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.
A Shock to the System “Can a brain implant treat drug addiction?” This is the question Zachary Siegel poses in his recent article, featuring four individuals addicted to opioids [“A Hole in the Head,” Report, September]. As part of their treatment, each received deep brain stimulation, or DBS. Two appeared to improve, while the other two did not. Siegel is skeptical that providing electrical impulses to a person’s nucleus accumbens could be an effective addiction treatment. He’s right. The notion is absurd. As Siegel notes, DBS has been proposed as a possible treatment for drug addiction because it has been shown to decrease some symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But the two aren’t sufficiently comparable. One can clinically differentiate the brains of individuals affected with Parkinson’s from those of unaffected individuals,…
As a small child, I would sometimes sit with my parents in our suburban London living room and watch the six o’clock news on the BBC. One evening, I saw images of African soldiers carrying rifles along city streets. A reporter said something like “government forces are entering the capital.” I don’t remember why they were entering the capital, or whether—as seems more likely—they were actually trying to stop someone else from entering it, but the phrase “government forces” stuck in my mind. A government, I concluded, was a kind of army. Some days later I opened the door to a man collecting money for the Salvation Army. He was wearing a uniform: a tunic with shiny buttons, pressed trousers, polished boots, and a peaked cap. I knew that the…
[Essay] GHOST STORIES By Peter Orner, from Still No Word from You, which was published last month by Catapult. On the black-and-white TV in the kitchen, my mother and I watched Richard Nixon’s helicopter slowly rise. My mother stood at the sink doing dishes. At one point, she stopped scrubbing but left her hands in the dishwater. The kitchen of the house on Hazel Avenue. The house no longer exists. It is less about her expression than that her hands remained in the water but were no longer scrubbing the dishes. Something to do with the stillness, her hands suddenly motionless in the soapy water. Maybe at that moment she wasn’t thinking about Nixon at all. She was staring out at the backyard. I don’t know what month of 1974…
In January 2019, when I found myself sitting across from Mindy Myers in a cramped D.C. coffee shop, the new resistance was riding high. A diverse lot of Democrats had just taken control of the House of Representatives, positioning themselves to curtail Donald Trump’s devastating abuse of the presidency. Trump’s chances of reelection looked questionable amid perpetual scandal and calls for impeachment, and even the Senate now seemed within reach. Myers had just finished her tenure as the first female executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Before that, she’d enjoyed a perfect record managing three Senate races, including Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 campaign, and she’d served as Warren’s chief of staff during her first term. That afternoon, we were discussing electoral prospects in Kansas, which national Democrats generally…
Conventional wisdom holds that our political moment is, in Joe Biden’s words, “not normal.” Thus, the usual political lessons to be drawn from such historical events as the New Deal or the United States’ entry into the world wars are supposedly irrelevant now. This is surely a dangerous misconception, especially when promoted by those who remember the past incorrectly. That is why the work of Walter Karp, a passionate scholar of American political history who offered a bracing antidote to the popular beliefs of his own era, is so useful today. A generation ago, Karp served as a contributing editor of this magazine. In the words of his friend and longtime editor Lewis Lapham, he was “a stormy petrel of a man, small and excitable, delighting in the rush of…
About a year into the global coronavirus pandemic, hunkered down in West Philadelphia and searching—this will be familiar—for a lifeline, I corralled five of my best beloveds worldwide into an exclusive institution. We were called the Marilyn Appreciation Society—the M.A.S.—and we committed to converging across our various time zones to watch the movies of Marilyn Monroe. We planned to see all the greats and a new tribute, called Blonde, long in the works and promised to be arriving imminently, based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates. The group chat, on Signal, was inaugurated with a go-round of peroxideperm selfies, courtesy a Marilyn filter, and my tech-savvy wife solemnly arranged the streaming. My friend Richard, tuning in from Newtown, Wales, provided scholarly background on the various…
