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.
In Memoriam We at Harper’s Magazine are saddened by the death of our former contributing editor Thomas de Zengotita (1943–2024), who wrote many essays for the magazine, including “The Numbing of the American Mind” (April 2002) and “The Romance of Empire” (July 2003). He will be deeply missed. Major Feelings It is only natural that Asian Americans hold different political views. No one thinks that the Irish, Italians, or Germans who came before us should vote as one bloc; Asian Americans, who come from many different countries, have the same freedom of thought as everyone else. The emergence of conservative Asian Americans, as observed by Matthew Shen Goodman [“Demographics vs. Destiny,” Report, October], discredits the tired liberal stereotype that all minorities think the same way and share the same traits.…
William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob the job off on H. L. Mencken, who wasn’t available. For the better part of two centuries, the Easy Chair—the oldest column in American journalism—has as often as not been a source of grief for its occupants. “The limitation of length and the long time-lapse are a monthly test of a writer’s professional judgment, not to speak of his luck,” DeVoto wrote in retrospect. (Over the course of his tenure, lead times grew from three weeks ahead of publication to seven, a gift of “the breath-taking advance in technology that is called American know-how.” Today, miraculously, lead times are…
Waste seemed like all I knew when I was a child. My parents didn’t get along, and we moved often, even when they were married, then more and more once they had divorced. Briefly, when I was in eighth grade, my brother, my sister, and I lived with our mother on one part of Cape Cod. After a year, we were sent to live with our father and new stepmother on another part of the Cape. Suddenly, as I started high school, I had different parents, a different house, a different school, different friends, a different life. My stepmother and I instantly, instinctively, despised each other, which made things hard for everyone. I had three close friends in those years, sequentially, not simultaneously, all from families dissimilar to my own.…
The notebooks show their age through their use and how they became dog-eared and worn. The pages are filled with notes written in pencil, which, perhaps fortuitously, fades more quickly. Some of the notes are long, others just lines, or words, indicators. Sections were later colored with highlighters, or have flight-line-ringed sentences—guiding later drafts of the book. Various pages were turned inward, or tagged, or have flattened corners. The inside covers of the notebooks were used to save a substantial collection of news clippings, an offbeat record of the world through those years of writing the book. There are pressed leaves, wildflowers, feathers of owls and colorful parrots and lorikeets, swans, finches, cockatoos, picked up on walks—hundreds of walks—taken alone while deep in thought, that in the end amounted to…
OPERATOR: 9-1-1, what are you reporting? PATRICIA UPTON: Yes, I need a officer to come out to my property. I have fifty to seventy-five raccoons that are all over my property. I just need a report made, because I have people that, um, can euthanize these animals. But since I’m only on a half acre, I need the sheriff’s department to weigh in. OPERATOR: I’m going to pause you right there. So: law enforcement does not actually respond to raccoons. UPTON: What? OPERATOR: You would have to contact either an exterminator— UPTON: I’ve done all this! I’m at the point now where I have anywhere from fifty to one hundred raccoons. I need an officer. OPERATOR: Okay, and is that a house there or an apartment? UPTON: It’s a house…
Tax the rich.Establish drop-in centers in supermarkets.Put plants and blue-sky images in waiting rooms.Turn the heating in hospitals down by one degree.Simplify medical language.Use taxis instead of ambulances for nonemergencies.Play “high-energy” music in ambulances.Replace ambulance sirens with healthy eating advice.Sell sugar-free ice cream from the back of ambulances.Get the homeless to drive ambulances.Give patients vouchers for local pubs.Charge people to fix botched cosmetic surgeries.Charge for X-rays following sports injuries.Get rid of middle management.Stop providing information in multiple languages.Use AI chatbots for suicide hotlines.Design hospitals like Amazon warehouses.…
