Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i Harper's Magazine

Ring the Alarm Jackson Lears chillingly demonstrates that the United States military favors neutral technocrats over conscientious officers when it comes to nuclear armaments [“Behind the Veil of Indifference,” Revision, July]. His piece brings to mind an incident from September 1983, when the Soviet Union’s early warning system erroneously reported a U.S. nuclear missile launch. It came at the worst possible time: only a few weeks earlier, the Soviet Union had shot down a plane that strayed into its airspace, killing 269 passengers, including a U.S. congressman. Fortunately, the man who received the alarm, Stanislav Petrov, suspected it was false and refused to report it to his superiors, violating protocol and preventing a retaliatory nuclear strike. Petrov’s decision saved countless lives. And yet superpowers like the United States take every…

From letters from readers published in The New York Times Magazine since 2021. Cool story. Great article! This is a stunningly well-written article. I’ve read and reread this article so many times. I think I’ve read and reread this piece twenty times all the way through these last few days. I’m going to have to read it again. I’m taking this article to my next ob-gyn appointment. This piece opened my brain cells. I wish I could succinctly describe how reading this article made me feel. It was so emotionally stirring and overwhelming that I was close to losing grip of my newspaper. This feature is so beautiful I actually cried a little bit as I slowly scrolled through it. I was dabbing my eyes myself by the end! I…

From a ruling issued in June by the Court of King’s Bench in Saskatchewan, Canada, in a case brought by a grain buyer who claimed that a local farmer had failed to honor an agreement they made via text. The defendant does not accept the plaintiff’s contention that the emoji means “I agree” or “I accept.” This has led the parties on a far-flung search for the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone in cases from Israel to New York State to unearth what means. Astarting point is that has a dictionary meaning: “It is used to express assent, approval, or encouragement in digital communications, especially in Western cultures.” This comports with my understanding, even as a late comer to technology. The defense remonstrates that allowing a to signify acceptance would…

From an interview with the British artist Tracey Emin, conducted by Laura Allsop, which was published in June by AnOther Magazine. LAURA ALLSOP: Some of the figures in your works appear like apparitions. Do you see ghosts? TRACEY EMIN: Yes. I’ve always seen ghosts. I also see myself as a ghost. ALLSOP: Do you believe in life after death? EMIN: One hundred, one million percent. A trillion percent. ALLSOP: How has the physicality of your practice changed since your surgery? EMIN: When I am painting, it feels like I never had bladder cancer. So I feel very free and liberated, much more than I did before my surgery. ALLSOP: How has your life changed since your surgery? EMIN: I don’t drink alcohol anymore. I don’t go out very often. I…

I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable. At the time it was my firm belief that generations did not exist, that they were simply a retroactive periodization that imposed narrative cohesion on history, one which had really no more legitimacy than such contested categories as “the Dark Ages” or “postmodernity.” “Generation,” of course, means primarily sexual generation—think, for example, of Aristotle’s treatise On the Generation of Animals—and for a…

From Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen Lee Friedlander, who is among the most celebrated and quietly innovative living American photographers, is eighty-nine years old and was born in Aberdeen, Washington, a place once nicknamed the “Hell Hole of the Pacific.” A product of a generation that felt itself to have exhausted the utility of the documentary tradition of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Friedlander’s work is distinguished instead by its humor, bracingly idiosyncratic composition, and prescience—his preoccupations over the years have included self-portraits, television screens, and commercial signage. Friedlander was at the forefront, with Garry Winogrand and others, of the explosion in formally imaginative street photography that fused the deceptively happenstance arrangements of Cartier-Bresson with the Beat spirit and cross-country pulse of Robert Frank. “Within photography,” the artist Martha…

“Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past.” I first read the famous opening lines of “Burnt Norton”—the first of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets— in a dusty school storeroom, surrounded by books on tall metal shelves. The space was just big enough for a desk and a couple of chairs, and one of my teachers was giving up his lunch break to prepare me for a university entrance exam. The taking and passing of competitive examinations was the bedrock of the education system that formed me. I was trained for it, like an athlete, and I attacked the poem with all the vigor of an infantry recruit. I was prepared to swing from ropes and crawl through mud. I wanted…

From “Memory Book,” by Bonny Cassidy, which was published in the ninth issue of HEAT Series 3. The evening nurse calls to say he’s had a fall. That phrase. I was out with Mum when the call came. Mum, who had that very afternoon moved her entire life from Cronulla to my town of Castlemaine. Dad doesn’t fall ever, and then the day she skips town after forty years—unbeknownst to him, who no longer knows where he is or that he is separated from her or that they sold their house—he falls. It’s been like this the past few years: the thin veil of symbols and correspondences fluttering over our lives. The best part of it all has been an absurd and mean humor among we the living. I didn’t…

By Phillip Lopate, from A Year and a Day, which will be published next month by New York Review Books. Those who marry a widow may find themselves competing with a ghost. Years ago, my friend Sally introduced me to Cheryl, who had been married to a painter named Edward Flood. Cheryl had met Edward when she was eighteen, he thirty-one. Though Edward was a gifted artist, he wasn’t selling much at this point. He also did what artists were supposed to do in those days, which was to smoke cigarettes and drink a lot. That, plus the harmful chemicals that painters inhaled then, may have led to his contracting brain cancer. They were married only a couple of months when he passed away, at age forty-one. A widow still…

The question for the arriving generation is not whether our society is imperfect (we can take that for granted), but how to deal with that imperfection. So far as I have been able to discover, there are four choices: I. DROP OUT One might think that this solution can be practiced successfully only in Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village, with the aid of LSD or some other reality-blunting drug. In fact, dropping out is among the oldest expedients. It can be practiced anywhere, with or without the aid of hallucinogens, and it has long been the tactic for those who find the world too brutal to be endured. The hermit of Mount Athos and the millionaire recluse in his Caribbean hideaway are both dropouts. So were Diogenes and Lao Tzu. So…

Discussed in this essay: The Fraud, by Zadie Smith. Penguin Press. 464 pgs. $29. In Elif Batuman’s 2022 novel Either/Or, the narrator, Selin, goes to her college library to look for Prozac Nation, the 1994 memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Both of Harvard’s copies are checked out, so instead she reads reviews of the book, including Michiko Kakutani’s in the New York Times, which Batuman quotes: “Ms. Wurtzel’s self-important whining” made Ms. Kakutani “want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the 70’s in New York and going to Harvard.” It’s a typically canny moment in a novel that strives to seem artless. Batuman clearly recognizes that every criticism of Wurtzel’s bestseller—narcissism, privilege, triviality—could be applied to Either/Or and its predecessor,…

By Percival Everett, from “Abstraction and Nonsense,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of The Yale Review. A version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. What am I doing when I decide to write a realistic story? What am I setting about to make? I am in fact constructing an artifice that feels real or “lifelike.” Roland Barthes would have us believe that the tricks of fiction are dead. With all due respect, this is not true for a couple of reasons. The first is that readers still invest themselves in stories so deeply that they will feel bad or good, and argue about whether a character has behaved realistically or not. The second reason is that readers are never…

From a training manual for employees of the real estate investment company Home Vestors of America, which flips houses. Find the Pain. Pain is always a form of motivation. People in pain look for someone with a solution! That could be you. You have solutions for people who experience ugly real estate “pain.” In order to find the Seller’s pain, uncover the Seller’s motivation for selling. There will be an emotional reason behind the Seller’s motivation. Find the emotion and you will uncover the Pain. Once you find the Seller’s pain, you have a much better chance of buying the house. Here are some examples of Pain: I lost my job and I’m now about to lose my house. I am getting a divorce and need to sell the house.…

(with acknowledgments to Lascia of The Listener) All clue answers are six letters long. Each clue number in the diagram is at the center of a regular hexagon formed by the six adjoining triangles. Answers are to be entered in the appropriate hexagon, starting at any triangle and traveling around in either direction. The entries at 14, 17, 38, and 41 are unclued (one is a hyphenate). Determining them may require a sixth sense, any way you turn. As a check, the letters appearing in the thirty-six triangles whose sides form the border of the diagram may be rearranged to spell K-POP BUFF’S VELVET GRANDILOQUENCE AT A BASH. Answers include one proper noun. There are no uncommon words. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its…