Harper's Magazine

Indecent Exposure Daniel Kolitz’s article on gooning [“The Goon Squad,” Report, November] is entertaining, vivid, and unusually well-reported for a legacy outlet tackling an online subculture. He joins a Discord server, surveys participants, and situates gooning in a lineage of adult media spanning magazines, tube sites, social-media feeds, and creator platforms. He also identifies a real formal innovation: porn music videos, a distinct, beatsynced genre with its own authors and audiences. But the framing of the piece skews moralizing and voyeuristic. Opening with a crime and a suicide that have little to do with gooning invites guilt by association and primes readers for panic; sensationalizing flourishes in such phrases as “pornography cult” and “gooner terror attacks” add little and don’t match the behavior that Kolitz documents. Methodologically, the piece leans…

The first time around, there was something almost thrilling about Donald Trump as president. His administration furnished the virtuous with a kind of negative pole against which to define themselves. Here was a foolish and incompetent tribune of the nation’s racist vulgarians, opposed by the prosperous and the well educated, the civilized and the tolerant. It was somehow fulfilling to imagine him as a bumbling villain, a Russian operative of some kind, or Adolf Hitler returned to life. The respectable world came together against him with a gratifying unanimity: the legacy media, the nonprofits, the universities, the think tanks, the tech sector, the intelligence community. Insulting this imbecile became the most rewarding pastime on earth. For much of 2025, by contrast, a pall of dread seemed to hang over the…

If you want a clear X-ray of an era, every triumph and delusion crisply rendered, you can always study its art. In the case of the United States, however, it might be more revealing to study its art museums. Such anxious, blustery things! By the time a new museum renovation has hatched, a successor is already pecking through its shell. The final products slant and shift their weight as though aware that there is nothing final about them. I have started thinking of them as spaceships to nowhere. In New York, there’s always another on its way. A few months ago, a new one touched down at 231 Bowery, its precursor having arrived next door in 2007, the year of Obamamania and the iPhone and the first gentle rustlings of…

My glorious and dearly beloved king, There is a secret that can be revealed to my august and gracious friend only in the hour of my death, but then it will become clear to him what today must seem obscure: that he alone is the creator and author of all that the world will attribute to my name from this day on. My sole reason for living is the wondrous love that descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend—as though from the lap of God—fructifying new seeds of life within me! And the sole creator of this life is my gracious friend, the savior who leads me to a new religion, a religion that brings forth a second, new life from deep within…

Founding of literary-cultural review magazine, Print. Submissions recruited; failed to raise money; abandoned. Neglected (shamefully) to communicate with contributors. (1998) An edited collection of essays on early modern secrets. Stalled after two meetings. (2001) An article on the circulation of Ben Jonson’s poetry. Written; rejected for failing to adequately consider musical contexts; put in a drawer somewhere and unseen since. (2001) A nonfiction book about fatherhood. Pages of notes, quotes, then ran aground, partly because everyone seemed to be thinking of writing the same book (but also never did). (2009) A database of books printed in English, in England, in 1609. Large spreadsheet; on completion, all sense of purpose evaporated. What is the point of this? Dormant file on desktop. (2010) An article on the early modern sense of the…

Our ship, the Conscience, an old repurposed ferry joining the latest wave of flotillas seeking to penetrate Israel’s sixteen-year naval blockade of Gaza to supply humanitarian aid, was sailing southeastward in the international waters of the Mediterranean, near the Suez Canal, more than one hundred nautical miles from Israeli or Palestinian territory. Over the ship’s loudspeaker, the captain alerted us to assemble on the deck; the Israeli military was approaching. Military vessels surrounded us as helicopters churned overhead, whipping up wind and spray and drowning out our chants of “We are journalists. We are medics.” Soldiers rappelled from the helicopters to the upper deck and trained their rifles on us. They ordered us out of our seats, to take off our life vests and shoes, empty our pockets, and submit…