From Breaking Bread with the Dead, which was published last month by Penguin Press. Navigating life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. There are days we can’t even put gas in our cars without being assaulted by advertisements blared at ear-rattling volume … | Continue reading
What privacy looks like on Google Street View | Continue reading
How I learned to live with the singular they | Continue reading
For several years, beginning when I was six or seven, I played a hobo for Halloween. It was easy enough to put together. Oversize boots, a moth-eaten tweed jacket, and my dad???s busted felt hunting hat, which smelled of deer lure; finish it up with a beard scuffed on with a char … | Continue reading
July 7, 2020 The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue deman … | Continue reading
July 7, 2020 The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue deman … | Continue reading
When does imagination become appropriation? | Continue reading
It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers. American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work … | Continue reading
How Wall Street enabled a global financial scandal | Continue reading
Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live? | Continue reading
Coronavirus reveals the power of smell | Continue reading
Harper's Magazine, the oldest general-interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation, through long-form narrative journalism and essays, and such celebrated features as the iconic Harper's Index. | Continue reading
Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction | Continue reading
On the specious new history podcasts | Continue reading
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to kno … | Continue reading
This is what I feared, that she would speak about the news . . . about how her father always said that the news exists so it can disappear, this is the point of news, whatever story, wherever it is happening. We depend on the news to disappear . . .—Don DeLillo, “Hammer and Sickl … | Continue reading
The dark world of online murder markets | Continue reading
Why we miss the WASPs | Continue reading
The cost of living in the Bay Area | Continue reading
Is there a masculine cure for toxic masculinity? | Continue reading
The future of salmon in the Pacific Northwest | Continue reading
We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures … | Continue reading
By Benjamin Moser, from Sontag: Her Life and Work, which will be published by Ecco this month. | Continue reading
Homesteaders on the margins of America | Continue reading
There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that’s exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things—finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing! —The Golden Book … | Continue reading
This article by Edmund G. Love (obituary), published in the March 1956 issue, was subsequently turned into a production by the CBS Radio Workshop (7.3 Mb MP3), a book, and a musical–which led in turn to an interesting hoax by a zealous producer. On March 4, 1953, at approximately … | Continue reading
Regarding the purported rules of English syntax, we tend to divide into mutually hostile camps. Hip, open-minded types relish the never-ending transformations of the way we speak and write. They care about the integrity of our language only insofar as to ensure that we can sti … | Continue reading
A twentieth-century Tolstoy and his forgotten novel | Continue reading
How a rising of the ocean waters may flood most of our port cities within the foreseeable future — and why it will be followed by the growth of a vast glacier which may eventually cover much of Europe and North America. THIS is the story of two scientists, who started five years … | Continue reading
The afterlife of American junk | Continue reading
By Eliot Weinberger, from Little Star #6. Weinberger’s books include An Elemental Thing and Oranges & Peanuts for Sale. | Continue reading
A few miles north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sausalito, is Richardson Bay, a saltwater estuary where roughly one hundred people live out of sight from the world. Known as anchor-outs, they make their homes a quarter mile from the shore, on abandoned and unseaworthy vessel … | Continue reading
Last fall, a court filing in the Eastern District of Virginia inadvertently suggested that the Justice Department had indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other outlets reported soon after that Assange had likely been secretl … | Continue reading
Alex and Wendy love culture. It’s how they spend their free time. It’s what they talk about at dinner parties. When they go jogging or to the gym, they listen to podcasts on their phones. On Sunday nights they watch their favorite new shows. They go to the movies sometimes, but t … | Continue reading
I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy.I write a fortnightly column for the British barely right-of-center magazine (that’s left-of-center, in the United States) The Spectator. Having weathered more than one social-media shit storm, I’m one column away from the round of m … | Continue reading
How the United States and China can avoid war | Continue reading
Hört, ihr Richter! Einen anderen Wahnsinn giebt es noch: und der ist vor der That. Ach, ihr krocht mir nicht tief genug in diese Seele! So spricht der rothe Richter: “was mordete doch dieser Verbrecher? Er wollte rauben.” Aber ich sage euch: seine Seele wollte Blut, nicht Raub: e … | Continue reading
Are homicides among the elderly acts of mercy or malice? | Continue reading
On an anthology of Oulipo | Continue reading
The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism | Continue reading
One foreigner’s perspective | Continue reading
There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that’s exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things—finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing! —The Golden Book … | Continue reading
When I arrived in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan Province, I found the city’s old bazaar shuttered in preparation for Ashura, an important day of mourning in the Shia calendar. In the past, Ashura had served as an occasion for sectarian fighting in Quetta, … | Continue reading
In February, at an event at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York, while sharing the stage with my fellow British writer Martin Amis and discussing the impact of screen-based reading and bidirectional digital media on the Republic of Letters, I threw this query … | Continue reading
Dynamicland seeks to free us from our devices—through technology | Continue reading