Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i Harper's Magazine

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…

From Stay Safe, a Winnie-the-Pooh-themed book that was distributed to Dallas public school students in May. If there is danger, the police will come fast to catch the stranger. Until then, remember what Pooh and his crew said to do. We should RUN like Rabbit instead of stay. If danger is near, do not fear. HIDE like Pooh does until the police appear. Doors should be locked and the passage blocked. Turn off the light to stay out of sight. We should all hide without making a sound in a place where we cannot be found. If we have cell phones, make sure to turn off all tones. If danger finds us, don’t stay, run away. If we can’t get away, we have to FIGHT with all our might. Like…

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…

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 Alice Notley, from The Speak Angel Series, which was published in February by Fonograf Editions. May all governments cease and no more men decide for me orSteal from me I’ll happily kill you but you know you’ve no stren-Gth someone says oh I’m Samson the blind and justScores of pigs run everywhere before the roof collapsesI’m going to live in the gully not needing electricityI’m going to die there like Marie not in a rehab like myMother doctorless and barely allowed after JerryBrown refused hospice services to the people in my home townI don’t need him or the president with his urgent vanityYou need a structure but I don’t not in our cities of cowardsThe problem is everyone’s needs dish it out to yourself and tellWaltons Buffet and Gates…

By Timothy Donnelly, from Chariot, published in May by Wave Books. I have aspired to the ease of the drink-steadied harperwho lives the tune so thoroughly his fast pink handsdance over the strings like some sharp thing made sharperwhen it’s put to use—a family of thing I can’t seem to land on any member of at present, but its heraldic emblempinned behind me like a charm would be the gold cat’s pawchopping cabbage for the supper I’m forever assemblingon a field of green to set before the Bard of Armagh. How I love to drift off as I did all through boyhoodinto the daze of my birthright as a person, even if back thenthis inwardness felt like thieving liverwurst sandwiches one shouldleave on the platter for the hardworking women, the…

Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brain-washing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality. On Sunday, April 29, 2001, Jay and Joyce Hale, my father’s older brother and his wife, took their granddaughter, Haley Zega—the only child of their only child—on a day trip to the Buffalo National River Wilderness in Newton County, Arkansas, in the heart of the Ozark Mountains. Jay…

My friend was a widow, not really old but already a widow twice. You think of Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack. To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. But really, it wasn’t funny. Nothing about it was funny. Audra had told (women) friends that Thad, the second husband, had saved her life, virtually—she’d met him within a year of losing her first husband, to whom she’d been married for thirty-six years. Which was why I’d been avoiding my widow-friend through the entire pandemic. Audra had to know that the pandemic wasn’t the reason for my avoidance. Thad had died in early 2020, before COVID, from an unspeakably virulent and swift-acting cancer, the kind where no sooner are you asked, Have you heard? than…

In 1968, Barry Goldwater sued Fact magazine for publishing a series of psychiatrists’ statements claiming he was “grossly psychotic” and “a mass-murderer at heart.” His victory prompted the American Psychiatric Association to adopt the so-called Goldwater Rule, which declared it unethical for doctors to offer diagnoses without an examination—as if any self-respecting office-seeker would consent to such. (“I have never talked to a psychiatrist in my life,” Goldwater said in his defense.) Thus was one of our nation’s great pastimes hobbled. From that day on, those of us who like to mouth off with the occasional “Bush II’s well-publicized penchant for clearing brush from his Texas ranch is proof of his narcissistic personality disorder” could no longer marshal evidence from actual MDs. Fortunately, psychoanalysis gives us a loophole. The American…

Discussed in this essay: Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 336 pages. $29. Ray Carney, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s new novel Crook Manifesto, is a Harlem furniture-store owner and family man. He wants to keep his head down and thrive, but finds it “impossible to play along like everyone else. To pretend that what they meant by freedom was the same thing he meant. As ever, he didn’t fit the templates.” In the words of the narrator, Carney is “just another schlubby shopkeeper getting leaned on.” Or in the even less generous words of a corrupt police detective, “the most famous nobody in Harlem.” Carney’s problem is not so much that he is an anonymous schlub, but that his status as a trader in ill-gotten gains—occasionally fencing stolen goods…

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…

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…

Australian scientists from the Whales and Climate Research Program asserted that whales cannot, after all, significantly mitigate atmospheric carbon. Orcas were teaching one another how to sink boats, and the population decline of Dungeness crabs may be due partly to ocean acidification worsening their sense of smell. The first instance of virgin birth was recorded in a crocodile. Whitespotted eagle rays and cownosed rays loiter at clam leases. Phosphorus deficiency turns Triphyophyllum peltatum plants carnivorous, and the sensation of hunger may slow aging in fruit flies. Snow flies amputate their legs to keep their vital organs from freezing, scalloped hammerhead sharks hold their breath to keep warm on deep excursions, and California two-spot octopuses edit their RNA to acclimate their nervous systems to temperature changes. Neuroscientists speculated that Costello, a…