HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.
Body Politic It’s fitting that Andrew Cockburn’s excellent overview of abortion politics [“The Fight to Choose,” Letter from Washington, August] begins with a dead woman: Savita Halappanavar, who died of a septic miscarriage in Ireland in 2012. It is fitting, too, that Halappanavar wasn’t seeking an elective abortion at the time of her death; her pregnancy was wanted, but non-viable. Many people in the United States may soon find themselves in her predicament: in desperate need of lifesaving medical care but in a hospital unable or unwilling to provide it. As the philosopher Kate Manne has argued, misogyny depends on a distinction between “good women” (generous, servile, sexually available) and “bad women” (selfish, ambitious, out of reach). The former are celebrated; the latter are denigrated, threatened, even killed. When abortion…
When I was a kid, we played a game: would you rather be given eternal happiness or told the secrets of the universe? I always chose secrets. In Eugene, Oregon, where I lived until age ten, you could see the Milky Way at night, a big glittering highway of stars. Now most people in the United States and Europe can’t see the Milky Way at all. Maybe kids today will form their celestial musings from the Webb telescope and its surreal imagery of early star life. Pondering the universe is part of childhood. It’s as if kids are on duty, wondering about UFOs and black holes and where the universe ends and what the hell is outside of it, while adults cease their shift on night watch. They leave it…
“Precise and atmospheric, combining fierce intellectual kick with an openness to nuance…. [Nelson asks] how to live in a world with crushing oppression, alongside people with cruel and violent beliefs, without giving into despair or violence yourself.” —Annalisa Quinn, NPR.org “On Freedom is ultimately a book that asks us to boldly and generously enter the minefield, to pick up what we find useful, to be pushed and provoked, to polish and discard and reinvent, and then to decide, alone and, ideally, in communion, where to go next.” —Meara Sharma, The Washington Post graywolfpress.org…
Percentage change since 2019 in the portion of Americans who believe environmental laws are worth the cost : −23 Percentage of U.S. voters who view climate change as the most important problem facing the country : 1 Of U.S. voters under thirty who do : 3 Percentage by which American men are more likely than women to support nuclear power : 47 By which men are more likely than women to have donated blood : 32 Percentage by which Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to have donated sperm : 50 By which more Democratic than Republican congress members have announced testing positive for COVID-19 : 48 Percentage by which Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be afraid of crowded spaces : 40 By which women are…
[Essay] NO GUARANTEES By Anna Badkhen, from “Dark Matter,” an essay that appears in Bright Unbearable Reality, which will be published this month by New York Review Books. There are no cattle on the ranch, though my landlady does have several cats. Beyond the wire fence is wilderness, high desert; wilderness inside the ranch, too. There are mule deer and white-tailed deer with translucent ears at dawn, a fox in the carport, a woodpecker metronoming the mesquite tree all day, mourning doves, owls by night. One morning, I leave open the door of my rental casita and a javelina walks in, walks out. Outside the ranch fence, pronghorn sometimes pass in the light. Pronghorn are the world’s fastest mammals over long distances. They can sustain a speed of sixty miles…
The story liberals tell themselves goes something like this: Once, the black-cassocked sages of the Supreme Court summoned forth the true spirit of the Constitution. Their rulings vastly enlarged the civil rights of marginalized Americans, sparing the nation the worst designs of Dixiecratic hatemongers, puritanical moralists, fascistic police chiefs, and venal industrialists. The court struck down Jim Crow laws, expanded the franchise, and erected guardrails to constrain the punitive machinery of the state. Its major cases became metonyms for enlightenment and virtue: Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v. Wainwright, Roe v. Wade. Throughout the land, upstanding citizens beheld the court’s beneficence and rejoiced. But nemesis haunts every heroic age and, by and by, this good court would succumb to the corrupting influence of lesser men. The hatemongers, moralists, police…
