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.
The Trauma Yacht Combining preposterous subject matter, pitch-perfect humor, and an irresistible voice, Lauren Oyler’s cover story [“I Really Didn’t Want to Go,” Letter from the Celebrity Beyond, May] has been met with profuse praise. I suspect, however, that the sheer thrill of the ride—the sail?—might distract us from recognizing that the piece is also a rare, penetrating meditation on what it is to write “as a woman” on a “women’s topic.” Oyler lists a series of tongue-in-cheek ambitions for the piece. Two of them—to produce “a swash-buckling masterpiece of magazine journalism,” and “unite irony and sincerity once and for all”—allude to David Foster Wallace’s 1996 cruise essay in Harper’s Magazine. But Oyler adds another: the assignment is an opportunity to “conquer the sexist genre of wellness writing.” This is…
My grandfather was a man who didn’t like to compromise. A rural Welsh boy who had made it to Cambridge University and then on to a career as a scientist, he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Throughout his life he rarely backed down from confrontation. He had little time for children, and his early gifts to me—always books—demonstrated what I can only call an impatience for me to grow up. For my eighth birthday, he gave me an illustrated collection of works by Edgar Allan Poe. When I turned ten, he presented me with Crime and Punishment. I think the general idea was that I should come back when I was ready to discuss them. I was flattered by the books, by the challenge they represented,…
Brian T. Watson is an architect and cultural critic. For twenty-three years, he has been a columnist with the Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts, focused primarily on current affairs and the forces that were and are shaping societies both here and abroad. btwatson20@gmail.com (781) 367-2008 Paper, $13.00 e-Book, $9.99 Available on Amazon Independent of the pandemic and war, we are beset by a range of unprecedented developments that together, in this century, threaten the very existence of civilization. The current states of just ten forces — capitalism, technology, the internet, politics, media, education, human nature, the environment, population, and transportation — are driving society in predominantly negative ways. These forces are powerful and interconnected and their combined dynamics will carry us into any number of disasters well before 2100. We…
[Essay] DANCER FROM THE DANCE By Alva Noë, from The Entanglement, which was published last month by Princeton University Press. When she dances, a young child already moves her body with a sensitivity to what is expected of her. Perhaps she has seen videos of Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift; she has danced with her mom; she has a bank of personalities and images that supply her with a sense of what feels right. Remarkably, what feels right has everything to do with what would look right to others—with her sensitivity, however unarticulated, to how others would respond to her. What she actualizes is nothing less than the embodiment of choreographic ideas of which she is not the author. This is a distinctively human form of intelligence at work. The…
If, when a child is growing up, it develops a spirit of rebellion, the closest institution to revolt against is the family. The family is where you are first misjudged, maltreated, belittled, lied to and beaten—or not. The Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz is famously quoted making the claim: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” This seems absurdly overstated. However, there is more than a grain of truth in it. Some kind of revolt is inevitable, because the vestigial writer or artist is seeking to express his or her individualistic vision of the world, which inevitably conflicts with that of the parent. A father doesn’t have to be tyrannical, or a mother over-protective, for them to want things to stay the same, and for the…
At the commune, I fed pigs and herded oxen. Had there not been anyone around to manage them, those two animals would have known exactly how to live. They would have wandered around eating and drinking as they pleased, and when spring came they would have looked for a little romance. Of course in such a scenario their standard of living would have been very low; it would have been totally unremarkable. Then, people came along who sought to give their lives a little more purpose: every ox and every pig was given a livelihood. For the majority of them, these livelihoods were quite tragic: the former’s was to work and the latter’s was to grow fatter. Human management has made pigs as miserable as can be. But they still…
