Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2024 i Harper's Magazine

In Memoriam We at Harper’s Magazine are saddened by the death of our former managing editor and contributor Robert K. Manoff (1944–2024). Along with Lewis H. Lapham and others, Manoff oversaw the redesign of the magazine that debuted in March 1984. He will be deeply missed. The Shows Must Go On Daniel Bessner’s article “The Life and Death of Hollywood” [Report, May] does a remarkable job illustrating how the weakening of antitrust laws paved the way for the existential threat facing Hollywood writers today. His commentary on the impotence of studios’ diversity initiatives gets at the heart of the problem: there is a wide disparity between those who decide what gets made and the audience of largely working-class people whose time and attention decision-makers rely on for profit. Though efforts…

It is a sign of an inability to do marketing.It is a blasphemous commercial.It is not only in poor taste, but also incredibly cowardly.It shows a lack of respect.It trivializes the heart of the Christian faith.It offends the sensitivity of millions of practicing Catholics.I suggest a total boycott of this company.This is of an unprecedented gravity.You don’t play with God.Christ reduced to a potato chip, debased and vilified like two thousand years ago.…

He hadn’t felt well when he woke up that morning but this was the case almost every morning. He would feel uneasy, even ashamed. He had been somewhere and he knew not where. Now existence was starting up again. It was incomprehensible. He grew calmer as the day progressed. Now it was almost evening and he was in his little garden with his dog and a glass of Scotch. The dog accepted an ice cube as was customary. There was a thicket in the corner and the dog barked at it briefly like he always did. He did not like it. The man sipped his Scotch and looked about them, for the moment content. He thought of the story of the two monks sitting in a garden much like this…

On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buckskin, wild tufts of hair sticking out the ears, the eyes burning now like hot stars, now clamped shut in a kind of ecstasy, and he lurched and tottered on broken boots like a nightmare overgrown child, like some massive obliterated eejit child, and he sang out his wares in a sweet clear lilting— Pot-ay-toes? Hot po-tay-toes? Hot pot-ah-toes a pen-ny? His verse swung across the raw naked street and back again, and was musical, but he had no potatoes at all. Tom Rourke turned and looked after the man with great feeling. To be old and mad and forgotten on the mountain—was it all laid out the…

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was, never happened. The Jihad was an imagined event, conjured up by Frank Herbert as part of the lore that animates his science-fiction saga Dune. It was humanity’s last stand against sentient…

On March 14, 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic´ sat down at a small table in the center of a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Visitors were invited to take a seat opposite her and meet her gaze. She remained there for seven hours each day until May 31, a total of seven hundred hours, during which time she silently interacted with more than 1,500 people. In an interview, Abramovic´ said she was trying to induce an “experience of the here and now.” The piece was called The Artist Is Present. During a private viewing one evening before the show opened, the scene had something of the royal pageantry of early modern Europe. Here was the queen holding court in her presence chamber, lording it over her…

No one, not even the cartographers of Google, can tell you exactly how many islands there are on earth, for to count an island, you must first define it. Is Australia a continent, an island, or both? Its tectonic grandeur implies one answer. Its improbable marsupial wildlife, having evolved over epochs of biogeographic isolation, implies another. Several years ago, a pair of fastidious geographers attempted to conduct a census of islands, putting the global total at 5,675, if by island one means a body of land, larger than ten square kilometers but smaller than a continent, encircled by water. This figure, as the fastidious geographers fastidiously note, excludes the additional 8.8 million islets (smaller than ten square kilometers) and 7 billion nano-islets (as small as one square foot, “just enough…

My dear brother— The Greeks’ originality in terms of mathematics isn’t, as I see it, their refusal to accept approximation. There is no approximation in the Babylonian problems, and for a very simple reason: it’s because they are constructed from the solutions. Thus there are dozens (or hundreds, I don’t remember) of fourth-degree problems with two unknowns that all have the same solution. This shows that the Babylonians were interested only in the method and not in solving problems actually posed. They enjoyed supposing unknown what is given, and known what is not. It’s a game, obviously, that does the greatest honor to their conception of disinterested research (did they have scholarships and medals to stimulate them?). But it’s only a game. This game must have seemed profane to the…

The best I can do is to be concrete,by which I mean cementedin place. Bywhich I mean beingthe mean witchI concretely have become. A pointy blackfactual hat. A nonfictional wand. My husky boyfeet cemented into the concreteveranda. A veranda I call a verandabecause it is not a veranda. Read me my Miranda rights on that one;it’s a class thing.Like calling a soda cracker a Tombstonepizza. Or my kid calling his dadCrackerjackwhen he walked on concrete sidewalksin his businessman shoesbecause they soundedlike horse’s hooves, and he thought Crackerjackwas a good name for a horse.…

“ Far as the east from even, /Dim as the border star, /Life is the little creature/That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read that stanza in February 2022, I was more than six months into a scientific experiment I was conducting with my friend and colleague Morten Christiansen, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, where he and I are professors. In 2021, two years before ChatGPT would become a household name, Christiansen had been impressed by the initial technical descriptions of GPT-3, the recently released version of the generative large language model (LLM) that had been developed by the tech company OpenAI. Christiansen and I have been collaborating for more than a decade, mainly on talks delivered at conferences…

On sale July 9 When a Turkish art historian on the eve of her 40th birthday receives an email from a mysterious man requesting a tour of Istanbul’s Byzantine churches, she has no idea that her future and the past she thought she knew are about to be upended. Flashing between 2003 and 1974, during the Turkish Army’s invasion of Cyprus, Summer Heat explores one woman’s place in her country’s devastating history. Defne Suman’s third novel to be translated into English is a spellbinding story of womanhood and fidelity, Turkish nationhood and cultural identity, and the secrets that families keep. “Vivid, evocative, and tender.”—Elif Shafak “Dazzling.”—The New York Times, on At The Breakfast Table “Suman’s voice and descriptions are so unique and enveloping.”—Buki Papillon, on The Silence of Scheherazade Order…

Aloha.The other day I found this rock that I had takenfrom your beautiful island on my honeymoonfive years ago.I removed it with full knowledge of Pele’s ruleagainst taking any part of her island.Our lives have been a living hell since we took it.The bad luck started with the death of my husbandin a car accident.Three house fires over seven years, all after havingremodeled.Cancer has plagued my family (including myself).I am so sorry I took this.Please return it to Hawaii’s earth.I should bring it back myself, but I can’t wait untilmy next visit.I humbly beg your forgiveness.Sorry to Madame Pele.:(We are hopeful this gesture will reverse our fortunes.I hope this helps.I will exhale.God bless the gods.…

A group of forty-eight people tossed coins of forty-six different currencies and obtained a total of 350,757 coin flips. We found strong empirical confirmation that when a person flips a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started on. The magnitude of the observed bias can be illustrated using a betting scenario. If you bet a dollar on the outcome of a coin toss (i.e., paying one dollar to enter and winning either zero or two dollars depending on the outcome) and repeat the bet one thousand times, knowing the starting position of the coin toss would earn you nineteen dollars on average. This is more than a casino’s advantage in six-deck blackjack against an optimal-strategy player, in which the casino would make five dollars on…

The story has become well known. Its title is“Tears and Pain.”Wipe away the tears that fall onto my cheek.If the pain inside me fell and landed on amountain, it would collapse it.Inside the heart of a besieged person: lookingfor medication and freedom.Patience, O people of al-Shifa, for your relief is near.Honestly, Mom, I’m really tired.Mother, I miss you. I hope to God I will get tosee you soon.We will leave only with God’s permission.We accept what God has fated for us and wewill not despair waiting for the coming relief,God willing.…

By chance, I arrived at the Jewish cemetery in Cologne on Yom Kippur. It was late September last year. I’d not fasted; I never do. That morning’s meal at the hotel had included soft-boiled eggs, buttered toast, pastries, jam, rolls, liverwurst, and a little pyramid of pork sausages; I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the gates locked shut to me. I was there to visit the graves of my great-great-grandparents Alexander and Clara Ganz. Through the iron bars, I could see glades of beeches and oaks, rows of old headstones overgrown with moss and ivy. Above the doors of a stucco mourning hall was a Hebrew inscription that I couldn’t read. I’d later learn that it came from the book of the prophet Habakkuk: “The righteous lives in his…