Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Harper's Magazine

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…

Putin concluded that spontaneity is dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talk of democracy is dangerous. Autocrats have risen before; they have used mass violence before; they have broken the laws of war before. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants to keep dictators in power. He wants to undermine America. He wants America itself to fail. There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France. There are questions about America. Yet another frozen conflict, yet another temporary holding pattern, yet another face-saving compromise will not end the pattern of Russian aggression. Ukrainians are waiting for the counter-offensive.…

A sprawling ranch on several acres has a short asphalt driveway that pools into a parking area that can accommodate five cars. I often drive by there at night, and have never seen a light. Not only is the house dark and lifeless, but there are no cars. Yet cars collect there in the mornings, soon after nine. Three cars, sometimes five. You don’t have to work for the Washington Post to imagine that people are working in this house. At what? This place, with its daytime cars, is also secluded. Secluding what? How many people show up in the cars? Are they wearing ties? A sprawling ranch on several acres, market value in seven digits, has been evidently unoccupied for fifteen years, but no realty sign has gone up…

The war in Ukraine has resurrected the ultimate technocratic fantasy: a winnable nuclear war. Intellectuals at the Hoover Institution are urging American strategists to “think nuclearly again,” reestablishing the idea that nuclear weapons are tools to assert U.S. primacy over Russia and China. This isn’t just talk. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently noted “steadily increasing U.S. bomber operations in Europe”—some near the Russian border. Though most Americans are unaware of it, escalation toward nuclear conflict is already under way. In this strange atmosphere, I feel moved to revisit my own experience as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship more than fifty years ago. My story is all too relevant today. As Daniel Ellsberg demonstrates in The Doomsday Machine, the shape of U.S. nuclear strategy has remained unchanged…

Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and smoked cigarettes when he wasn’t gritting his teeth. Pen’s mother sat in the front seat. She wore a blue scarf and black sunglasses and kept saying, “Slow down, Cal. What’s the point in speeding? This is a vacation, right? You’re supposed to be relaxing. That’s what the doctor said. Relax.” Pen and her brother Thomas sat in the back seat. It was a big back seat; but Pen felt crowded, as if there were more people in the car than there actually were. Before they left for Sanibel, Pen and her mother had gone to the circus together, just the…

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,…

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…

If all experience is mystical the white spruce swayed in the window branch by branch almost to the doorstep willow-like near your sun-damaged eyes And what do dirt’s sinuous motions have to do with leaf’s actions I asked the young woman I asked the grandmother and the entire family crawling across the floor And who is the young returnee who would carry his AK-47 past the 7-11 almost to the corner and back wanting chips sometimes candy a contemplative on duty This wake, sleep, this wake sleep sea the planet and its lost parts lay plow to the furrow dream a little dream with me…

The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite. Edited by the composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, it’s a selection of hatchet jobs culled from the classical music press of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part of the pleasure of the Lexicon is the simple fun of reading a takedown—more fun still because ad hominem insults were once a fixture of music criticism. But by emphasizing “biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgments,” Slonimsky was also trying to make a point about society’s reluctance to accept new music, and about the time it takes the human ear to grow accustomed to new sounds (roughly a generation, he thought). Thus we read early reviews complaining that Wagner wrote the “music of a demented…

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…

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…

A television remote with eighty-eight buttons A flip phone that plays highlights from ESPN A computer that looks like a VCR A Walkman that plays vinyl records A landline that can send emails Compact discs that give off different aromas A urinal shaped like a golf club A chair that massages internal organs Cola mixed with coffee Colgate-branded frozen beef lasagna Blue ketchup Beef-flavored bottled water for dogs Fish-flavored bottled water for cats Chocolate-flavored appetite suppressants Adult food packaged in baby-food jars Pens for women Spray-on condoms for men Sunglasses that attach to magnets glued to one’s head A doll dressed in rags called Little Miss No Name…

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pit-falls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals. No one can agree on what woke is supposed to mean. The right has blamed it for everything from the spike in school shootings to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, while many who are described as woke on the left see themselves as fighting a long-overdue battle for social and racial justice. These disagreements are not just political. In fact, they sometimes seem to be antipolitical. Arguments over wokeness are often…