Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Harper's Magazine

[Essay] BOOK OF LIES By Fae Myenne Ng, from Orphan Bachelors, which will be published this month by Grove Press. Our father’s elder sister arrived with her husband in 1921. We called her Big Aunt. Big Uncle was a twin, but I don’t remember another uncle. My mother explained that in their village, the weaker twin was sacrificed at birth to prevent it from stealing the hei, the life force of the stronger twin. Big Uncle was gentle and always deferred to Big Aunt. Surely, his family married him to a strong woman to counteract any imbalance. Big Aunt would buy the paper name needed for my father to enter the country. She found a man with American citizenship selling a slot for a paper son that matched my father’s…

Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work. Last year, as resignation rates appeared to plateau, the cause célèbre shifted to “quiet quitting.” This theory holds that what truly distinguishes the present crisis is a more metaphorical sort of resignation: a withdrawal of effort, the sort of thing that is called “work-to-rule” when undertaken by a union. This supposed rebellion against extortion has served as fodder for familiar right-wing complaints about entitlement. The most…

Clayton Dalton is a writer and an emergency physician in New Mexico.…

NOTES FOR “NO TYPOS”: Note: * indicates an anagram. ACROSS: 1. de(part)ed, rev.; 7. rev.; 11. *; 13. g-land; 14. hidden; 17. be-t[abasco]; 18. hidden; 19. *; 20. *; 22. do[nna]do[nna]; 24. ba[ngor]-sic; 26. sw[oo](a)n; 27. *; 28. *; 30. hidden; 33. hom*[ophobes]; 34. gasoli(n)e*; 35. *; 36. [daw]so(lo)n; 37. S. A. (ndal*)S.; 38. second letters. DOWN: 1. *; 2. first letters; 3. chape[l]*; 4. *; 5. [Zuck]er[berg]-and-meta*; 6. s[c]one*; 7. [green] s-e.i.(rev.)-zed; 8. LI-quid-s[weep]; 9. even letters; 10. post(P-one)men-[valen]t[ine]; 12. rubdo(W) ns*; 15. t[ooth]-[s]ardines(s); 16. (true-i-t[hum]b)*; 21. Demo[crats]-ban*; 23. last letters; 25. ch([bi] o)ose; 29. c[hocolate]-anon; 31. c[learing]-ays*; 32. B.(L) O.C.; 34. first letters, rev.…

Artificial intelligence researchers estimated that, among categories of domestic labor, grocery shopping is the most automatable and childcare the least. Japanese subjects rated human-in-the-loop AI-generated haiku as superior to those written entirely by AI or by humans, and information scientists argued that AIs need to be taught not to plagiarize. The claustrum is unlikely to be the seat of consciousness. Bluestreak cleaner wrasse fish will attack photos of unfamiliar fish faces but not of themselves; they will also, if shown a photo of a parasite-like mark on their throats, attempt to remove it. Researchers proposed that animal consciousness is neither a binary proposition nor a continuous gradation but an assemblage of qualities: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, evaluative intensity, external synchronic unity, and external diachronic unity; self-synchronic unity, self-diachronic unity, experience…

I have now seen sucrose beaches and I water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen five hundred upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line. I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway residence in Key West, Florida. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat…

I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, flesh comes off the bones—what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night. At noon we could look at our own faces. All the basic shapes were there, in bone. Bright winter sun turns kids skinless. Skins them. But there we were in geometry class. The teacher also taught physics. He was grotesquely tall. Thin. He’d demonstrate the angles with his bones. This was Catholic school. The blackboard was useless. A gray swamp dense with half-drowned numbers. Mr. Streeling would bend a leg in midair: 90 degrees, cleaner than a protractor.…

The novel form is capacious and elastic, in some instances deployed like a magnifying glass on a water droplet, and in others as a panoramic lens to encompass a vast landscape. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the Colombian writer perhaps best known for his 2011 book The Sound of Things Falling, writes novels of the latter sort: his ambitious fictions tackle the darker sides of Colombia’s history and politics. His new book, RETROSPECTIVE (Riverhead, $30), eloquently translated by Anne McLean, might at first glance appear a narrower undertaking: it simply tells the story of his close friend Sergio Cabrera, a filmmaker who has directed more than twenty movies, including The Strategy of the Snail, and was appointed as Colombia’s ambassador to China last year. Cabrera’s life, one quickly realizes, covers a wide…