Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i Harper's Magazine

Live and Let Die Michel Houellebecq suggests that agitating for medical assistance in dying infantilizes those who seek relief when their suffering becomes intolerable [“The European Way to Die,” Revision, February]. In making this argument, he contends that suffering one’s death throes without alleviation—no matter how debilitating or agonizing the condition—has always been considered noble. This is simply untrue. Seneca, who recommends finding “the proper time to slip the cable,” is one of many ancient philosophers who argued that the wise human seeks not a “natural” death but a good one. Valerius Maximus writes of early in-habitants of present-day Marseilles: A poison compounded of hemlock is under public guard in that community, which is given to one who has shown reasons to the Six Hundred, as their senate is called,…

“One helluva team of writers has produced a book you’ll be dipping into for years.”–Jim Bouton, author of Ball Four Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine uncovers funny, touching, exciting, and intriguing stories of the sporting life, both professional and amateur. This collection includes some of the most well-known and respected writers of the past century, including Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe, Shirley Jackson, Lewis H. Lapham, Gary Cartwright, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Pete Axthelm, George Plimpton, and Rich Cohen. FRANKLIN SQUARE PRESS…

Just as you, Attis, swear devotion to Magna Mater—the great mother!—I follow several: Judy Garland,Mary Beard, Tori Amos, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley,Yuja Wang, Jackqueline Frost, Simone Weil, a few othersa vision out of Christine de Pizan Brilliant as they are they cannot solve all my problems,but Attis, spare me the suggestion I do as you did.Why must you and fellow worshippers castrateyourselves, cut open your arms and shoulders?Why dance wildly around a sacred pine whippingyourselves knucklebones beating timbrelsand pine cones lacerating bare chests splattering treeand altar with sweat and gore then why apply gold leafto your freshly wounded genitals?To imitate harvestin human inclination toward the eternal…To throw yourselfbefore a woman who will not reject your desire.Like you I propagate nothing but lyric. Attis, you’d agree with graffiti from Imperial Rome:Baths,…

“Timely and indispensable.”—Atlantic “A fascinating new book.”—The Economist “A perfect primer for anyone trying to understand how the intelligence community is meeting the challenges of the digital age.”—Dina Temple-Raston, Washington Post “A historical and scientific detective story of first rank…. [Mayor’s] results are as striking as they are entertaining.”—Mott T. Greene, Science “A remarkable anthology…. Blauner’s table of contents reads like a ‘Who’s Who of Intelligent Modern Prose’…. This collection amplifies the wisdom of Thoreau for an age that is frequently hard of hearing.”—John Kaag, New York Times “Career and Family is a radical book. It is also brilliantly researched and argued.”—Lily Meyer, New Republic “[An] earnest defense of the humanities, which is also a personal testament to the power of a liberal education.”—Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Atlantic PRINCETON UNIVERSITY…

The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9. “There is no chance that the world will avoid the effects of warming—we’re already experiencing them—but neither is there any point at which we are doomed.” Writing in the Guardian a few days later, Rebecca Solnit highlighted a paragraph from a recent report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that said carbon-dioxide removal technology could theoretically “reverse… some aspects of climate change.” Though she admitted this was “a long shot” that would require “heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary…

April said that when she got healthy—if she did, she said, if—she wanted to have Julia’s body. It was the ideal, April said, curvy but still thin enough, I should know from that time I had to draw you. She had leaned over Julia and traced her outline. It was one of the activities, along with closing your eyes and picking your anchor, the place where you can go in your mind when you get triggered. For Julia this was a place in Maine, on a lake cliffed by rocks, where her grandparents had once owned a home. Each day Julia watched for the postman to deliver the mail, his hand on the outboard motor steering him toward the dock. April hovered over Julia, who lay prone on the large…

Toxoplasma gondii infection, which was recently found to increase human facial symmetry and attractiveness, makes Danish women become successful entrepreneurs. Open-label placebos reduce feelings of guilt, and video game loot-box purchases are strongly correlated with problem gambling. Exeter researchers sought gamblers to treat with ketamine, and other Exeter researchers who reared pheasant chicks, trained them on cognitive puzzles, and released them into the wild found that they were likelier to be eaten by foxes near the edges of their home range. A Finnish researcher warned of rising sexual inequality and loneliness in straight men, noting that 5 percent of them have half of all penile-vaginal sex. Erogenous mapping revealed a pronounced preference for the tip of the penis and the middle third of the ventral penile shaft among circumcised men.…

There was a football game that afternoon at Buckley and though I can remember who I masturbated about on that early October day (I wrote it down—I kept lists, a jack-off journal) I can’t remember what team the Griffins were playing though I knew Susan would be in the stands, mildly cheering Thom on as quarterback, and I took a chance and assumed Robert Mallory wouldn’t be attending the game. Robert Mallory is the mysterious newcomer to the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, where Bret, the autofictional narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel The Shards, is a senior. The chance he has taken is to wait for Robert to leave campus in his black Porsche, so that Bret can tail him undetected, as he’s driving not his usual car…

This is the story of two scientists. Their search began five years ago with a single radiocarbon clue from the ocean floor. It led over many continents and seas, to drowned rivers and abandoned mountain caves. These two serious, careful scientists—Maurice Ewing and William Donn—believe they have finally found the explanation for the giant glaciers that once covered America with a wall of ice up to two miles thick, moving mountains and trampling forests. If they are right, the world is now heading into another Ice Age. The first clues came to light on the deck of their three-masted research schooner. In the summer of 1953, the ship traced a puzzling pattern on the ocean floor. The crew were working with their newly perfected deep sea piston corer, a device…

I. NORWICH, SUMMER OF 1974 He received my address from a Hungarian poet, young at the time and since deceased, who decades later became notorious for racist right-wing statements. In the autumn of 1973 he sent me a letter from England. He wrote in an elaborate style, spiked with broken Hungarian. He informed me that he wanted to travel to Hungary to brush up on the language. He invited me to stay at his house in Norwich for a month. If it suited me, I could host him in Hungary the following year. I was a graduate student in English and eagerly accepted the offer. Michael H. Parkinson, an instructor at the University of East Anglia, was twenty-nine years old at the time, seven years my senior. I arrived in…

Revision is the act of reworking something—an idea, a text—in an effort to improve it. It means to look again; in some instances, it may be the surrounding world that has altered. A KIDNAPPED WEST: THE TR AGEDY OF CENTR AL EUROPE (Harper, $24.99) is comprised of two historical texts by Milan Kundera, with contextual introductions by two distinguished French scholars. “The Literature of Small Nations,” translated from the Czech into French by Martin Daneš and then into English by Linda Asher, is a rousing speech that Kundera delivered to the Czech writers’ congress in 1967, the year before the Prague Spring. He was already celebrated in his native Czechoslovakia; his novel The Joke, published earlier that year, “both evoked an era and ended it,” as the political scientist Jacques…