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.
Dems the Breaks It’s remarkable that a writer with Andrew Cockburn’s progressive ideals would deem a Joe Biden candidacy evil, as in “the lesser evil” versus Trump [“Against the Current,” Letter from Washington, October]. In contrast to his past two Democratic predecessors, Biden’s priorities and achievements are stunning. So is the lack of credit he gets for them. Over the course of his presidential term we’ve seen major infrastructure and regulatory improvements, low unemployment rates, substantial COVID-19 relief policies, provisions to lower prescription drug prices, and persistent efforts to pardon student debt, not to mention his recent advocacy for striking auto workers. The piece’s companion article, a critique by Walter Karp of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. [“The Revolution of Youth,” From the Archive, October], serves to underscore Cockburn’s naïveté about…
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 have the knowledge and solutions to address our difficulties, but for many reasons we will not employ them. There is urgency to this story. We face many threats, but one of them — the internet and its hegemony and imperatives — is rapidly changing nearly everything about our world, including our very…
Al Gore once leaned in close, in a kitchen, late at night, at a party at a film festival, as someone snapped a photo of us. I never circulated it; Al Gore doesn’t go with my image. The writer and artist Benjamin Weissman had a girlfriend in high school who was simultaneously Jimmy Page’s girlfriend and if I was him I’d tell everyone. I’d never stop. But Ben is modest. Lots of people talk and few of them know. I thought I had a brag that I once dated a guy who’d dated a woman who’d dated Slash. But compared to Jimmy Page, Slash is Al Gore. In the Nineties, I used to see Dee Snider from Twisted Sister in the elevator of the apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue where…
[Essay] NOVEL GAZING By William Maxwell, from “The Impulse Toward Autobiographical Fiction,” a 1963 lecture that is being published for the first time in the collection The Writer as Illusionist, edited and introduced by Alec Wilkinson, out next month from Godine. An autobiographical novelist is the kind of man who would go to the funeral of somebody who had been like a father to him, and worry all through the one-hundred-and-third Psalm because he has absentmindedly worn brown shoes with a black suit. “As for man,” the minister says solemnly, “his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. /For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. And the place thereof shall know it no more…” The novelist has heard him, all right.…
From blog posts by Sam Altman since 2013. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear. I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new, “Is this person a force of nature?” Hire people you could describe as animals. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel just by talking to people about the struggles you’re facing instead of saying, “We’re crushing it.” In the memorable words of Coco Chanel, “I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.” This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to…
From notes made on custom license plate applications flagged for review by the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles since 2012. SUPERJU: (My nickname is Juju.) Superiority of religion, “super jew.” K4K4SH1: (An anime character, Kakashi.) Profane, looks like “caca shit.” KRACKO: (A character from the Kirby video game.) Drug related, almost sounds like “crack ho.” LAHORE: (A city in Pakistan.) Sexual, whore. BYAGIRL: (I want people to know my car is being driven by a girl.) Looks like “buy a girl,” human trafficking. EGIRL: (I’m a gamer.) Sexual, girls who send nudes. CHITTY: (The car resembles the one in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.) Profane, sounds like “shitty” with a Hispanic accent. AFUEGO: (Cool, nice, “looks good” in Puerto Rican slang.) Profane, “ah, fuck you & go.” GFY: (God forgives you.)…
