Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Harper's Magazine

Kremlinology Being accustomed to criticism from political flanks, I rarely engage with invective, but I feel compelled to respond to Samuel Moyn’s shallow and superficial review of my book The Folly of Realism [“Casus Belli,” August], because Harper’s Magazine is a widely respected and storied publication. Moyn’s review is less a critique of my book than a reflection of his casual approach to the history and stakes of the Russia–Ukraine war. In dismissing my deep historical research as “wish-casting,” Moyn substitutes glib labels and ideological caricature for genuine engagement with the arguments I present. The Folly of Realism is a well-documented historical analysis of three decades of U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine, tracing how successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, embraced a Russia-first framework that repeatedly sacrificed Ukrainian security…

Today they’ll watch for smoke, black or white, and my grandson will turn a month old. Grandson, so much easier to say than the other name, the one I’ve only ever used for my beloved elderly, but I am fifty-four, which friends keep saying is too young, and part of me wants to agree while the other part knows it’s plenty old enough—in fact, given the scope of history, fifty-four might be too old to be what I am now. What’s your name going to be, friends keep asking. I’ve tried on a few—Honey, Mimi, Gigi. I know a woman called Weezer and one called Happy and in both cases it was the grandchild who chose. On the news they’re talking about names and legacies and who the next pope…

For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification…

1. As for God the Father—I can’t go there,not even for a minute. God the Mother—maybe,but not my mother—and certainly not yours with her late-life implantsand the sly way she askedfor the price of everything 2. As if each action, each thoughtwas a nick that made yousmaller— warped you— like this womanlooking anxiouslyat the gate numbers, eyes sunkenfrom long strain, wearing a Hawaiian shirt,her gray-blond hairin cornrows, turning her faceback and forthas if saying no because each gateis the wrong gate.…

Discussed in this essay: Scene: A Memoir, by Abel Ferrara. Simon & Schuster. 272 pages. $29. It is no great surprise to learn, as one does in the “Thanks” section that concludes the filmmaker Abel Ferrara’s new memoir, Scene, that Ferrara was contacted by a representative of Simon & Schuster about writing a book after said representative bore witness to the director introducing a screening of his 2014 film Welcome to New York. Ferrara is one of cinema’s great raconteurs, his introductions, interviews, director commentaries, and Q and A’s invariably combative, profane, raucously funny stand-up sets conducted in demotic language heavy on jivey street-rat patois—“bro” is a favorite salutation—and delivered, between alarming bursts of hoarse cackling, in a shredded voice that evinces a well-documented history of hardcore substance abuse (a…

Well-being no longer dips and ill-being no longer peaks in the midlife of Britons and Americans, owing to a deterioration in mental health among the young. Loneliness among Japanese and Taiwanese women declines in late life, whereas it continues to rise among their male counterparts. Between 2002 and 2019, the probability that a given area of Manchester, England, would become a bar desert increased twenty-six-fold, while the probability of its becoming a restaurant desert decreased fourfold. Jordanian women self-reported high mean scores on the Food Fussiness scale, and Turkish preschoolers who engage in emotional overeating are more likely to have parents who soothe them with food. Researchers determined that American consumers who experience white guilt are more likely to patronize black-owned businesses, even when they are poorly rated. Dry lowerleg…

This past summer, Robert Graves’s The Big Green Book was on heavy rotation in my two-year-old’s bedtime reading. It’s one of a handful of mostly forgotten children’s books that Graves wrote, a mysterious and vaguely disquieting story in which Jack, a young child being raised by his aunt and uncle, takes a deep dislike to them, uses a book of magic he discovers in their attic to transform himself into an old man, then tricks them into indentured servitude by (magically) cheating at cards. He also forces his uncle’s fingernails to grow through his palm and out the back of his hand, and instills a lifelong fear of rabbits in the family dog, whose illustration by Maurice Sendak is a surprisingly harmonious combination of an Old English sheepdog and Blake’s…

The word “liberty” in America’s currently reactionary scheme of things slows the pulse and chills the blood. The story of Western civilization is for the most part a collection of tales told by, for, and about the ruling families whose smile was fortune and whose frown was death. Alas, nothing seems to do much good. “It’s awful,” the historian said. “All true,” I said. The will toward self-annihilation is a familiar human characteristic. I don’t know what the less enlightened periods of history were like, but at present I can think of nothing easier than to outrage large sectors of public opinion by merely stating the obvious. No leaves on the trees, few birds in the sky; the spacious vistas interdicted in all directions by armed men in black uniforms—police…

Assessing the prevalence of weapons that circulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poses challenges. Evidence is fragmented. And companies are averse to sharing their records, especially corporations in the business of selling weapons, fossil fuels, and pharmaceuticals. So I have turned to gunpowder as a proxy. Muskets used anywhere from 0.23 ounces to nearly an ounce of powder per shot; a reasonable average would be 0.38 ounces per shot. The 80.55 million pounds of gunpowder exported by the British in the eighteenth century to Africa, Asia, and the Americas was enough charge for 1.3 to 4.6 billion shots. Every country with an arms industry exported its wares. In 1700, for example, the Dutch flooded part of West Africa with perhaps as much as 40 million pounds of gunpowder, enough…

The challenges facing the establishment media are more severe today than ever before. Trust in the press is at a record low, with only a quarter of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressing confidence in media organizations. Jobs in journalism, meanwhile, are declining faster than jobs in coal mining: since 2005, the United States has lost more than one third of its newspapers and nearly three quarters of its newspaper journalism positions. Furthermore, recent years have exposed significant professional failures—from the flawed coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to inadequate reporting on President Biden’s cognitive health. All the while, audiences sift into ever-narrower silos: Substacks, podcasts, livestreams. Perhaps most telling is the changing relationship between media and political power. There is a palpable sense of surrender in the air. In December,…

Five entries—simple fill-in-the-blank prompts, not standard clues—are listed separately. Their locations in the diagram are to be determined. Clued answers include ten proper nouns and one foreign word. The entry at 22D is uncommon. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 65. FILL IN THE BLANKS a) Drag artists love a ___________ marabou fans effectively b) Choice opponents might ask if there is a __________ c) I have a proxy to ______________ d) High obbligatos, no, but if you want an ___________ e) Parents at bedtime have to decide __________ tell a story ACROSS 1. (See instructions) (11) 9. It’s revolting—and also redundant! (8) 10. Buggy you might get into for a spell? (3) 12.…

Oh, I understand how it happens. Bloodlust comes up and…you know…takes over. —My mother, on the violence of crowds Everyone knows in a basic way what violence is for. Even my mother, a housewife who grew up on a farm. Even me, a small seventy-year-old woman who makes her living with written words. Violence is for getting your way; for asserting your existence as an individual or a group; for venting torrential feeling; for sadistic pleasure. Sometimes, I think, it’s to assuage existential terror. Because if you’re doing the violence, at that moment anyway, it’s not being done to you. I’ve been on the receiving end of violence more than once; sometimes I’ve had to submit to it, sometimes I’ve successfully fought back and escaped it. Because of my bodily…

I don’t suppose the English know what happened here, Pasolini says to Nicholas over dinner. Not someone as young as you are, anyway. They are eating, all three of them, in the only restaurant open. The dish is faintly disgusting, an assortment of boiled meats, some gray and some wrapped in a thin, sweating pink skin. It was to this town, Pasolini says, that fascism in Italy retreated. After Mussolini was deposed, he was rescued by the Germans and deposited here to run a puppet state under their command: a new republic of unparalleled viciousness and cruelty. So “Salò” means the town, yes, but also the state that was run from it. Salò is a location on a map, a moment in time, a state of mind, coming and going,…