Harper's Magazine February 2026

Smear of Influence In Pankaj Mishra’s column [“Liberal Totalitarianism,” Easy Chair, December], he catalogues the failures of Western liberalism without providing constructive advice on how to resolve them within the political framework of a constitutional democratic republic. Instead, he simply lashes out at an “intellectual service class” hiding behind a “moral mask” of liberalism while reciting a litany of illiberal abuses all too familiar to any intelligent reader. Mishra refers to nineteenth-century European imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a time when “powerful white men obscured their worst excesses” of genocide, slavery, and despotism by “presenting themselves as philanthropists in the vanguard of humanity’s march toward a glorious future.” That mask in fact dates to the fifteenth century, when the Church issued a series of papal bulls giving…

In November 2023, as Israeli politicians and journalists blurted out their fantasies of mass extermination, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas co-authored a statement titled “Principles of Solidarity.” Incensed by criticism of Israel, he and his collaborators insisted that the country’s assault on Palestinians was “justified in principle.” Two years later, as Israel makes a mockery of the ceasefire in Gaza, the last surviving great European thinker has sunken into a complicit silence, and other pillars of the postwar West are not faring better. The evidence from the last months is overwhelming. After Donald Trump demanded the Nobel Peace Prize, its Norwegian stewards awarded it to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan agitator who hailed the American president’s extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean Sea and his supposed struggle for peace, freedom, and…

Since the dawn of time, English teachers have instructed students to avoid cliché. Clichés kill the imagination; they arrest thought; Hannah Arendt blamed them, in part, for the Holocaust. Once a phrase has been stamped with the stigma of cliché, the thinking goes, it is no longer available to either the creative writer or the close reader. Writers on the verge of cliché should quickly swerve before getting caught in its thought-quashing machine, and readers who come across it should write it off as canned, shopworn, and tired. And yet, what, as a metaphor, could be more canned than “canned,” more shopworn than “shopworn,” more tired than “tired”? Why does the contempt for cliché seem to inspire such uninspired critique? Is it possible to speak of cliché without cliché? In…

My question today is: Is the church going to embrace AI? I mean, I’m proud to be a Christian, and you should be, too. Seventy percent of Nobel Prize winners of the past hundred years are Christians. Do you want to win the Nobel Prize? The best way to do that is to become a Christian. Almost every higher education institution is based in Christendom. Almost every hospital is based in Christendom. We can be proud to be Christian and we can be proud to embrace technology. Do you think Zuckerberg cares what we, the Christian community, think about AI? Or Sam Altman? We have to show up together to shape technology. I have three chat services open on my desktop pretty constantly, and sometimes they’re just dead wrong. It’s…

ELLIOT MAXWELL: Do you have a general awareness of the testing that went on under CIA auspices at hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons, jails, and institutions for the criminally insane? SIDNEY GOTTLIEB: I certainly wouldn’t say yes if you mean all of those. If you mean any of those, the answer is yes. MAXWELL: Do you recall experiments with psychochemicals on human subjects being done in prisons? GOTTLIEB: Well, I am having trouble with the term “prisons.” The reason for the confusion is that there are institutions that I have trouble defining. I wouldn’t call it a prison. It had people with criminal backgrounds in it, but they were not confined as they would be in a prison. I would call it more of a treatment facility. TED RALSTON: Would this…

All right, says the dog, I’m only doing this once. Everyone shut up. So, it’s winter. I’m writing a book of jokes. The jokes are funny, everyone loves them. Yeah right. I’m thinking maybe I’ll pitch it to RCW literary agents. Yeah like they’ll want you. Then one day, I’m doing some research, just dicking around on the internet, really, for this joke I’m working on about the hundreds of starving children murdered by the GHF, you know, it’s interesting what you find when you poke around a bit under the covers. Felix qui diligitur. You’re telling me, says the alligator. So the GHF is headquartered in Delaware, but they set up a quote, unquote affiliate branch in Geneva, for investors who prefer to operate outside U.S. structures. Nothing to…