Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Harper's Magazine

Earlier this year, researchers from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands released a proposal for the “Beacon in the Galaxy,” a message designed to solicit contact from alien worlds. Unlike previous earthbound suggestions, from digging a fiery trench in the Sahara to outfitting the Eiffel Tower with mirrors aimed at Mars, the BITG, if sent, would broadcast an encoded radio message to distant star systems. Work on the BITG began in late 2019, when Jonathan Jiang, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was studying how advanced civilizations in the Milky Way would be affected by war, industrialization, and biotechnology. He found that even if the probability of a nuclear apocalypse were just .01 percent, few civilizations would survive much longer than humans have already. Jiang…

When telling a story, history’s imperfect record sometimes insists upon inconvenient gaps. This is the case with Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a remarkable tale that spans centuries, countries, and players. Undaunted, Joseph Luzzi, a professor of comparative literature at Bard College, has undertaken the complex narrative with erudition and passion in his new book, BOTTICELLI’S SECRET (W. W. Norton, $28.95). These religious illustrations are, as Andrew Butterfield put it, “among the most lively, tender, and psychologically searching works [Botticelli] ever created.” They were commissioned in the early 1480s by a member of the Florentine Medici family from an artist most famous today for the pagan masterpieces Primavera and The Birth of Venus. Botticelli worked on the drawings for well over a decade, but what happened next is uncertain, not…

The increasing conservatism that comes with age is largely a consequence of raising children; small children, but not macaques and capuchins, can perceive faces in inanimate objects; and psychopathic traits, particularly meanness and disinhibition, protect against PTSD. Cooperation among strangers in the United States increased slightly between 1956 and 2017. Americans and Chinese who are considered to possess superior morality by their acquaintances report greater than average happiness, and condomless intercourse among metropolitan Chinese men who have sex with men has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic. An evaluation of natal males and natal females using the Core Autogynephilia Scale found low autogynephilia among the non-autogynephilic. A survey of five cultures found that laughter shared by romantic partners sounds warmer, more feminine, and more submissive than laughter…

[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…

Matt Johnson wanted me to watch a protest at a chicken slaughterhouse, and I didn’t want to go. As the press coordinator for the animal-rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), Matt’s job is to get journalists interested in these kinds of events, and he was trying pretty hard in his texts to me, insisting that the event was a big deal. It didn’t sound like one to me; it sounded like something I’d already read about dozens of times. I figured that if I went, I’d loiter at a lawful distance from the activists chaining themselves to private property, take notes, have trouble finding somewhere to pee, and wonder when it would be acceptable to leave without appearing rude or lacking in compassion for the chickens. Then it would end.…

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…

St. Francis once converted a wolf to reason. The wolf of Gubbio promised to stop terrorizing an Italian town; he made pledges and assurances and pacts, and he kept his part of the bargain. But St. Francis only performed this miracle once, and as miracles go, it didn’t seem to capture the public’s fancy. Humans don’t want to enter into a pact with animals. They don’t want animals to reason. It would be an unnerving experience. It would bring about all manner of awkwardness and guilt. It would make our treatment of them seem, well, unreasonable. The fact that animals are voiceless is a relief to us, it frees us from feeling much empathy or sorrow. If animals did have voices, if they could speak with the tongues of angels—at…

GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT Solvers with good memories may remember the puzzle of August 2018, in which Robert “Yauser” Yau proposed to his cryptic-loving partner, Jordan B. L. Smith. The wedding was planned for the summer of 2020. It got postponed again and again, but I am happy to report that it finally took place in June. The puzzle was reproduced on the face of the wedding cake. To commemorate the marriage, Mr. Smith did the only thing a puzzle lover could do: he created a new cryptic, which, with my help and blessing, is this month’s puzzle. A number of the clued answers require an alteration before entry—which ones are for the solver to determine. For that reason, word lengths are omitted. As a final step, follow the instructions in 49…