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.
Xi Who Must Be Obeyed Ian Buruma’s analysis of China’s historical evolution and President Xi Jinping’s quest for national unity is informative and well supported [“The Great Wall of Steel,” Report, February]. As he points out, China strives to maintain its hold on religious and ethnic minorities. People in China are also becoming more secular, and are embracing their country as a sacred object of worship instead, a substitution Xi capitalizes on. These two phenomena are connected: the government suppresses marginalized groups and weaponizes nationalism to create a unified front against foreign powers. I am uncertain about China’s future should Xi remain in power. I recently asked a number of Chinese intellectuals in North America: Could you accept a disintegrated China? To my surprise, most of them said yes, that…
My first skis, at age two, were Olin brand, a fluorescent coral pink. They had no edges. Their sidewalls were pure white, like cut cake. They glowed, a special and unearthly light source in the snow. I was pulled along an almost flat hill, holding the end of my mother’s ski pole. At three, not good enough yet to ski with my parents and older brother, I was left at the rope tow. At four, graduated to skis with metal edges and able to scooch onto the bunny lift, I continued to fend for myself. I would sometimes wait at the bottom for a very long time, too shy to yell “single.” I remember falling while loading, and then a grown-up man skied over my face by accident as he…
Percentage by which U.S. military spending has increased since the withdrawal from Afghanistan : 5 Percentage of Afghans who are expected to be living in poverty in August : 97 Minimum number of U.S. immigration history requests held up because of pandemic rules on records storage : 350,000 Percentage change since 2017 in the number of Republicans who say military officers have “high standards of ethics” : −21 Minimum number of people who reported relatives to the FBI for participating in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot : 15 Portion of U.S. representatives facing ethics investigations last year who refused to cooperate : 1/2 Portion of Americans who have favorable views of both capitalism and socialism : 1/5 Who have unfavorable views of both capitalism and socialism : 1/5 Percentage…
[Essay] WHITE RAPTURE By Margo Jefferson, from Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir, which will be published this month by Pantheon. I started teaching women writers in the early Nineties. When I thought about my own writing—its materials, its form, what needs would drive it—I wanted to learn from every one of them: from Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks. I was also working out how to succeed as a teacher in the classroom, unprotected by a page and a byline. I started teaching full-time in 2006. And I taught The Song of the Lark, Cather’s luminous portrait of a girl from the American West becoming a great opera singer, in college seminars between 2007 and 2011. Nearly all of my students were…
A voice says: “Close your left hand. Don’t ask yourself whether you’re asleep. Think about trees.” I’m lying in bed. A sleep mask covers my eyes. A tangle of wires covers my left hand. At the tip of my ring finger, a sensor measures my heart rate. A flexible length of plastic embedded with circuits stretches from my palm to the top of my middle finger. This will record the hypnic jerks and spastic opening-hand motions that signal my entry into hypnagogia, the first stage of sleep, where thoughts slip free of conscious control. There’s a laptop on the bedside table; the screen shows fluctuating green and red lines. Adam Haar Horowitz, who is running the experiment, speaks to me over Zoom, monitoring my somatic information. The device I wear…
I once awoke from a dream while I crossing Bond Street in New York with a friend, and it was snowing hard. We had been talking, and there had been no observable gaps in the conversation. I doubt if I had made any more than two steps while I was asleep. But I am satisfied that even the most elaborate and incidentcrowded dream is seldom more than a few seconds in length. It is swifter than waking thought; for thought is not thought at all, but only a vague and formless fog until it is articulated into words. The habit of writing down my dreams while they are fresh in my mind, and then studying them and rehearsing them and trying to find out what the source of dreams is,…
