Harper's Magazine October 2023

Science Fiction Jason Blakely offers a persuasive critique of the scientism that was widely apparent in the early days of the pandemic [“Doctor’s Orders,” Essay, August]. Public officials justified controversial policies—lockdowns, mask requirements, vaccine mandates—by gesturing at “the science,” seldom acknowledging that their decisions reflected implicit value judgments. They prioritized reducing risks to human life over the needs of many businesses, schoolchildren, working parents, and churchgoers. In insisting that they were merely following the science, they suppressed inconvenient moral and political disagreements. If more citizens had been able to participate in the crafting of local pandemic policies, the rate of public approval might have been higher. It’s less clear, however, that the tendency of officials to conceal value decisions behind the veil of science “serves to explain,” as Blakely puts…

The original Anthology Film Archives, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, was designed with high black partitions between each seat, so that viewers could wall themselves in to the screen like anchorites. This was before my era. I do my best without the partitions, with merely a dark theater and a locked-in commitment. Films that exploit such a devotional contract can take me to a certain height, a height of subjection, such as I felt watching Michael Snow’s 1971 La Région Centrale, at a 2005 screening in Los Angeles. A camera swings around and records a craggy, treeless, and unpeopled landscape in remote northern Quebec. I watched what the camera showed me for three hours and ten minutes, and listened to the whines and beeps, synchronized to the camera’s movements, that…

[Essay] TRANSIT GLORIA By Marvin Kitman, from an unpublished draft of his memoir. A longtime television critic for Newsday, he died in June at age ninety-three. During the Great Depression, my father always had a job. He worked for Western Union, the communications giant, as a troubleshooter. In 1937, he was transferred from Pittsburgh to New York City. My mother was against the move. In addition to taking care of my sister and me, her responsibilities included looking after her mother, Bubbe Kaufman, who was housebound in Finleyville, Pennsylvania. She had rheumatoid arthritis and needed a wheelchair. After much discussion, my mother finally agreed to relocate on one condition: that she would spend six months of every year with her mother in Finleyville. That meant taking my sister and me…

From affidavits filed by residents of Falmouth, Massachusetts, regarding a new pickleball court. We are of sound mind. Pre-pickleball, we enjoyed the outside of our home tremendously. We could be seen on our deck, on our front porch reading, in our yard relaxing, gardening. We would converse with our neighbors. We could attract birds and hear them sing. We no longer read the paper on the porch. We no longer hear the sounds of nature. We no longer enjoy gardening. The vegetation is overgrown. Our lives now revolve around avoiding the outdoors, where the pickleball noise is. The loud, piercing, relentless popping sound of the hard pickleball against the solid paddle can be heard inside our home, in all rooms, under any conditions. It comes through the windows and the…

By Patrick Freyne, from “Real Estate,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of The Dublin Review. THE VILLAGE When I was around twelve, we moved to an estate in Newbridge, which was arguably the second-most significant town in County Kildare. Newbridge was called Newbridge because it was once the site of a new bridge. That new bridge was very old by the time we moved there. Halfway into the estate, near our house, there was a green, and beyond it a line of well-tended fir trees. On the other side of those trees was a single tennis court. The court spoke to the estate’s class aspirations. Lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, teachers, and army officers lived in the Village. The Village was posh. When asked where I lived, I’d often…

By Jonathan Lethem, from Brooklyn Crime Novel, which will be published this month by Ecco. Say a guy, a former Dean Street boy, now resident of an apartment above a bar on Columbia Street, the far side of the BQE—say that guy has been visiting his aging mom in her apartment near the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Say it’s a cooling mid-October Friday evening and he wants to walk that distance across his homeland—now, which street should he choose? On Flatbush or Fulton or Schermerhorn, he’ll be dodging the sidewalk hawkers. To walk Dean or Bergen or Pacific, that prospect is another thing entirely. Should he opt for the row-house blocks, he’ll surely be flinching at hallucinatory Spaldeen ghosts, as if he might have to stick up his hand at…