Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i Harper's Magazine

Indecent Exposure Daniel Kolitz’s article on gooning [“The Goon Squad,” Report, November] is entertaining, vivid, and unusually well-reported for a legacy outlet tackling an online subculture. He joins a Discord server, surveys participants, and situates gooning in a lineage of adult media spanning magazines, tube sites, social-media feeds, and creator platforms. He also identifies a real formal innovation: porn music videos, a distinct, beatsynced genre with its own authors and audiences. But the framing of the piece skews moralizing and voyeuristic. Opening with a crime and a suicide that have little to do with gooning invites guilt by association and primes readers for panic; sensationalizing flourishes in such phrases as “pornography cult” and “gooner terror attacks” add little and don’t match the behavior that Kolitz documents. Methodologically, the piece leans…

My glorious and dearly beloved king, There is a secret that can be revealed to my august and gracious friend only in the hour of my death, but then it will become clear to him what today must seem obscure: that he alone is the creator and author of all that the world will attribute to my name from this day on. My sole reason for living is the wondrous love that descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend—as though from the lap of God—fructifying new seeds of life within me! And the sole creator of this life is my gracious friend, the savior who leads me to a new religion, a religion that brings forth a second, new life from deep within…

The grocer, whom she counted on, he said he was reaching out—asking customers what they really wanted—and then she saw fresh kale for the first time!—ruffled as it is—in a big bunch, and such a severe, deep green, more like something lavish she would prefer to wear. She doesn’t buy or cook kale, but it’s as if she attacks the food that she does buy and cook. And she can eat it very fast, impaling items that then hurtle into the pit. Look here—she and her husband must hurry—they have urgent business to take care of just like everybody else. Her legs serve her well as levers. They bear her weight. And her husband, Jimmy—oh, just sum it up! He is a new man these days, because he is different…

They have me doing transcription in a room the color of coffee deciding if it really wants to be coffee. Coffee or something else. Occasionally, a head will poke in through the door and smile. “Oh, hi,” it will say. “Hi,” I’ll say back. “I’m glad they finally found someone to fill Frank’s old position,” the head will say. “Yes,” I’ll say. Then the head will disappear. I never get to know the heads’ names, nor do I see the heads attached to actual bodies. For all I know, they are floating heads passing by Frank’s old office. I do not know Frank, but he seems to be on all the heads’ minds lately. Every head that pokes in ponders Frank’s previous existence in the room, his possible future existence…

The existence of a sizable body of voters with a known prejudice will exert a powerful attraction on any group of politicians. For Republican leaders, the prospect of an isolationist comeback must be particularly tantalizing. They cannot help recalling that the last and, in some respects, most luxurious era of Republican power began in 1920, when isolationist sentiment almost wrecked the Democratic Party. They must also remember that the emotions stirred by Hitler’s war wrested eight states from Franklin Roosevelt. Republican leaders are gambling on a revival of the old isolationist vote to sweep them to victory in 1952. Who are these isolationists? What made them isolationists in the first place? Has the Korean War stirred the same emotional responses as the two world wars? A major difference between the…

The birth of the Public Universal Friend is up there with the signing of the Declaration of Independence and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware as one of the feel-good sensations of 1776. That October, Jemima Wilkinson, a twenty-threeyear-old Quaker living with her father in colonial Rhode Island, fell gravely ill, perhaps with typhus. After some five days of fevered writhing, Wilkinson said she saw “celestial beings floating by her bedside”—generally an indication to send for the undertaker. And yet she awoke the next morning not just alive but infested with life. The “tabernacle” of her body, she told one of her brothers, was now home to a spirit dispatched by God, and archangels had descended to assure her that there was “Room, Room, Room, in the Many mansions of eternal…

The first time around, there was something almost thrilling about Donald Trump as president. His administration furnished the virtuous with a kind of negative pole against which to define themselves. Here was a foolish and incompetent tribune of the nation’s racist vulgarians, opposed by the prosperous and the well educated, the civilized and the tolerant. It was somehow fulfilling to imagine him as a bumbling villain, a Russian operative of some kind, or Adolf Hitler returned to life. The respectable world came together against him with a gratifying unanimity: the legacy media, the nonprofits, the universities, the think tanks, the tech sector, the intelligence community. Insulting this imbecile became the most rewarding pastime on earth. For much of 2025, by contrast, a pall of dread seemed to hang over the…

Founding of literary-cultural review magazine, Print. Submissions recruited; failed to raise money; abandoned. Neglected (shamefully) to communicate with contributors. (1998) An edited collection of essays on early modern secrets. Stalled after two meetings. (2001) An article on the circulation of Ben Jonson’s poetry. Written; rejected for failing to adequately consider musical contexts; put in a drawer somewhere and unseen since. (2001) A nonfiction book about fatherhood. Pages of notes, quotes, then ran aground, partly because everyone seemed to be thinking of writing the same book (but also never did). (2009) A database of books printed in English, in England, in 1609. Large spreadsheet; on completion, all sense of purpose evaporated. What is the point of this? Dormant file on desktop. (2010) An article on the early modern sense of the…

I’m trying to breathe like the curtains doThe opposite of what I’d tried yesterday Trying to forcefully removeWhat had both practical and impractical use The sun reprinted again and againUpon the towel no harp In the real senseIn the room where dreams come Or beckon and I stubbornly held firmMaybe knowing all material is limited For a night, lost treasures returnedA chorus Pointing out the window one huge blurry armGifting me solitude and plenty A sense I’d tumbledComically there from the sky Into my worn nest of cottonOn my knees like new Overgrowth below, forever on all sidesI cooed for the day…

January 20, 2025, the first day of President Trump’s second term, marked a major milestone for the U.S. utility sector: a record high for naturalgas consumption. A few weeks after, key players in American utilities gathered blocks away from the White House for the Winter Policy Summit, a conference organized by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). Trump’s policies were much discussed—but the country’s energy demand, which had started to climb for the first time in two decades, was even higher on the agenda. For most Americans, this trend is bad news. It means higher electric bills, ostensibly to pay for new infrastructure. But for the utility sector, greater energy use brings greater profits, followed by stock buybacks and executive bonuses. From the panels to the hotel…

Discussed in this essay: The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, by Gerald Howard. Penguin Press. 544 pages. $35. As a writer I am, I suspect, at the worst stage of life—older, sentimental, self-pitying, just awful—to be reading a vivid history of the twentieth-century writers who produced the most influential work of my youth, which is to say, the writing that began to emerge after the First World War and that shaped American literary sensibilities until the late Seventies or early Eighties. Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature is a history of that era and its aftermath, seen from the panopticon that is his chosen subject, the editor, critic, and poet Malcolm Cowley. The action surrounding Cowley in the Twenties, Thirties,…

Our ship, the Conscience, an old repurposed ferry joining the latest wave of flotillas seeking to penetrate Israel’s sixteen-year naval blockade of Gaza to supply humanitarian aid, was sailing southeastward in the international waters of the Mediterranean, near the Suez Canal, more than one hundred nautical miles from Israeli or Palestinian territory. Over the ship’s loudspeaker, the captain alerted us to assemble on the deck; the Israeli military was approaching. Military vessels surrounded us as helicopters churned overhead, whipping up wind and spray and drowning out our chants of “We are journalists. We are medics.” Soldiers rappelled from the helicopters to the upper deck and trained their rifles on us. They ordered us out of our seats, to take off our life vests and shoes, empty our pockets, and submit…

As large language models are increasingly utilized in financial decision-making domains such as asset management and commodity trading, understanding their potential for pathological decision-making has gained practical significance. We systematically analyzed LLM decision-making at cognitive-behavioral and neural levels based on human-gambling addiction research. In slot-machine experiments, we identified cognitive features of human gambling addiction, such as illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy, and loss chasing. When LLMs were given the freedom to determine their own target amounts and betting sizes, bankruptcy rates rose substantially alongside instances of irrational behavior, demonstrating that greater autonomy amplifies risk-taking tendencies. Through neural-circuit analysis, we confirmed that model behavior is controlled by abstract decision-making features related to risky and safe behaviors, not merely by prompts. AI systems have developed humanlike addiction.…

On a cool evening in October, six weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in full view of thousands at Utah Valley University, I joined a sea of young people lining up outside the auditorium on Indiana University’s sprawling Bloomington campus for an event sponsored by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk himself had been scheduled to headline the event, one stop on a planned tour of colleges across the country. Instead we would hear from Tucker Carlson, once the star of Fox News and now a wildly popular podcast host. The choice was a pointed one given Carlson’s willingness to buck Republican orthodoxy, particularly on matters of foreign policy. He has vehemently denounced American military involvement abroad, including attacks on Iran, support for Ukraine, and most controversially, the U.S.-backed war…