Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i Harper's Magazine

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…

From reviews of the children’s animated television series Bluey published in media outlets since 2021. Beloved kids’ programCute and highly relatableA real gemA damn good showInstantly recognizableA huge phenomenon globallyThe kids’ show that just keeps givingBoth wise and hilariousPoignant and timelessSublime in its casual simplicityTrivial but life-changingTranscendentAn astounding work of artAt times, absolutely perfectPure geniusA masterpieceReally experimentalDistinctly AustralianCreates envy and longing and a touch of shameA spiritual-scientific manifestoA thrilling display of masculinityA depiction of the lawlessness of the 1980sAn entire scope of the cosmosMay one day save humanity…

Miracles and Machines A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell Expansively illustrated, this book tells the singular story of “the monk”: a 450-year-old walking, gesticulating robot that prays. Liberated The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun Kaz Rowe This young-adult graphic biography explores the life, art, and activism of genderqueer, Surrealist French artist Claude Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore. María Magdalena Campos-Pons Behold Edited by Carmen Hermo, with contributions by Mazie M. Harris, Jenée-Daria Strand, Phillip Towsend, and Selene Wendt and an introduction by Amalia Mesa-Bains This expansively illustrated survey of the career of contemporary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons delves into her diverse oeuvre of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and performance. Inside Pompeii Luigi Spina A lavish,…

She didn’t believe in ghosts until her mother started talking to her on Mount Archer in the Pleasant Valley Preserve in southeastern Connecticut. She was stretching her calves in the little parking lot by the trail head when she heard, clear as day, “Come on, Jessie. Enough now.” Clear as day? She hated the clichés that crowded her mind when she thought of her mother. Clear as her mother’s voice, gone three years, buried five states away, at the top of no mountain. The second time it happened she had just started her hike and was thinking about bears. She’d heard that one had been spotted in New London County, and she was trying to remember the protocol for encountering different wildlife. Were you supposed to make yourself big or…

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…

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 the transcript of an August 2023 ceremony marking the unveiling of a time capsule discovered under a nineteenth-century monument at the United States Military Academy at West Point. JENNIFER VOIGTSCHILD: Are we ready to see what is in that box? AUDIENCE: Yeah! STEVEN W. GILLAND: This is pretty cool. I mean, think about it. When’s the last time a time capsule has been opened here? Nobody has any idea what’s inside of it. SHANE R. REEVES: That thing has been sitting undisturbed for one hundred ninety-four years, right here at West Point. I hope it’s cool. I hope it’s awesome. I can’t wait to see what’s in there. VOIGTSCHILD: Our archeologist has done a thorough inspection of the box. What do we see? PAUL HUDSON: Nothing quite yet ……

My particular line of country has always been generalization and synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I hate statements, views, prejudices, and beliefs that jump at you out of midair. I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible. That is why I have spent a few score thousand hours making outlines of history, short histories of the world, general accounts of the science of life, attempts to bring economic, financial, and social life into one conspectus, and to estimate the consequences of this or that set of causes upon the future of mankind. In the course of these experiments I have devoted a certain amount of anxious thought to the conspicuous ineffectiveness of modern knowledge. And I think that it is mainly in the troubled years…

It is difficult to predict when one will spend the night at a hotel in Newark, let alone three, and uncommon to agree to such a scenario willingly. If you live there already, you stay home. If you’re there for a professional engagement, your boss made you go. If your flight has been canceled, you go there as a last resort. Whereas, though I felt compelled to be there, I couldn’t point to an authority outside of myself that had forced my hand. The room had been booked a week in advance. I was in town, in March, for Philip Roth Unbound, a weekend-long festival hosted by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, on the occasion of what would have been the author’s ninetieth birthday. A decade earlier, Roth had…

On May 21, 1991, in the third floor men’s room at the University of Chicago Divinity School, a student noticed a hand dangling beneath one of the partitions, already turning blue. In the fourth stall, Ioan Petru Culianu, a Romanian professor of religious history, had been shot once through the head and left to die in a pool of his own blood, his pants still down. His killer was never caught, and the motive seemed to lie in some macabre interplay of politics and passion—the sort of fate that, in the American imagination, could only befall a foreigner. Some believed Culianu’s polemics had gotten him assassinated by the Romanian Securitate. The FBI noted that his occultist scholarship “was attractive to ‘wackos’” and that he “may have been accused of…

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…

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.)…

From Up Late by Nick Laird, which was published last month by W. W. Norton. I was working as a lawyer in Poland for a large firm trying to cash in on the deregulation of the Eastern European markets when I visited the brush shop. It was on a side street in the shadow of our skyscraper, the first in Warsaw. I didn’t spend much time in the office, especially in the afternoons. I liked to wander past an empty woman’s boutique called Troll, an empty sports shoe store called Athlete’s Foot. I’d walked past the brush shop—no sign—several times before I entered, ringing the bell on the door. Wooden counter. Wooden floor. Three assistants in shopcoats talking, and continuing to talk. The shop sold only brushes, but brushes of…