Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i Harper's Magazine

Don’t Stop the Muzak Liz Pelly’s article on Spotify’s collusion with the stock-music industry [“The Ghosts in the Machine,” Report, January] is fascinating and well researched, but it could have used more historical perspective. The move toward corporate-produced music seemed inevitable for decades, ever since record labels (along with publishers, periodicals, film studios, and radio stations) began to consolidate and, with the help of new technology and marketing science, maximize corporate control at the expense of artists’ agency. Technological advances in digital recording, sampling, and vocal editing, as well as the advent of streaming platforms, only made it easier to reduce music to “content” and market it like fast food. Until the 2000s, the structure of the music business involved record companies’ finding promising artists and signing them to exclusive…

A WOMAN Every night without fail I try to tear the swastika off the Nazi flag. I’m proud of myself and happy when I do it, but the next day it’s always sewn firmly on again. A MATH TEACHER It was forbidden under penalty of death to write down anything to do with math. I took refuge in a bar. I took an extremely thin sheet of paper out of my bag and wrote down a couple of equations in invisible ink, deathly afraid. A FACTORY OWNER Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter…

The great advantage of an outhouse is that you never have to flush it and it doesn’t freeze in the winter. Do you know how to pump it out? Well, my father used to shovel bark mulch over it, then it decomposes. Why don’t you install a chemical toilet? Don’t you have a pit? Does it leach out, or not? It’s all natural. I’d rather dig a hole in the bushes. But if you put bark mulch over it, I’m telling you, it doesn’t even stink. All right, then. It’s so dark right now. Here, take the flashlight with you. But something’s going to jump up at me from down below. Nonsense, there’s nothing living down there. You never know. When the sun shines on the chimney, my great-grandmother used…

The Great Basin is a vast interior watershed cut off from the sea and spanning some two hundred thousand square miles of the American West. Settlers traveling on emigrant trails largely raced through the region’s desert playas on their way to more productive lands in California and Oregon. When the frontier closed, much of the Great Basin remained unsettled, and the land ended up being administered by either the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—the latter being our national custodian of “the land nobody wanted,” as the old saying goes. These are harsh places, with little to recommend them to the casual lover of nature. Under the principle known as multiple use, they are managed for the dual, and often hard-to-reconcile, purposes of natural conservation and the…

They make a wilderness, and they call it peace. —Tacitus, Agricola Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump’s return to office has only put a tin plate on the coffin. The doctrine lost all legitimacy through its dependence on American global power and the hopeless contradictions this has entailed. Its demise was a failure of American and other Western politicians, of experts and journalists, to live up to the standards of ethics and courage on which they founded their claims to hegemony—and which they preached to the rest of the world. Many liberal institutions and individuals played their part in the doctrine’s death, either by actively supporting Israel or by allowing themselves to be intimidated into silence—and in many cases, by engaging in the repression…

There’s nobody like Vermeer. Or is there? His modest known output of some thirty-five paintings—a number that keeps fluctuating—inspires something more than appreciation, or even fascination, in those who latch on. We could speak of awe, an almost religious reverence. In 1929, crowds flocked to London’s Royal Academy of Arts for a massive exhibition of four hundred and fifty years of Dutch art. Gracing the cover of the illustrated exhibition publication was Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa of the Low Countries. Not a Hieronymus Bosch or a Rembrandt, but this small and modest painting by Vermeer, not even a portrait, but a tronie, a stock character, rather low-ranking in the hierarchy of painting. What is it about her? I ask this honestly: Where does value lie in…

No news from Washington is so certain to arouse the rage of conservatives as reports of an increase in the army of federal employees bursting out of the District of Columbia. NUMBER OF FEDERAL WORKERS REACHES WARTIME PEAK: such a headline is sufficient to send the temperature of guardians of the Constitution shooting upward. Conservatives see in such a report only a vast political machine greased with the millions that each month line the pockets of federal jobholders. Those jobs, at the Public Works, Works Progress, or Federal Emergency Relief Administrations, are made up of “intellectuals”—not necessarily experts or specialists in a field, though some of them may be that, but brainworkers, men and women trained to think abstractly. They have been drawn from universities and colleges, from advertising agencies…

I see more shredding trucks in New York than I used to. They park around the city for “community shredding” events, where neighbors, friends, and loved ones convene to watch their old bank statements and medical records become curly, illegible ribbons. One such truck I’ve seen was emblazoned with a slogan: secure destruction you can trust. But I’d never thought to give destruction anything less than my total trust. The truck belonged to Iron Mountain, a corporation in the business of both destroying information and preserving it, named for a former mine in the Hudson Valley. Its first storage facility, which contained a massive bombproof vault, opened there in 1951, allowing banks, oil companies, and insurance firms to assuage their atomic-age paranoia by maintaining bunkers for their most sensitive documents…

Q: There are two ladies in love with me to the degree that nothing will satisfy them but marrying me. They both are content to take each other as a partner rather than lose me, yet fearing it’s a sin, we know not what to do but will await your advice. A: It’s a hundred to one that you will not be liked as well after marriage as before, and it’s probable you won’t much like the prohibition of one woman or the other. Therefore, you’d better try them out first and afterward let her take you that likes you best. Q: A lady of good birth and fortune has granted some private favors to me, but so discreetly as to preserve her reputation. A friend of mine courts her…

The gifts I didn’t send you on war’s birthday,the poem’s wave to me as I close the book, like it was dying of gangrene,the bridges between my mouth and what I would say aboutanything shut down,the barracks next to the tall fence of my life,the time spent with old neighbors before they were scattered by the shell of absence,my dreams walking along with their old cane to a sea that couldn’t care less,last pill in the cabinet of hope,the beads in my rosary are endless, and I’m delirious: Gaza… Gaza.Like flags of a country that defeated itself,from the heart to the heart they came back staring into the void,looking for old addresses in the salty mail.As for the songs embroidered on the dress of sand,the heart flows like a river…

NOTES FOR “FACETIOUS FRIENDS” Note: * indicates an anagram. The highlighted entries each contain all five vowels with no repetition. They are: A. ABSTEMIOUS*; B. CA(U)L-IF-LOWER; C. SEQUOIA, sickwhoa-ya; D. SUBCONTINEN-TAL*; E. M.I.A-O.(U.)E.D.; F. EDUCATION*. ACROSS: 11. rev.; 12. *; 14. t-outs; 15. hidden; 17. hidden; 18. [s]tree[t]; 19. two mngs.; 21. homophone; 22. [w]Indy; 24. [h]avoc-[h]ad-[t]o; 28. even letters; 30. Tru(is)m[p]; 31. *; 32. ramp-age; 34. hidden; 36. *; 41. hidden; 43. last letters; 45. hidden; 46. U-nrepealed*. DOWN: 1. *; 2. homophone; 3. [f]utile; 4. opt-1-mist; 5. *; 6. ro(t)om, rev.; 7. *; 8. Ot(E)ri; 9. pun; 10. *; 13. *; 20. two mngs.; 23. stor(e)men; 24. rev.; 25. As-1-a; 27. hidden; 29. su(per)b; 33. go(u)da; 35. men-u; 36. homophone; 38. first letters; 39. homophone; 40. nort[h], rev.;…

Discussed in this essay: Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation, by Daniel Rachel. Akashic Books. 480 pages. $32.95. When I was asked recently what gigs I’d most want to see if I could travel back in time, a few obvious answers leaped to mind: Charlie Parker, the Velvet Underground, Dylan and the Band c. 1965–66. Truly, what I’d most like to do is revisit certain nights in the late Seventies in a less altered state than I was in at the time: the Fall, Joy Division, Pere Ubu, Wire. Also on that list: one night in the spring of 1979, when, down in the basement of the Hope and Anchor, a raucous crowd witnessed an early London performance…