significantly restricted abortion to much earlier stages in pregnancy; Arkansas banned the procedure outright. However, this domino effect—which has been attributed to the presidency of Donald Trump and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—is part of a much older, coordinated attack on the rights established in Roe v. Wade. In this episode, Brigitte Amiri, a deputy director of the A.C.L.U. Reproductive Freedom Project, Madeleine Schwartz, a Harper’s Magazine contributor who has conducted interviews with former members of Jane, a pre-Roe reproductive health center in Chicago, and Rachel Nolan, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Columbia Society of Fellows and has written about El Salvador’s complete ban on abortion for Harper’s, discuss with web editor Violet Lucca the history of reproductive rights in the United States and elsewhere, the possible legal outcomes of these bills, and the very real consequences they pose for women’s health. Read excerpt from Schwartz’s interviews: https://harpers.org/archive/2017/04/jane-does/ Read Nolan’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/10/innocents/

For many Americans, our relationship with stuff ends when we take it to the curb on trash day. But for millions of items—everything from coat hangers to mattresses—this is the beginning of a second life, one that flows out the Miami River and on to Haiti. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rowan Moore Gerety explores how this process relies on cheap labor rather than cheap materials, the fine margins of which many Haitians rely on to survive. “Refugees from the northwest have long made up a disproportionate share of the ‘boat people,’” he writes. “Today, it remains Haiti’s poorest and most isolated region, and almost every family that can afford it has sent someone to South Florida in search of a living. For those who stay, fortunes rise and fall with the tide.” In this week’s episode, Moore Gerety talks with web editor Violet Lucca about how cocaine undergirds the industry, why a once agriculturally rich nation remains so poor, and how this story epitomizes the United States’ approach to territorial control in the Caribbean. Read Moore Gerety’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/downstream-haiti-american-junk/

The oxymoron “humanitarian war” is sometimes used ironically, at other times derisively, and still at others earnestly. In his recent book, excerpted in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, explores criteria deemed essential to justify violence. “While claiming to protect populations,” Brauman writes, “the United Nations is rehabilitating war—when in fact it was created to prevent it. And in granting itself the right to declare war and to call it ‘just,’ the U.N. is acting as both referee and player, and legalizing the conflation of judges and parties to a conflict.” In this week’s episode, Brauman is joined on a panel by Harper’s president and publisher John R. MacArthur and Columbia University professor Elazar Barkan. They probe the lessons of Libya, Somalia, and Kosovo; the threshold of violence that demands international involvement; and how the framework of humanitarianism can be co-opted, to disastrous effect, by propaganda. Read an excerpt of Brauman’s book here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/humanitarian-wars-regis-meyran-rony-brauman/

For most Salvadorans, it’s difficult to avoid the nation’s gangs, vast networks that manifest their power through extortion and territorial control. Why, then, do so many Salvadorans vilify a man who had made extraordinary progress toward easing gang violence? In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Castro follows Raúl Mijango, an ex-guerrilla commander who had built seemingly impossible inroads between the gangs and the Salvadoran government, only for it all to crumble. “The story of the truce and its dissolution is central to understanding the United States’ responsibility for the current migration crisis,” Castro writes, “and it suggests what it might take to comprehensively address the root problem of gang violence in El Salvador today.” In this week’s episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Castro about the origins of the violence, who stands to benefit from sustaining the conflict, and the price paid in the name of security. Read Castro’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/gang-truce-san-salvador-raul-mijango/

There remains an idea that society exacts its price, and that if we could simply bring ourselves to walk away from it all—our bank accounts, our homes, our internet connections—we could, like Thoreau, return to an Edenic existence. The truth, of course, is much more complicated. In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Joe Kloc explores the lives of anchor-outs, a group of people who live in abandoned boats near Sausalito, California, perhaps the last place in America where such a community exists. Although many of the hundred-plus anchor-outs chose to move there, Kloc discovers grimness along with high spirits. “Life is not easy. There is always a storm on the way, one that might capsize their boats and consign their belongings to the bottom of the bay. But when the water is calm and the harbormaster is away, the anchor-outs call their world Shangri-lito.” In this week’s episode, Kloc, an associate editor at Harper’s, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about how he befriended some of the anchor-outs, the surprising complexity of their economy, and how this microcosm illuminates the daily, unconscious decisions we make living in America. Read Kloc’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/lost-at-sea-richardson-bay/

It’s not a new question, but it is an especially timely one: How do children of immigrant parents absorb and, in turn, imagine an idea of their ancestral country? Pierre Jarawan’s new novel, The Storyteller, follows Samir, a German-born son of Lebanese immigrants. Samir’s father disappears without a trace when he’s just a boy, which shatters the family. Years later, Samir goes searching for his father in Lebanon, and he must reconcile the imagined paradise his father portrayed with the real country he’s never known. In this week’s episode, Jarawan speaks to web editor Violet Lucca about how his experience as a slam poet helped him write a more compelling book, how art like his fits into the political moment, and what it takes to tap into the details of childhood that help a story quicken and begin to breathe.

Adoption is often idealized as an altruistic, almost saintly act. But, throughout history and across cultures, the paths babies have taken to reach those well-meaning parents have frequently involved coercion or trafficking. In a report for the April issue, Rachel Nolan examines the checkered history of international adoptions from Guatemala, once one of the world’s top sources of adoptive children. Following one adoptee, Jean-Sebastien Hertsens Zune, as he returns in search of his origins, Nolan writes that “Zune is part of a wave of adult adoptees who are now returning to Guatemala to face disconcerting revelations about their pasts.” In this week’s episode, Nolan, a historian of modern Latin America and lecturer at Columbia University, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about the ways Guatemalan adoption complicates civil war, family, and attempts at reconciliation. Read Nolan’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/destined-for-export-guatemalan-adoptions/

Though we live in a politically factious era, our cultural landscape is dominated by consensus, where even the New York Times publishes top-books lists and must-see-TV listicles in place of measured criticism. What do we lose by squaring art away into tidy monoculture? In his cover story for the April issue, Christian Lorentzen calls upon anyone who enjoys serious literature to push back against feed-based culture: “The edifice of ‘books coverage’ that has been constructed around the work of critics looks a lot like the coverage of television—a tissue of lists, recommendations, profiles, Q&As, online book clubs, lifestyle features, and self-promotional essays by authors of new books—an edifice so slapdash it could be blown away in a week.” In this week’s episode, Lorentzen talks with web editor Violet Lucca about how digital culture has fallen short of its cultural promise, why fans are drowning out the critics, and the false allure of imposing order upon the infinite world of literature. Read Lorentzen’s cover story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/like-this-or-die/

Cy Twombly’s art was in many ways the perfect avatar of Cy Twombly the man. As an artist at the intersection between two major movements in the twentieth century, he was an unplaceable combination of art outsider and someone with high-art sensibility, an artist who eschewed Americana but was its apotheosis. In interviews, he was either intensely private or flippant toward the interviewer, qualities that only increased his appeal. In the March issue, Andrew Martin, author of the novel novel Early Work, reviews two new books about Twombly. In this conversation with web editor Violet Lucca, Martin upholds the ambiguities of the persona, the artist, and the art, and reflects on what we are to make of Twombly today. Read Martin’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/cy-twombly-fifty-days-at-iliam-the-art-and-erasure-of-cy-twombly/

Black artists, intellectuals, and writers have long been asked to process their pain for white audiences—which has led some well-intentioned white progressives to view pain as the entirety of the black experience. Recognizing this fact inevitably leads us to wonder: what would have James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time been like if he had only addressed his fourteen-year-old nephew, or included a letter to his nieces? Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body, and Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, both seek to expand and break out of limiting narratives around race in their work. On March 7, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Rachel Poser moderated a discussion with Bernard and Smith at Book Culture that weighed the delicacies of genre, the expectations of audiences, and the act of parlaying experience into art.

Playful, big-eyed, and highly intelligent, sea lions seem to beg for human attention—except they don’t, because they’re animals. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Sallie Tisdale examines how human intervention—specifically, the construction of massive dams that trap fish and rising ocean temperatures—has led sea lions to make their way to bodies of water they shouldn’t be in, specifically the Columbia River in Oregon. Tisdale makes the case that we must guide this population back into balance, or face a population of starving sea lions and environmental collapse. In this episode, Tisdale, author of Advice for Future Corpses and other books, discusses the emotional, economic, and environmental issues that have exacerbated this problem with web editor Violet Lucca. Read Tisdale’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/catechism-of-the-waters-sea-lions-columbia-river/

The popularity of white nationalism is not limited to predominantly white countries, and in South Africa, a country upheld as a model of racial reconciliation, white anxiety has coalesced around the notion that white farmers are being systematically murdered for their land. In our March issue, James Pogue travels to South Africa to investigate why this narrative is particularly enticing for white nationalists around the world, and galling for the millions of landless, poor black South Africans. “Personally, I had come to South Africa with a sense of despair,” Pogue writes, “bringing with me a question about whether it was possible that the only real answers left to the issue of whiteness were exactly the options presented by Roche and his racist allies: a choice between a power-obsessed vision of innate white superiority, which I would never share, or a kind of permanent self-loathing and apology for sins of the past, which I did not think was very workable as a politics.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Pogue, author of Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West, about how South Africa has failed to disentangle race and class after apartheid. Please consider donating to Pogue’s GoFundMe, which benefits his fixer, Mophethe, who was attacked with acid shortly after the story went online: https://www.gofundme.com/help-mophethe-recover-from-acid-attack

As medical technology continues to extend life spans, very little thought is given to the quality of those added years, or to what someone who is severely infirm but not terminally ill might need to feel fulfilled. In the February issue, Ann Neumann delves into the phenomenon of “mercy killings,” in which a man ends his spouse’s life once an illness has compromised her quality of life, and attempts suicide afterward. Not far from the house she grew up in, Neumann discovered the story of Philip and Becky Benight, two aging people in love who, after pushing against a system of care that disempowered them, decided to end their lives together. Their story is not unique; there are hundreds of so-called mercy killings each year in the United States, but our health care and legal systems have yet to catch up to the needs of the aging. In this audio essay, Philip Benight talks to Neumann and Violet Lucca, web editor of Harper’s Magazine, about his singular bond to Becky, the various institutions that sought to help but only hurt them, and the legal fallout of their actions. Read Neumann’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/going-to-extremes-elderly-assisted-suicide-caregivers/

Each year, millions of people around the globe are displaced, and while many are able to resettle through official channels, millions more are forced to travel through unofficial, unsanctioned, often dangerous paths. When migrants vanish, whose responsibility is it to find them? In his piece for the February issue, Matthew Wolfe follows Javed Hotak as he searches for his brother Masood, who disappeared while attempting to migrate from Afghanistan to Germany. “The families of these migrants are left to mount searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what has been ripped apart.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Wolfe, a journalist and graduate student in sociology at NYU, about the “immense, mostly hidden catastrophe” of missing migrants and the people who can’t forget them. Read the article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/without-a-trace-migrants-afghanistan-turkey-greece-bulgaria/

There is an exquisite irony about the rise of the internet and personal computing: although they were once hailed as safeguards against authoritarianism, that’s precisely what they now enable. In the January issue, Fred Turner explains how the challenge of these new modes of communication stems from historical narratives. “If we’re going to resist the rise of despotism, we need to understand how this happened and why we didn’t see it coming. We especially need to grapple with the fact that today’s right wing has taken advantage of a decades-long liberal effort to decentralize our media. That effort began at the start of the Second World War, came down to us through the counterculture of the 1960s, and flourishes today in the high-tech hothouse of Silicon Valley.” For this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Turner, a professor of communication at Stanford University, about how, in an era of disembodiment and disempowerment, we can reimagine collective action and reconfigure digital systems.

Although many august publications have survived the shift to digital, they have retained many of the problems in how print outlets make assignments and edit their writers’ work—particularly when it comes to race. In the December issue, Mychal Denzel Smith writes, “There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor. This is not new. Navigating the constraints of white supremacy while establishing a self-definition outside of it is what being black in America has always meant. Slave narratives are powerful firsthand accounts of the horrors of slavery and important assertions of black humanity. But each one, whether Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is compromised by the fact that its intended audience was almost exclusively white. It was never the enslaved who needed to hear about the brutality of enslavement.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by Smith, the author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education and a fellow at the Nation Institute, to consider the structural problems of the news media, and how they mirror larger problems in society.

What do a comic genius and an internationally renowned psychiatrist have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out. So much, in fact, that Harper’s Magazine and Book Culture on Columbus brought John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist together for two nights of conversation. On the first night, McGilchrist interviewed Cleese; on the second, Cleese interviewed McGilchrist. With wit and intelligence, the two men delved into the philosophical and biological underpinnings of how we each understand the world.

What do a comic genius and an internationally renowned psychiatrist have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out. So much, in fact, that Harper’s Magazine and Book Culture on Columbus brought John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist together for two nights of conversation. On the first night, McGilchrist interviewed Cleese; on the second, Cleese interviewed McGilchrist. With wit and intelligence, the two men delved into the philosophical and biological underpinnings of how we each understand the world.

Social media has changed “the future of history.” Our lives and the historical events of our time are recorded differently now, with tweets and Instagram posts replacing letters and film rolls as primary sources for future generations to study. In the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, the writer and journalist Nora Caplan-Bricker delves into the world of internet archiving to explore how traditional methods of preservation are being adapted to accommodate our digital footprints. “Preservation Acts” chronicles the changes in attitudes toward archiving the internet over the past decade, as archivists shift from attempts at wholesale preservation to selective processes that take into account ethical considerations surrounding our rights and privacy online. In this week’s podcast, Caplan-Bricker joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss the fast-moving field of digital preservation; contextualizing and prioritizing tweets in the age of Russian bots; preserving discourse from the darker corners of the internet; and the challenges of ethical archiving in a digital age.

With over 45,000 agents in its ranks, US Customs and Border Protection is the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Yet, as Melissa del Bosque notes in “Checkpoint Nation,” CBP’s jurisdiction extends farther than even congressional leaders realize, and relatively little is known by the broader public about how the agency operates. Last month, del Bosque, an investigative journalist and Lannan reporting fellow at the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, joined Rachel Poser, a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, to discuss her article and the issues surrounding border enforcement. Live in conversation in Austin, Texas, at an event co-presented with The Texas Observer, del Bosque and Poser explore how, and why, the CBP has expanded over time, the use and abuse of checkpoints, and the legal strategies currently being employed by groups such as the ACLU in order to push back against CBP’s power.

In one of the most closely watched races of this midterm election cycle, Ted Cruz narrowly defeated Beto O’Rourke to gain reelection to the Senate for a second term. Unpopular among Democrats and Republicans alike, Cruz has been a target of national derision since his election on a Tea Party platform in 2012. In “The Tragedy of Ted Cruz,” published in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, Ana Marie Cox goes in search of the Texas senator, hoping, perhaps in vain, to find some common ground with the man for whom she has an unlikely “soft spot.” Cox joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her article, Cruz’s self-made caricature, what she thinks drives the senator, and whether some of the mockery of Cruz and his family goes too far. This episode also deals with the aftermath of the midterm elections: Cox and Lucca discuss their hopes for the future of progressive politics post-Beto, both in Texas and across the country, the roles the media and politicians like Cruz have played in amplifying white nationalist voices, and whether there are any Republicans left to temper Trump’s impulses. Read Ana’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/11/the-tragedy-of-ted-cruz/

Western Pennsylvania is a haunted-house mecca, boasting 40 haunts (as their owners like to call them) within 40 miles. With readymade Rust Belt ruins, low rents, and the horror legacy of George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead, Martin, and Creepshow, the area offers DIY scares as well as expansive Hollywood attractions. This episode is an audio tour of some of these haunts and the owners who have an undying love for them. Read Rachel Wilkinson’s full story here: https://harpers.org/blog/2018/10/the-haunting-of-western-pennsylvania

By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. The Republican Party, led by a president elected by a minority of voters, is advancing a set of policies that fewer and fewer Americans support, and with four sitting Supreme Court justices appointed by either President Trump or President George W. Bush, who also lost the popular vote, the impact of this imbalance of power is likely to be felt for decades to come. With political divisions seemingly becoming ever more intractable, are fears that the United States is on the brink of a second civil war really so far-fetched? In his November cover story “Rebirth of a Nation,” Jonathan Taplin proposes that, in order to protect and advance the interests of the majority, progressives must fight to counter federal power, in favor of a new emphasis on states’ rights. In this episode, Taplin joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss why decentralization is the way forward, how states like California are leading the way, and why he is not optimistic about the so-called blue wave in the upcoming midterm elections.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an Associate Justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, this event illustrated of how we are socialized to perform and understand gender, race, and class. In this week’s episode, new books columnist Lidjia Haas joins Web Editor Violet Lucca to discuss a handful of recent publications that deal with these issues: Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, and Kristen M. Ghoddsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. In the second segment, Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and Telex From Cuba joins Lucca to discuss an essay she wrote which was included in the October Readings section, pulled from her memories of the late Nineties New York art world.

The advent of radical centrism; journalists’ fantasy that they are part of the professional elite; the shuttering of local newspapers; the impending extinction of the book editor; your Comp Lit degree from Brown: All are symptoms and causes of the dissolution of American society. In June, the day after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory in the Bronx led many (but perhaps too few) to rethink the future of the Democratic Party, and the evening after we’d learned that Trump would be filling his second seat on the Supreme Court, Thomas Frank delves into his freakishly prescient book, Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. “The con-game is our national pastime,” he says. “And so we come to Donald Trump.”

Natalie Holly reads Jenn Alandy Trahan’s short story from the September issue “They Told Us Not to Say This.” Then, Trahan joins Web Editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of her work. Trahan is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she was a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction.

Hailed as a major victory for conservatives seeking to reduce collective-bargaining rights, the recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 has further emphasized the precarious position occupied by American unions. Formerly ranked in the top tier of nations for collective-bargaining rights by the International Trade Union Confederation, the United States is currently in the fourth of five tiers, alongside Argentina and Peru. As mainstream political support for labor causes has dried up and hard-won protections gotten rolled back, traditional methods of labor activism have been constrained, leaving workers all the more vulnerable to exploitation. In his September cover story “Labor’s Last Stand,” Garret Keizer explores how the labor movement, from union representatives, to grassroots activists, is fighting to secure “a place at the table” for American workers. In this episode, author and Harper’s contributing editor Keizer joined Web Editor Violet Lucca to discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by today’s workforce (unionized or not), and the future of the American labor movement.

There are 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and, by one estimate, one in ten of them has been the victim of some sort of fraud—deceived by scammers who promise to expedite their visas, free them from detention, or help with their asylum claims for a fee. The true scale of these schemes, collectively known as notario fraud, is impossible to know because victims are reluctant to come forward for fear of being deported. And the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy is now creating the perfect conditions for scammers to thrive. In “The Deportation Racket,” Micah Hauser investigates a husband-and-wife team of con artists who pretended to be lawyers and scammed hundreds of undocumented immigrants in detention centers across the South. In this episode, Hauser, a former fellow at Columbia Journalism School’s Global Migration Project, talks with Harper’s editor Rachel Poser about how the pair operated, and what needs to be done to protect immigrants from fraudsters.

When both war and the military-industrial complex hum unchallenged in the background of American life, it turns out that a fighter pilot, in the right circumstances, has the ability to launch a nuclear attack. Barack Obama’s commitment to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal over the next twenty-five years at a cost of at least $1.2 trillion failed to generate public outrage; now that Donald Trump is president, the call to reevaluate Cold War procedures has become freshly urgent. In his August issue story “How to Start a Nuclear War,” Harper’s Washington Editor Andrew Cockburn reveals just how few controls stand between the president and a nuclear launch. Cockburn joins Web Editor Violet Lucca to discuss why we’re still so close to nuclear war—and what it would take to step back from the brink.

The western United States is experiencing longer-burning, wider ranging, and more deadly fires now than at any point in the past century. The attitude towards fire and fire management in the rural West and Washington, however, has changed little in the last 100 years: Rather than letting it burn, as part of a natural process, firefighters must risk their lives to extinguish it; requiring the use of fire-retardant materials in homebuilding, tree-thinning on at-risk property, or restricting where homes can be built is dismissed as “big government.” In his August cover story “Combustion Engines,” Richard Manning reports from the fires that swept through Montana’s Lolo National Forest last summer and reveals the social and political obstacles to protecting American communities from fire. In this episode, Manning, a longtime Montana resident and frequent contributor to Harper’s, joined Web Editor Violet Lucca to discuss how we must all adapt to better live with new normal. “The West is just the vanguard,” says Manning. Soon other parts of the world, including the American Northeast, will be facing fire too. Read Manning’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/08/lolo-peak-rice-ridge-mega-fires/

The United States has the largest population of prisoners in the world: at present, nearly 2.2 million adults are inside correctional facilities. The incarcerated are disproportionately African-American and Latinx, and nearly half have been diagnosed with a mental illness. In her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, journalist Alisa Roth reports on the lack of care available to these vulnerable populations, and describes the abuse and punishment that exacerbates their illnesses. This conversation between Roth and Eyal Press took place at Book Culture on April 24, 2018.

Bank-owned bikeshares and empty condos. Record numbers of homeless families and “curated” pop-up shops. A poverty level that’s higher than the “Fear City”–era. Such are the realities of living in New York City in 2018. In his July cover story “The Death of a Great American City,” Kevin Baker peels back the veneer of urban affluence and reveals how public amenities have been gradually destroyed by private interests and neglect from politicians. In this inaugural episode of The Harper’s Podcast, Web Editor Violet Lucca is joined by Baker and Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, to discuss the neoliberal underpinnings of this decline and how to reverse it. Read Kevin Baker’s feature here: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/