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.
Black Mirror Barrett Swanson’s report on collab houses [“The Anxiety of Influencers,” Letter from Los Angeles, June] reminded me of another excellent piece of writing: George Saunders’s 2003 short story “Jon,” which follows a group of teens living in luxury, much like the boys Swanson encounters during his stay in a TikTok mansion. Writing before the term “influencer” became ubiquitous, Saunders calls the teens TrendSetters and TasteMakers. They live in isolation, refracted back to the outside world in brief flashes: on baseball cards; in promotional material for gum and clothing. They are implanted with devices that transmit advertisements directly into their minds, replacing memories with commercials, chipping away at their personhood so they can more fully embody the products they’re peddling. Saunders isn’t afraid of his fictional teenagers—he’s afraid for…
In 1974, a pair of scientists who would go on to win the Nobel Prize published a paper demonstrating that the chlorofluorocarbons used in aerosol sprays and refrigerators were harming the layer of ozone gas that prevents UV rays from penetrating Earth’s atmosphere. In 1985, as more researchers began to assess the implications of the report, an atmospheric scientist—who initially thought his instruments were malfunctioning—announced that he had discovered a hole in the ozone that covered much of Antarctica. Scientists rushed to make sense of the depletion, and terrifying stories circulated about antarctic sheep being blinded by UV radiation and humans facing unavoidable skin cancer. “It’s like AIDS from the sky,” one environmentalist later told Newsweek. Yet by 1987, dozens of countries had signed the Montreal Protocol, the world’s most…
By Greg Jackson, from “Sources of Life,” which was published in the Spring 2021 issue of The Point. Jackson’s essay “Prayer for a Just War” appeared in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine. A false theory of culture is worse than a false theory of the heavens. The planets stick to their orbits no matter what we think, but culture becomes what we believe it to be. Conditioned by the prophets of data and nostalgia to imagine nothing that goes beyond the evidence of the past, we forget that people are self-aware and that their actions are shaped by a self-aware culture. Our explanations are not independent of our behavior but constitutive of it. Our cults of thinking become our culture. Every conscious decision we make—even simply to pause or…
By Daniel J. Kruger, from an article titled “Phenotypic Mimicry Distinguishes Cues of Mating Competition from Paternal Investment in Men’s Conspicuous Consumption,” which was published in April in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The experimental stimuli are shirts with small and large versions of a luxury brand’s logo. Participants rated the unseen owner of each shirt and were expected to intuitively distinguish the life histories and related characteristics of the two shirt owners. Participants viewed images of two classic-fit Polo shirts, one with a “signature embroidered pony at the left chest” and one with a “signature embroidered Big Pony at the left chest.” Results indicated that mating effort and parental investment scores were inversely related. The owner of the large-logo shirt was also rated more attractive to women for a…
From publishers’ descriptions of audiobooks recorded by Edmund Kemper for The Blind Project. Kemper was convicted of murdering his grandmother, grandfather, mother, and seven other girls and women between 1964 and 1973. He is currently serving a life sentence in California. FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC: Four children are kept in the attic of their grandmother’s labyrinthine mansion, isolated and alone. As visits from their seemingly unconcerned mother slowly dwindle, the children grow closer and depend on one another to survive. THE TANGLED WEB: If the most exciting part of Rowry’s job is running in the drunks on Saturday night, that’s fine with him. But sometimes drunks carry guns. BOWDRIE’S LAW: When you look into Chick Bowdrie’s black eyes it’s like looking down the barrels of two .44s with their hammers…
From interviews conducted by Anne T. Lawrence and collected in On Dark and Bloody Ground, which will be published this month by West Virginia University Press. GRACE JACKSON: In the days of prosperity, you know, those coal operators, they came in here and built themselves a fine hotel. And they brought in harlots by the carriage-full for them operators. Didn’t care about no religion or nothing. They say that there was no religion this side of Thurmond, nor no Sabbath either. Wasn’t uncommon to see five thousand dollars on the roulette wheel at one time. And if a man refused to pay up, why, they’d just shoot him in his tracks, yes they would. No-body would even miss him in the morning, but there he’d be, floating facedown in the…
