Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 i Harper's Magazine

Safety in Numbers I’ve been in security since 1985, and I recognize many of the industry’s shortcomings described in Jasper Craven’s report [“The Thin Purple Line,” September]. Training leaves a lot to be desired. In my first licensing class, our instructor was a police officer with a trove of wisdom on street situations, safety, and taking pride in one’s appearance and demeanor. As he said (and as Craven notes), authority has a lot to do with image projection. He was later replaced with another officer who slugged in and said to us, “Look, you know this is BS, I know it’s BS, but you gotta do it, so …” New York City security sounds particularly chaotic, and Craven’s article suffers from a narrow focus on it. I live in St.…

From articles published in the American press about the explosions of thousands of communication devices in Lebanon and Syria in September. Israel allegedly detonated the devices remotely, wounding more than three thousand people and killing thirty-two, including two children. A daring operationA tactical victoryA tactical successAn incredible tactical successA strategic winA stunning blowA sophisticated attackA remarkable attackA spectacular attackAn intelligence triumphA psychological masterstrokeA feat of logistics and creativityA sci-fi-style attackA James Bond–style hack attackA scene one would expect from a Hollywood thrillerOne of the most remarkable pieces of sabotage in the history of the dark arts…

By Emily Skillings, from Tantrums in Air, which will be published in June by The Song Cave. If, as I suspect, all language has diedfor me, at least for the time being, then I’ll trotout the little reeking phonemes,the dancing spines, the disremembered—and I promise I will not try. Someone smells amazingat the weird art partywhere I am asked to read poetryto looping electronic music.I want to be a poet entirelyof a different kind. Later I discoverthe scent is coming from the scrawny potted jasmineblooming in the corner, dropping hersyrup on the floor. It’s nice to meet a fellowwhore in the world.…

Scientists used light-activated synthetic droplets to move genes to different sections of chromosomes, animated a circuit in the brains of mice that caused them to seek shelter where none was available, and allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a four-wheel vehicle and a soft five-limbed robot. Veterinarians treating a bearded dragon whose aneurysm had led to an enlarged temporo-orbital artery discovered that a reptile’s pulse can be taken at the back of its head. Sea robins can taste with their legs. Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills. Eiffinger’s tree frog tadpoles preserve the cleanliness of their water supply by refraining from defecation until adulthood. Captive greylag…

How does History move? A generation ago, in the Nineties, it seemed to have forgotten how: perhaps, as Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, History was on a journey, or it was sleeping and not to be awoken. Francis Fukuyama infamously proclaimed, with apparent triumph but actual melancholy, that History had reached its end. For Fredric Jameson the situation was even more grave: amid the uncanny blur of late capitalism, a sense of the historical had not just expired but vanished altogether. Now, we are told, History is back, and so is action, power, and ferocious ideological combat. Donald Trump threatens to abolish American democracy and install a dictatorship, perhaps a fascist one. In Western Europe, the old liberal order trembles before a rising tide of right-wing populism, while Russian…

By Richard Beck, from Homeland, which was published in September by Crown. In his 2005 book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis pointed out that, since the Seventies, the world’s poor countries have urbanized at a rate that puts Europe’s nineteenth-century urbanization to shame. But whereas those European experiences of urbanization were part of an industrial revolution that saw growth accelerate dramatically, the more recent urbanization of what used to be called the Third World has occurred in places where economic growth is either low, slowing down, or nonexistent. Megacities have grown so much not because they are hotbeds of economic opportunity but because the best way for people to survive when they cannot find secure, salaried labor is to live near as many other people as possible. The term for…

My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said in a loud, anguished, slurring voice I hardly recognized, “but I’m in very good hands.” A few hours later, I was on a flight home. When I visited her in…

By Kevin Killian, from Selected Amazon Reviews, which was published last month by Semiotext(e). I was at a loss, for none of the yarns I had on hand were anywhere near the natural quality in my mind. I was on the prowl for a particular look. It had to have that hand-dyed look. It was going to be put through all kinds of weather hell, so the colors had to be fast, and yet not the unnatural dye you see so often on cheaper pulls. I didn’t want a yarn that screamed out that it was lab-colored. I liked the soft Shetland colors of a Highland kilt. A friend suggested I go for the ticker-tape look of a crocheted hand knit, and gifted me a plentiful wicker basket piled high…

People don’t read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened: I noticed something! I was jerked alert by the following: Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial—the means…

Two years after my father died, our childhood home in California was finally empty and my brother and I made plans to clean out the garage. Our backyard adjoined that of the house around the corner, where our father had grown up; we called that the Old House. My parents eventually came to own the houses on both sides of ours as well, forming a tiny L-shaped kingdom, with a tidy complex of workshop, woodshed, and garage nestled in its crook. Our father was a high school industrial-arts teacher, and he moonlighted as a radio and television repairman. This was his sovereign territory, entered at one’s own risk. We took it apart. The garage was crammed with the dense sediment of decades. We found the expected debris: a rusty saw,…

Discussed in this essay: Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $32. In 2001, the biographer Jean Strouse happened upon an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent that featured twelve portraits of the Wertheimers, a British family of German-Jewish descent. Asher Wertheimer, the patriarch, was a well-known art dealer who had commissioned Sargent to paint a series of portraits of himself and his wife in 1897 to commemorate their twenty-fifth anniversary. Over the next decade, as the artist painted the couple and their ten children—individually and in groups, sometimes more than once—he evidently got to know the family well. A photograph on display alongside the portraits showed him…