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.
In Memoriam Harper’s Magazine is deeply saddened by the death of our dear friend and longtime contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022). Her classic book Nickel and Dimed, which chronicles the harsh realities of working for minimum wage, began with two pieces of undercover reporting published in the January 1999 and April 2000 issues. She will be missed. Body Language Like many women, I am sympathetic to Charlotte Shane’s thesis that females should enjoy a right not to carry unwanted pregnancies to term [“The Right to Not Be Pregnant,” Revision, October]. But I fear that by elaborately avoiding the word “women” she detracts from her purpose and alienates a large portion of her audience. “Impregnatable people” is an overtly dehumanizing term; progressives’ trendy linguistic effacement of the entire childbearing sex amounts…
A few months ago I introduced a screening of Robert Frank’s rarely shown and somewhat notorious film Cocksucker Blues at a cinema house in Los Angeles. Legally, the film can only be shown four times per year, and this was one of the four. It sold out immediately. (The version available on YouTube is so degraded from dubbing that it’s not really the same film.) When Frank, who was Swiss, published his book of photographs The Americans, back in 1958, he redefined what was possible in art. The book is filled with prosaic scenes of work and ritual, solitary faces and people in crowds. As he stated in his Guggen-heim application, he had set out to capture things “easily found . . . a town at night, a parking lot,…
[Essay] YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? By Meghan O’Gieblyn, from “Sentience and Sensibility,” which was published in the September/October issue of The Baffler. It was all too easy to dismiss the Washington Post story about Blake Lemoine—the Google engineer who claimed this summer that his employer’s chatbot, LaMDA, was sentient—as an instance of clickbait, hype, and moral panic. Its many absurdities appeared contrived to exhaust the attention of a populace hollowed out by years of doomscrolling and news fatigue. As far as the machine learning community was concerned, the story was a distraction. There were, as these experts knew, legitimate issues with language models, and those issues had nothing to do with sentience but stemmed from the fact that the models were entirely unconscious, that they mindlessly parroted the racist, misogynistic,…
I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible in the hallway outside my chemistry classroom, in which lurked a boy I loathed named Glenn, who would make fun of my Journey T-shirts. It would be years before I really got into Iron Maiden, but at my friend Jonathan’s house I’d heard Barry Clayton’s creepy recitation of Revelation 13:18 on the title track of The Number of the Beast: “Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast: for it is a human number; its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” I wanted to know what that was all about. My father was so…
Sometimes I console myself with a S vision of New York in ruins. Having been educated in the classical tradition, I prefer to imagine the desolation in the manner of Piranesi—blocks of stone overgrown with weeds, abandoned technology rusting in an autumnal wind. The vision is an anodyne of rage. It allows me to contemplate with equa-nimity the fatuousness of a society so content with so many smug assumptions and so willingly deceived by so many false promises. At moments of extreme depression, mercifully infrequent, I think of Johnny Carson and the discount department store as the two sublime expressions of the American Dream. For a man who succumbs to that kind of despairing metaphor, the prospect of nuclear holocaust does not seem so appalling. He assumes the survivors will…
“I like keeping things alive,” Boubacar Diallo told me. He had raised animals his whole life, a hobby he in-herited from his father, a soldier in the Nigerien Army. “Anyone will tell you the address to my house is the place where the cattle are outside.” Diallo climbed a ladder to reach some hay bales on the roof of a ramshackle leanto under which three goats, their fleeces the color of old snow, were huddled next to a flock of pigeons. He hopped down and tossed the bales into the pen. A few birds followed him. Caitlin L. Chandler is a writer in Berlin. Her work on this article was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffet Fund for Women Journalists. It was early November 2021,…
