Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Harper's Magazine

Mindsweeper The roster of failed suicide-prediction tests that Will Stephenson explores in his essay [“The Undiscovered Country,” Miscellany, August] reminded me of a time in the mid-Fifties when an eager nursing student suggested I take an attitude test. I was a teenager who didn’t believe in the order of things and who tended to hold negative opinions—conditions that prompted psychological evaluation. The test was straightforward: draw a stick figure family of three. I drew the stick figure child between the two parents. Each parent held the child by the hand. The psychologist who analyzed my drawing was astonished. What I produced wasn’t what she had expected. And even then I knew what she expected from me: an image of alienation, perhaps even child abandonment; some evidence of trauma that could…

Whiskey Ten burgers and two steaks from Mexico Uncastrated wild boar meat Deer musk glands applied as a treatment for being struck by lightning Medical waste splashed by heavy rainfall Testosterone cream applied by a resentful massage therapist Medication taken to get rid of a double chin Cocaine ingested by kissing a woman in a nightclub Sinus medication ingested by kissing one’s girlfriend Menstruation medication ingested by drinking from the same glass as one’s wife Residual foreign blood from a vanishing twin absorbed by the body before birth Ghosts…

The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavor, left behind in the early twenty-first century by an Indian goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid.” The note was found in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life. The liquid form of the poison, known in Germany as Blausäure, or blue acid, is highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celsius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which not everyone can distinguish, as doing so requires a gene absent in 40 percent of humans. This evolutionary caprice makes it likely that a significant…

Discussed in this essay: Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 592 pages. $30. The first half of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, centers on an improbable church youth group in the near western suburbs of Chicago during the final days of 1971. The improbability is twofold. First, the group’s size: it’s enormous, drawing more than a hundred adolescents—a population one might associate with a megachurch, but not a mainline Protestant congregation in an inner suburb, which is the setting here. Second, it … well, it’s just not religious. There are no readings from Scripture, Jesus is scarcely mentioned, and the associate pastor who opens meetings with prayer is treated with scorn by many of the young people, and with scarcely concealed contempt by the youth pastor who runs…

Climate change will benefit rattlesnakes. A 1972 MIT model predicting societal collapse in the twentyfirst century continued to prove prescient, coastal flooding in the 2030s will be exacerbated by the wobbling of the moon, the stratosphere shrank by 400 meters between 1980 and 2018, and the cryosphere shrank by 3.2 million square kilometers between 1979 and 2016. The lead author of a study in The Cryosphere called saving the Greenland ice sheet by injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere “​a plan B that is not!” The carbon released annually by feral pigs’ rooting in the ground is equivalent to the emissions of 1.1 million cars. In a fifteen-hour period, pyrocumulonimbus clouds in western Canada produced 710,117 flashes of lightning, including 112,803 ground strikes. The permafrost of Svalbard is becoming less…

Decades ago, my father implored me to get acquainted with James Baldwin. As is often the case with such parental injunctions, I ignored him for a long time, but once I’d acted on the suggestion, I wished I’d done it sooner. When I thought, when I wrote, Baldwin’s work was a constant inspiration. When I moved from New York to Paris in 2011, it was his path I followed. And when I visited his abandoned home in the foothills of the Alps a few years later, I was so stirred that I campaigned, in vain, to save the property from a real estate developer. But until this summer, I had never made a pilgrimage to Leukerbad, the postcard Alpine village of ski slopes and thermal baths to which Baldwin retreated…

game: Which author would you like to publish? player: Your friend Greg, who writes media-criticism-jazz-fusion in a zany style, and whose cost to print is $60 and some weed. game: Your friend Greg is being canceled! What will you do? player: Say nothing. Remove author from catalogue quietly. game: One evening in the library, where you often find yourself these days, you come across a most marvelous and disquieting tome in the restricted rare books section. Its leather cover and binding are inlaid with prismatic glyphs that seem to shift and warp depending on how you hold it. player: Try to sneak the book out of the library. game: You get caught. You are fined $1,000 and banned for life. player: Some things are best left in dreams … game:…

A colored angel named Levine said to him, I have come to help you. But he had only half-listened to Levine. The name, the color wrong. Don’t match. Unnatural. Beyond belief. He lost the angel until he desperately needed him and searched desperately for him and searched and searched and at last finds him and pleads for help that the colored angel had once long ago offered. A happy ending to my story, please, Levine. When he steps on the water of the colored angel’s voice, it does not give way. Feels solid as sidewalk, firm enough under him to place his other foot on the water, which could not be water, he was thinking even as he mounted it and stepped again, as if he could walk on water…

Shea Stadium is not Eden, and the picture of Tom and Nancy Seaver leaving its graceless precincts in tears did not immediately remind me of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel. And yet, absorbing the feelings generated by Seaver’s departure from New York led me to the kind of inflated cogitation that links Masaccio and the Mets, if only because the feelings were so outsized and anguished and intense. The late Sixties and early Seventies were celebrated or execrated for many things besides someone being able to throw a baseball consistently at ninetyfive miles per hour. Yippies yipped, flower children blossomed and withered, America was being greened, by grass and by rock and by people who peddled them. This was a pastoral time, and it would,…

Full disclosure: I initially purchased this album for gay reasons. There’s a sort of hot Pre-Raphaelite ghost clutching herself on the cover, and I, a fourteen-year-old girl in suburban St. Louis whose main cultural outlet was the local mall, found myself unable to resist her. Another disclosure: I did not, at the height of my musical listening career, listen to albums in a normal way. My usual practice was to lie down on the floor like a huge fetus, place my ear against the speaker, and pretend I was in a warm aural womb where God was growing me through an umbilicus that could only be described as my own tenuous grip on reality. You might expect this attitude to prepare me to hear Liz Fraser’s voice for the first…

Dear Stan: I am thinking. I am still thinking. God, why do I make so many mistakes! Because I am thinking? Probably, badly thinking. Love to all. The trees in the park are all white. Some day … I still do not know how to pray. Love Jonas…

White serpentpolar circlewings in granitepink sorrow in the iceblockforbidden zones around the mysteryheartpounding miles from distancewind chains hanging on homesicknessflaming shell of fury— And the snail with the ticking pack of God-time.…

Amigo Bob Cantisano didn’t think he was going to die. But his wife, Jenifer Bliss, who had cared for him through eight years of throat cancer, could see that his condition had taken a turn for the worse. The tumor in his neck had imploded, leaving an open wound that Jenifer kept clean and dressed. Little by little, it was growing toward his carotid artery. The doctors warned he could bleed out any day. “I believe your spirit will live on,” she told him, “but your body isn’t doing so good. It’s important to talk about what you want.” Amigo Bob didn’t know what should be done with his body. To bury toxic embalming fluid in the earth was out of the question—he was a lifelong environmentalist. Otherwise, he hadn’t…

vesey on the eve Maybe he should have split every tongueamong his fellow Israelites whether they sworeon their souls or not. Or gone it alone, based on the signs he read in the cowriesand cob wheels, the gris-gris of his motherwit. But that wouldn’t have been practical.How many turncoats’ throats can one man slit,how many ships commandeer, homesteads level to ash by sunup? In his bones he knowsa fool or traitor one will step forward to sow his plan like feed among the buckras,and his name from that moment will be blackerthan blood. Some know no other way. On the other side of the river of souls the scalewill tip in his favor. Men sleep as sure in their skins in heaven as liberated ghosts in Pétion’s nation.Faith alone leaves…

Discussed in this essay: A Very Old Man, by Italo Svevo, translated by Frederika Randall. New York Review Books Classics. 224 pages. $15.95. “Mario samigli was a man of letters, getting on for sixty years old. A novel he had published forty years before might have been considered dead if in this world things could die even when they had never been alive.” So begins Italo Svevo’s comic novella A Perfect Hoax (1926), written after he himself had passed the age of sixty. Though a failed writer, Mario has managed to make a life for himself by working in business, but even “at his age he continued to think of himself as destined for glory.” That dream of glory turns out to be precisely what makes Mario vulnerable to the…