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.
Rules of Engagement Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne claim that Russia had warned the United States since the end of the Cold War that it would violate fundamental principles of international law if we did not let it dominate Ukraine, and that we should have respected Russia’s threats to invade and destroy its neighbors [“Why Are We in Ukraine?,” Essay, June]. This line of argument inaccurately reflects history. Russia recognized the independence of the former Soviet republics by ratifying binding international agreements, including the Paris Charter, the NATO-Russia Founding Act, and the Budapest Memorandum; by invading Ukraine, Russia went back on its promise to respect Ukrainian sovereignty. To blame the United States and our allies for the current conflict because we crossed Russia’s “redlines” is to endorse those boundaries and…
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…
When Roxy Music was recording “Street Life” for the 1973 album Stranded, they hung a mic out the window of AIR Studios above Oxford Street, but they didn’t like the results and they ended up mixing in the sounds of a Moroccan market instead. As “Street Life” begins, we hear traffic amid four haunting chords and a shimmering hi-hat rhythm, and then Bryan Ferry belts out that he wishes everyone would leave him alone. He goes out for a walk. “Each verse seems to have its own character,” he later said, “like blocks on a street.” A fan since my youth of early Roxy Music, I still hear that song’s ethereal city vibe when I, too, wish everyone would leave me alone and, like Bryan, hit the streets. If I…
[Essay] MORAL FIXATION By Jacqueline Rose, from The Plague, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. On the opening page of his famous 1981 meditation, After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asks his readers to imagine themselves living in the aftermath of catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters, blamed by the public on scientists, leads to widespread riots, with laboratories destroyed, instruments wrecked. The government that takes power abolishes science in schools and universities, and imprisons or executes those who practice it. By the time they realize their mistake, it is too late. Only fragments of scientific knowledge remain. MacIntyre’s startling hypothesis is that the language of morality has entered “the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world…
From a report published in May by the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General that outlines major disciplinary infractions committed by law enforcement officers in 2022. Vaping in a squad car while transporting a civilian Stealing while responding to a service call Punching the wall of a victim’s home while responding to a service call Failing to fully report the escape of an inmate Responding to a call regarding a woman who needed medical attention at a Days Inn, beginning a sexual relationship with her, and then giving her a box containing $2,000 in exchange for not reporting the relationship Falling asleep in an inmate’s cell Storing hollow-point bullets in a child’s room Telling a supervisor to “go fuck yourself” when told he would have to take a coronavirus…
By Amalialú Posso Figueroa, from the Spring 2023 issue of The Massachusetts Review. Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Diteman and Shanta Lee. The nanny Fidelia Córdoba kept her rhythm in her tetas. She’d been born on the banks of the River Sipí and she had bulging tetas, small and round like a pair of corozos, with retractile nipples that also had a sense of direction. They were all at once compass–sextant–weather vane–plumb line–astrolabe quadrant–point you left point you right, or wherever you needed to go but never get you lost kinda nipples. The nipples on the tetas of the nanny Fidelia pointed north and south, east and west, up and down, inward and outward. The nipples on the tetas of the nanny Fidelia were the navigator, the pathfinder, the…
