Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i Harper's Magazine

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…

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…

I rose from sleep one night, my back a trouble tense, and rode in reverse from the idiopathic to what I believe were the glories each scene an indulgence of a body I possessed. One was carried above other bodies, hovered over them, was weightless. Another threaded itself, a quarter of two couples, in intricate maneuvers. Switched dance partners easily. Or stumbled with a stranger to his place. waited for the sun to come up I watched over her and while I was looking out the window she left, became older went to sleep next to her (our) dying mother. Together we listened to the rattle become more foreign than any accent until it was pure accent, meaning inaudible. It took so little time to get from the walk-up to…

Omar Casimire dreamed of a flood a year before Hurricane Katrina arrived. The day after the levies broke, as he paddled a salvaged boat through the deluge burying New Orleans East, using a broken board as an oar, the vision resurfaced as déjà vu. With a small digital camera, he photographed the dream-scape that now appeared in the world before him: familiar street signs barely clearing unfamiliar reservoirs. He took pictures as he watched the waters rise from a room in the Super 8 Hotel on Chef Menteur Highway, east of the city’s Industrial Canal and south of Lake Pontchartrain—both breached—where he’d needed to sign a liability waiver to stay. As he told it in a poem he wrote later, “The Super 8 roof started to peel like a Plaquemines…

Discussed in this essay: The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Harper Perennial. 400 pages. $16.99. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 704 pages. $35. I first heard of anarchism around forty-five years ago, as a teenage member of the Science Fiction Book Club. One day the U.S. Postal Service delivered a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Dispossessed, which I read as soon as it arrived and immediately declared my favorite book—even better than Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End or Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey, which had until that moment shared the honor. Then I dug out a moldy volume of our old World Book Encyclopedia and read about the history of anarchism. My enthusiasm soon—I almost said faded,…

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,…

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…

My father told me this story. He said it happened one Christmas Eve many years ago. A boy was walking alone along-side a highway and saw the lights of the A&P grocery store ahead of him in the darkness. The boy walked down into a ravine and across the deserted parking lot and stood in front of the store’s automatic doors until they opened and admitted him. “Hurry up, hon,” said a woman at the register. “We’re closing soon.” Christmas music played over the loudspeaker and a big display of canned hams sat right at the front of the store. The pile of stacked cans went halfway to the ceiling. Each can was decorated with a picture of a family—a father and a mother and a boy and a girl—all…

Note: * indicates an anagram. ACROSS: 1. COLLYWOBBLES (bellyache); 10. ari(Z-on, rev.)a; 11. [f]emu[r]; 12. R.I.P.s; 13. escal(O)p*; 15. ABSQUATULATE (leave quickly); 17. Bur(lesque*)r; 19. a[l](t)titude; 22. NULLIGRAVIDA (a woman who’s never had a baby); 26. [P]stree*-t; 27. *; 28. a-basement; 30. RODOMONTADES (boasts); 33. *; 35. [f]eeler; 36. *; 37. STERNUTATION (sneeze). DOWN: 1. car-a-van’s-Aries; 2. [f]oribi[s]; 3. [s]lip(s); 4. y(og, rev.)urt; 5. [c]oast; 6. B(O)cuse*; 7. Ba(A)l, rev.; 8. emo(T-E)s, rev.; 9. *; 14. *; 16. qui(l)t; 18. pun; 20. tur-(boj-e[h]t, rev.); 21. a-VAT-a-r; 23. first letters; 24. *; 25. d(I’ve)d; 26. sa(DD)le; 29. *; 31. homophone; 32. hidden; 34. tea[m].…