Harper's Magazine

06/25/2024

Travis Scott was arrested for trespassing and disorderly intoxication after breaking into a Miami yacht to yell at its passengers; Scott admitted that he had been drinking and explained himself by saying that “it’s Miami”; he has since begun selling a shirt bearing those words underneath a photo of his mug shot, which had been digitally altered to feature a broad smile.

https://harpers.org/2024/06/weekly-review-muwasi-refugees-blitzkrieg-hezbollah-gaza-war-crimes-starvation-west-bank-aid-hajj-heat-climate-activism-taylor-swift-boeing-juneteenth-putin-kim-jong-un-dui-travis-scott-miami/

A commemoration of the rapper’s brief arrest in Miami Beach, the shirt reinforced the idea that for some celebrities, a brush with the law can be good for business.

06/25/2024

Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Benjamín Labatut has written a spirited treatise on the philosophical threat posed by AI, and a winding historical narrative about its intellectual predecessors—a fascinating and tortured set of characters that include the 19th century mathematician George Boole, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, logician Walter Pitts, and finally Boole’s great-great-grandson, Geoffrey Hinton, who put his ancestor's ideas into practice as a computer scientist and vice president at Google, developing neural networks and some of the early iterations of what we now know of as AI, before quitting to warn the world about the dangers of these creations.

Before and after artificial intelligence

06/20/2024

“All you can authentically do is reproduce the flow, make your art as much like life as possible. If there’s a problem with immediacy as a style, it’s that it abolishes critical distance. Instead of an interrogation of reality, which is surely one of the jobs of art, there’s just affirmation, clicks and likes, a big thumbs-up for things just as they are.”

July 2024 Issue [Easy Chair] Be Here Now Download PDF Adjust Share by Hari Kunzru, On March 14, 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic sat down at a small table in the center of a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Visitors were invited to take a seat opposite her and meet her gaze. She re...

06/19/2024

“Do you know any alcoholics or drug addicts? If so, you have a good idea of how the lies of addicts can erode the life of a family or a couple. Do you know to what extent greed and rivalry can deprive children not only of money but also of love? That’s the story of O’Neill’s (Irish) family and of my own family (on the Scottish side), both destroyed by premature deaths, each poisoned by the uniquely American disease of every man for himself – a fundamental hostility to helping one another.”

https://harpers.org/2024/06/american-disease/

06/18/2024

In Rome, attendees of a Pride parade carried cardboard cutouts of Pope Francis days after it was reported that he used a homophobic slur for the second time in recent weeks. “Priests sometimes talk a lot, and you don’t understand what they are talking about,” said the Holy Father, instructing priests to keep their speeches under eight minutes so as to dissuade their congregants from falling asleep. During a speech in which he got the name of his doctor wrong, Donald Trump challenged President Biden to take a cognitive test. Congressman Greg Steube introduced a bill that would rename the coastal waters around the United States “the Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States,” a former White House staffer claimed that on several occasions Trump mused out loud about executing people while in office, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the former president to Jesus Christ.

https://harpers.org/2024/06/weekly-review-gaza-netanyahu-humanitarian-aid-united-nations-who-malnutrition-ukraine-zelenskyy-modi-meloni-pope-pride-slur-execution-sugar-daddy-degenerate-crypto-rodeo/

06/17/2024

Resisting AI; facing the ghosts of resistance and exile in Cologne; among the ruins of Aleppo; fiction by Nicolette Polek and Joy Williams; the political history of Olympics pictograms; Donna Tartt, Simone Weil, Hari Kunzru, and more, in the July issue, now available https://harpers.org/archive/2024/07/

06/15/2024

“The twenty-first century’s protagonists of history, according to white-collar common sense, do not sweat in fields or factories, much less carry bundles down country roads. The involuntary, palpitating life palpitates elsewhere now. It flashes and darts through a vortex of global finance, trade, and engineering, somehow producing AI search engines, coronavirus vaccines, and the blockchain, all without the input of a single mud-stained worker. This may be pure ideology. But it carries a political odor, and surely has something to do with the kind of hardy perennial one so often sees in the New York Times: why do the democrats keep losing the working class?”

Matthew Karp

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/easy-chair-as-if-you-was-a-insect-matthew-karp/

06/14/2024

“After trying your hand at the market, you might realize you’re not that good at this buying low and selling high, nor do you have the know-how to diversify your portfolio enough to mitigate risk. So you give your money to someone who has told you, or at least implied—but never promised, and certainly not on paper—that over time, they can make more for you than you can make for yourself, even after taking their fees into account. This relationship can assume quite a few forms, though one of the most popular has been the mutual fund, in which the savings of many individual investors are pooled together and controlled by money managers. Though they’re commonplace today (by 2022, just over half of U.S. households had shares in at least one mutual fund), they didn’t get Joe and Jane Investor’s attention until the Sixties—when funds began advertising to the broader public—and only really started to catch on in the Eighties, thanks to a bull market, name-brand stock pickers like Peter Lynch and Michael F. Price, and the rise of the retirement plan.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/what-goes-up-andrew-lipstein-401k-doomsday-index-fund-catastrophe/

06/13/2024

“No one can torch the English language like a Beltway insider. A few years ago, phrases like ‘a feature, not a bug’ and ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ burned so fiercely through the Washington commentariat that they enjoyed hardly a moment between the flame of novelty and the ash of cliché.”

Have you read Dan Piepenbring’s New Books column? If you haven’t, you are in for a treat!

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/new-books-dan-piepenbring-all-the-worst-humans-frostbite-spycraft/

06/12/2024

“It is difficult to conceive of manual laborers—let alone rural, Trump-voting American workers—as a source of our own wealth and comfort. To the extent that urban liberals appreciate this logic at all, it drifts toward dim and distant thoughts about supply chains, and perhaps the dark origins of the iPhone in a Chinese factory or Congolese cobalt mine. If anything, the argument travels in the opposite direction.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/easy-chair-as-if-you-was-a-insect-matthew-karp/

06/07/2024

T.D. Allman reported on the U.S. led repression of a guerilla insurgency in El Salvador at a time when America’s support for that country’s military dictatorship was at its height. “However diligently one searched for significance,” he wrote in 1981, “one found only terrorized, hapless people — abused, barefoot women with no food or medicine for their malnourished children; landless, jobless, illiterate men and boys fleeing for their lives from the ‘security forces’ of their own national government; mutilated bodies beside the road.”

06/06/2024

“Two centuries after our independence from Britain, our past is to us what the monarchy has become to the British. It long ago lost the power to govern our actions, and its illusory glitter often blinds us to the realities of both the world and our place in it. But the past, if we are willing to listen, still has the power to warn.”

T.D. Allman, from “The Doctrine That Never Was,” which appeared in the January 1984 issue

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/the-monroe-fantasy/

06/04/2024

Sprinkler, a painting by Olivia Hill, whose work was on view in April at Bel Ami, in Los Angeles.

Courtesy the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles

la

06/04/2024

“Political retribution,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson; “political malpractice,” complained Senator Mitt Romney; “fascism,” railed Senator J.D. Vance; “the kind of thing you would expect to see in the communist U.S.S.R.,” groused GOP co-chair Lara Trump.

https://harpers.org/2024/06/weekly-review-ceasefire-red-lines-elections-corruption-trump-guilty-coup-campaign-alito-flags-supreme-court-ethics-right-to-vote-south-korea-north-korea-balloons-kim-jong-un-beijing-pandas-adams-rats/

05/31/2024

As predicted in January 2017

05/30/2024

Harper’s Magazine and the John Templeton Foundation present

Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner in conversation

https://tickets.nyu.edu/harpersmagazine

Thursday, June 20
7 - 9 PM
NYU Skirball Center
566 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY
This event is free and open to the public, however seating is limited. Reserve here:
https://tickets.nyu.edu/harpersmagazine

Farrar, Straus and Giroux NYU Skirball NYU Skirball Center Ben Lerner

05/24/2024

“Perrine, Florida, 1981,” a photograph by Sage Sohier, whose work was on view in April at Joseph Bellows Gallery, in La Jolla, California.
Sohier’s book Passing Time was published last year by Nazraeli Press.

Courtesy the artist and Setanta Books

press

05/22/2024

At a bar in Kyiv, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken performed “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young a day before announcing $2 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine. “The United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting, not just for Ukraine but for the free world,” he said from the stage. “What the United States performs for the free world is not rock ’n’ roll, but some other music similar to Russian chanson,” said a Ukrainian lawmaker and former diplomat.

https://harpers.org/2024/05/weekly-review-hostages-gaza-israeli-ministers-kyiv-blinken-iran-slovakia-new-caledonia-student-protesters-simpsons-harrison-butker-wife-blame-kavanaugh-king-charles-portrait-blood-snakes-portal-potato/

05/21/2024

Buckingham Palace unveiled King Charles III’s first official portrait since his coronation. “Yes, you’ve got him,” was Queen Camilla’s response to the work.

https://harpers.org/2024/05/weekly-review-hostages-gaza-israeli-ministers-kyiv-blinken-iran-slovakia-new-caledonia-student-protesters-simpsons-harrison-butker-wife-blame-kavanaugh-king-charles-portrait-blood-snakes-portal-potato/

05/21/2024

“Against a backdrop of recent financial hubris—including meme stocks, crypto, NFTs, SPACs, SPARCs, and alternative private-public investments— index funds are the safe bet, the old standby, a choice so sound your employer makes it for you. The question is whether this is proof that passive investing can’t be a bubble—or only a sign we need to rethink what a bubble can be.”

Andrew Lipstein on the peril of passive investing

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/what-goes-up-andrew-lipstein-401k-doomsday-index-fund-catastrophe/

05/20/2024

The June issue gets scary about index funds; plus Matthew Karp on George Eliot and the Democrats’ class problem, the epistles of Paul Schrader to the Californians, the cult that survived end times, fiction by Michael Deagler and lots more.

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/

05/16/2024

“In 2010, I was forwarded a letter this magazine received in which the writer complained about an ungrammatical sentence. As both the author of the offending sentence and—in the one real, full-time job I’ve ever held—something like this publication’s usage authority, I felt obliged to reply, and explained that the sentence in question ('five white tigers in a Chinese zoo had become fearful of the live chickens offered them as food') was definitely kosher, though I understood it sounded a little archaic not to say 'offered to them.' This was not enough for my correspondent.”

So begins The Branson Pilgrim...

Wherein the author spends a decade acquiring knowledge of country and/or western music, Elvis’s stillborn twin, Bidenomics in the wild, bathroom cruising, wax statuary, race relations, and the soul of the nation

05/15/2024

“I would like to see all Afghan girls permitted to go to school, but not if they can only do so under the permanent protection of soldiers from Kansas or California. So well done, Mr. Biden. Stunted since childhood in focus and judgment, former president Trump ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan just before the end of his term, without any planning and, oddly, without notifying the armed forces before signing the order.”

The Biden Administration has a selling point that is even less visible than the withdrawal from Afghanistan: the antitrust campaign by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

05/14/2024

“How terrible it is, Sophia thinks. How terrible is the lot of women. And what might this woman say if Sophia told her about the new struggles, women’s battle for votes and places at the universities? She might say, But that is not as God wills. And if Sophia urged her to get rid of this God and sharpen her mind, would she not look at her— Sophia—with a certain stubborn pity, and exhaustion, and say, How then, without God, are we to get through this life?”

Alice Munro, August 2009

https://harpers.org/archive/2009/08/too-much-happiness/

05/14/2024

The first man to receive a genetically modified pig kidney transplant died two months after the operation, the remains of a Vietnam veteran were identified 50 years after their discovery by Arizona farmers chasing a runaway pig, and two pet pigs were mistakenly killed by mobile butchers in Washington State. Hundreds of wasps attacked Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza after they drove their tank over a nest.“Everyone got stung at least a couple of times,” said the fire chief of Clinton, Maine, of the first responders tasked with containing 15 million honeybees after the tractor-trailer transporting them overturned. The driver of a box truck crashed and caused an hour’s worth of stalled traffic after suffering a sneezing fit in New Hampshire, and in Oklahoma, another driver crashed his truck into a power pole after a Chihuahua jumped into his lap.

https://harpers.org/2024/05/rafah-west-bank-israel-egypt-south-africa-al-jazeera-campus-encampments-trinity-magna-carta-westminster-dog-show-kendrick-lamar-drake-wrestle-pigs-wasps-crash-punch/

05/08/2024

“Rich people tended not to bother celebrities, though. Rich people didn’t even look at celebrities, whereas Manny knew that if he so much as walked across coach now, two or three guys would stop him to chat, ten would stare, twenty others would badly pretend not to stare. He’d wondered what it was with rich people, if they went through rich-people training once they’d amassed a certain amount of wealth, an intensive course in which they were taught how to properly eat an ortolan, and to leave celebrities alone because it was déclassé to care about fame. Although he hadn’t been offered that course, and he had to be richer than most people on the plane.”⁠
⁠
From “New Material,” a story by Camille Bordas

Collage by Joanna Neborsky ⁠

May 2024 Issue [Fiction] New Material Download PDF Adjust Share by Camille Bordas, Collages by Joanna Neborsky Manny hadn’t opened the blinds in a week. There were too many windows in his brownstone, and he feared paparazzi might be hanging around the block. Though, in all honesty, it wasn’t jus...

05/07/2024

Donald Trump hand delivered pizzas to firefighters amid his hush-money trial. “A lot of people talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—you know, I’m a fan of his father and, you know, his uncle—rest in peace. I remember where I was the day he was killed. I mean, it was a tragic day. The entire country wept,” said JFK’s only grandson, Jack Schlossberg, while performing as a non-descript Boston man named Jimmy in one video from a series he posted to Instagram, which also included his impressions of a southern horse farmer named Wade, and Vladimir Putin.

https://harpers.org/2024/05/weekly-review-hostages-impasse-slaughter-doctor-housing-destruction-protesters-campuses-antarctica-arrests-palantir-drone-strike-nypd-columbia-city-college-biden-israel-palestine-bird-moon-lando-jfk/

05/04/2024

This past year a refurbished Star Wars seemed to be everywhere, but I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness; also a sense of moral good and fun. But then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes, I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form, and I guessed that one day they would explode. "I would love you to do something for me," I said. "Anything! Anything!" the boy replied rapturously. "You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do," I said. "Anything, sir, anything!" "Well," I said, "do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?" He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. "What a dreadful thing to say to a child!" she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right, but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

Sir Alec Guiness, July 1998


https://harpers.org/archive/1998/07/obi-wan-rethinks-his-past/

05/04/2024

“One of the great postapocalyptic visions of the ruin-haunted Sixties was the final scene of Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty half submerged in the sand. Often, it can feel as if America is still at the cinema, replaying his square-jawed anguish over and over again.”

Hari Kunzru

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/ruin-haunted-hari-kunzru/

05/03/2024

“When we make art, we don’t know how it will work out, what it will mean. The writing, the novels, the essays: he did them in a place and in a time, in a country, that has no real love of certain people and certain things and no real love of literature, no real love of black people doing anything, really, that can’t be appropriated. We must remember that there are a great many things that African Americans have done, making something out of the despair and the horror of the mess they found themselves in, and that they’ve been simply lifted up out of their culture. The blind faith he had in just saying these things, writing these things, doing, living this life and not knowing how it would go. Would it be remembered? Would it vanish? He got inspiration, it seems to me, from the essential life that was going on in the country at the time, the essential life of America, which is something Americans would like to forget. The essential existence of America is the African American.”

Jamaica Kincaid on James Baldwin

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/a-people-i-know-jamaica-kincaid-god-made-my-face-a-collective-portrait-of-james-baldwin/