Harper's Magazine

HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.

Harper’s Magazine

LETTERS

EASY CHAIR • Above Politics

POISON IVY • By Ryann Liebenthal, from Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis, which will be published this month by Dey Street.

GOOD OL’ BOYS’ CLUB • From a motion filed in March in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. According to the 2020 census, 64.3 percent of the voting-age population in Newbern is black.

THE INSTANT MONET ENTERS THE STUDIO • By Jean-Philippe Toussaint, from L’instant précis où Monet entre dans l’atelier, which was published in 2022 by Éditions de Minuit. Translated from the French in May by Pauline Cochran.

HOOKED ON PHONICS • By Daniel Saldaña París, from Planes Flying Over a Monster, which was published last month by Catapult. Translated by Christina MacSweeney.

THE WOLFE PACK • By Geoff Dyer, from the introduction to a new edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which was published last month by Picador.

ATTICUS FINS • From an interview with David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University, conducted in February by Lisa Margonelli for The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast.

BROTHER, GO • From an interview with the Sudanese human-rights lawyer Jamal Abdallah Khamis, recorded last October by Human Rights Watch. On June 14, 2023, paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and Arab militias overwhelmed Masalit-majority neighborhoods in West Darfur’s capital, Geneina. Tens of thousands of Masalit people and other non-Arabs tried to flee central Geneina for its northern suburb of Ardamata, the location of a Sudanese Armed Forces base. The RSF and militias attacked the refugees, injuring and killing men, women, and children.

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE • By Lauren Elkin, from Scaffolding, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

SPECTRE OF CONSEQUENCE • From headlines that have appeared in the British magazine The Spectator since January.

SEPTEMBER • By Roberto Tejada, from Carbonate of Copper, which will be published next year by Fordham University Press.

THE THIN PURPLE LINE • The dubious rise of the private-security industry

THE MAKESHIFT MILITIA

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THAT? • The future of college in the asset economy

THE NEW AGE BIBLE • On the origins of A Course in Miracles

MY AUSCHWITZ VACATION • On Holocaust tourism

FOUR STORIES

NEW BOOKS

GLIMMERS OF TOTALITY • Fredric Jameson at ninety

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

FINDINGS