Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i Harper's Magazine

Masters of None The practice of interviewing government officials became commonplace in the United States by the 1880s, but was considered uncouth in parts of Europe through the end of the First World War. As American audiences enjoyed a more intimate, and often critical, perspective on their leaders’ decision-making, one French observer disparaged the “spirit of inquiry and ‘espionage’” animating the American press. Thomas Meaney’s dispatch from the Munich Security Conference [“Masters of War,” Letter from Germany, June] is an impressive revival of that spirit. His interviews with David Petraeus, Ben Rhodes, Niall Ferguson, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, and an unguarded Chinese foreign minister whom he chases down are relayed with the familiarity and irreverence of the original “correspondents”—often the friends of an editor whose long-distance correspondence was simply published. Meaney’s…

“My fiancé is waiting for me in Las Vegas,” she says. She keeps on talking about her fiancé and apologizing for her every move. That’s just something junkies do. I know she’s a junkie not because she’s drinking liquid morphine but because she says sorry a lot. And the cheekbones, of course. She calls it “my medicine,” the morphine. She asks the flight attendant for wine and I join her. I’m on a Manchester–Las Vegas Thomas Cook flight and I need a drink. If she didn’t call it her medicine I would ask her for some. I can’t sit still. I’m nervous. I’m in trouble. I was told that entering through Las Vegas would be easier than LAX, that the immigration officers are more relaxed. Or that they are so…

What is wood? Consider the teenager’s nomenclature for an erect pecker. A peckerwood is a jerk. A woodpecker is a bird. A group of woodcocks is a fall. A flock of seagulls is annoying. Though wooden rafters support your roof, there is no wood in a rafter of turkeys. There are wood ducks, woodchucks, Wood Islands, Woodvilles, Wood Alleys, none of them as wooden as the personalities of your dead neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Wood, who are both just as stiff as a board, lying, as they are, God bless them, in their old pine boxes. I would, you would, she would: it’s conditional. Wings of ash and spruce flew the Wright brothers a few dozen yards. Blasted into space, a piece of Newton’s apple tree experienced weightlessness. Forests, you…

Muji was founded in 1980 in a thorough rationalization of the manufacturing process. The ensuing products are remarkably pure and fresh: succinct. They have even been credited with being “anonymous.” In contrast to the prevailing and overembellished products in the marketplace, Muji’s do not seek to entice responses of strong affinity like “this is what I really want.” Muji’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with such statements as “I must have this” but with a sentiment akin to “this will do.” “This is what I really want” expresses both faint egoism and discord, while “this will do” expresses conciliatory reasoning. It may even be said to incorporate resignation and a little dissatisfaction. Muji’s goal is to sweep away that slight dissatisfaction and raise its level…

Before going up Millstone Hill the crowd waited in a field for darkness to fall. As the long summer day trailed on, they twirled colored ribbons and tossed devil sticks in the air, a jam band played, and a woman braided her boyfriend’s hair. There were overpriced hot dogs and lasagna for sale but no beer. On one side of a length of caution tape, a couple on a blanket played Magic: The Gathering. On the other, a small huddle of silhouettes dressed in fire-resistant clothing stood beside a forge—later I learned that they were bronze-casters. They each carried a scoop on a long stick with which they removed molten metal from the forge and indecorously chucked it at a wall of plywood, sending sparks raining in the darkening blue…

Discussed in this essay: The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned…

Archaeologists translated cuneiform tablets recording shareholder agreements for the first company in Anatolia. People living in the Horn of Africa survived the explosion of the Toba supervolcano 74,000 years ago, and shifts in the Nile River system, such as floodplain expansion and consolidation from a wandering braided network of smaller rivers into a single channel, may have contributed to the prosperity of Egypt’s New Kingdom. Exposure to tidal environments causes freshwater snails to develop circatidal rhythms, and exposure to metals from abandoned mines causes genetic isolation in British trout. The volume of water in Tibetan lakes is expected to quadruple by 2100. Warm ocean water unexpectedly intruded between the Thwaites Glacier and its bedrock. The combustion efficiency of carbon fuels in the Yangtze River Delta doubled between 2011 and 2021,…

On a damp, gray afternoon in April, I took my daughter with me to vote in the New York Democratic primary. After a long Tuesday, she was keen to get home to Cheddar Bunnies and apple juice; instead, she was watching me fumble with a series of locked doors outside a local high school in Brooklyn. As it started to rain, I realized that my problem was acute: I had to explain to the hungry four-year-old on my shoulders why I had taken a precious chunk of her afternoon in order to cast an empty ballot. She realized it, too, with a ring of triumph in her voice: “But if you’re not voting for anybody, Daddy, why do you have to vote?” I was doing this to register dissent from…

You’re returning from Hong Kong, oyster of the hundred thousand pearls, and from the very first train (the one that takes you straight from Narita Airport to your beloved Yamanote Line, short-circuiting the interminable trip by road) your heart is stolen by Japanese kindness. Who will find the proper note to sing the praises of xenophobic hospitality? It’s because there is something really tragic, an irremediable flaw in the misfortune of not being born Japanese, that one must show all possible consideration for the foreigner (as for the cat). You mount the staircase to the train station, and suddenly your bag hangs less heavily from your arm. A robust country dweller has taken hold of the other strap, and will accompany you like that as far as the quay, where…

“were molecular machinesoperating onenergy freelyavailable fromsuch sources asthermodynamicprocesses.” It sounds so benignwhen you put itlike that. Our earliest ancestorswere accelerants. They ate change.Where does that leave us? Do I believethat formulatinga problemin the starkestpossible waywhile making strangeand conspicuousword choicesis helpful? What if the answeris no? Ladybug, ladybug,fly away home. Your house is on fire.Your children…

The night before my brother’s second wedding, he held a rehearsal dinner that was, per contemporary tradition, a rehearsal only for the pained social interactions that were to follow the next day. I was one of the guests of honor at an overpriced restaurant in the New Jersey town where we’d grown up, and my gift for diplomacy rendered me essential to my brother’s hopes for a successful weekend. But who tells stories about successful weekends? I had remained publicly neutral about my brother’s divorce less than a year prior. It had been clear from the start of his relationship with Elyse, never mind the relatively brief marriage portion of it, that it was not going to last until death did them part, unless, ha ha, one of them killed…

More than four million Americans are already part of the growing enhanced community. It takes courage. The International Olympic Committee has weaponized the athletic community against science and against you. Below are some tips to help you on your enhanced journey. YOU DON’T HAVE TO COME OUT AS ENHANCED It’s really up to you. If you are in an environment that is hostile toward enhanced athletes, remember that the Enhanced Games embraces you. IF YOU THINK SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS ENHANCED Remember that you cannot force them to come out. But if a friend comes out as enhanced to you, respect their commitment to their health. STAY IN CONTROL OF THE NEWS If you come out as enhanced, it is important to control the messaging. You are overcoming the dogma…

The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent. There are evils hiding among the congregation, the pastor continues, unseen devils that must be named and expelled. “I renounce you, Satan,” he says, “and all of your demons.” On his command, those demons will be cast out by the power of Jesus: an exorcism en masse. His voice works up to a pulsing staccato, listing the lurking devils. “Yoga … psychic hotlines … every voodoo curse, out, out…

That summer we lived in two houses, one after the other. I had remembered it as two summers, but my brother, Gabriel, reminded me, no, it was all one summer, 1961, when he turned six and I turned eight—a birthday distinct in my memory because of the gift of a small plastic carriage drawn by eight miniature horses, an object of intense fascination that I drove along intricate roadways I constructed in the dirt. It was a long summer, in any case: long in the elastic time of childhood, and so long it might as well have been two. There were the two houses, after all. As I learn now, consulting Joseph Blotner’s doggedly calendrical biography of our father, Robert Penn Warren, we lived in the village of Locmariaquer on…