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.
Revolutionary Letters Michael Robbins’s essay on the apocalypse [“Apocalypse Nowish,” Essay, December] is a prime example of climate defeatism, a misguided trend in writing about the environment that privileges pessimism over the political imperative to confront the climate crisis. Each degree or sub-degree of global warming we prevent will make a significant difference in the number of people who die from climate disasters and food shortages. This will remain true for some years, even if we fail to limit global warming to the much-touted figure of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Robbins writes of a “crisis” that can’t be resolved within the institutions that gave rise to it, but we shouldn’t think about climate catastrophe in such binary terms. We won’t overthrow the political and economic systems that transformed…
Los Angeles is not “Hollywood,” and those who confuse the two should be banned from visiting. One quarter of California’s forty million residents live in L.A., which is the most populous county in the United States, and the majority are not screenwriters or actors or people whose employ has any connection to the entertainment industry. L.A. is the nation’s manufacturing capital; we make cars and airplanes and apparel. Our two ports are the nation’s largest and busiest, and the shipping and distribution of goods from those ports form yet another giant industry. Greater Los Angeles is L.A. plus its surrounding counties, which are seamlessly enmeshed into a single organism of commerce and culture comprising nearly twenty million people. One gazes into the geographical expanse of this place to try to…
“Berkman and Truesdale brilliantly reframe an essential policy question: Should we promote working longer? Convening experts across the social sciences, this volume illuminates growing inequalities and pushes us to consider the current realities for younger workers in assessing this question. Overtime provides an innovative, compelling, and critical perspective on modern work.”—Erin Kelly, author of Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It https://global.oup.com/…
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[Essay] THE HOLY MULTIPLICITY By Olga Tokarczuk, from “Scientomancy, or Divination by Science,” which was published in the Fall 2022/Winter 2023 issue of Salmagundi Magazine. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. I would like to focus on a special way of predicting the future. As we are living at a time of unusual uncertainty and anxiety about what will happen next, this topic is on many people’s minds, prompting us to ask: “What is our future going to be like?” And also: “Can we foresee it to any degree at all?” When I say “our future,” I’m not thinking about the next few years, but rather the gradual processes whose effects will be visible several centuries from now. In ages past, various ways of predicting the future developed dynamically.…
In recent years, a long-standing global consensus about the value of liberalism as a political and economic order has begun to erode. Where once disagreements concerned differing interpretations of liberalism’s demands or balancing liberalism’s conflicting goals of freedom and equality, now populist movements on both the left and the right are challenging the legitimacy of liberalism itself. As the chorus of critics grows, political leaders and thinkers in the United States and abroad must weigh difficult questions about the future of an ideal whose allure was once viewed as universal. What steps should liberal societies take to safeguard human dignity in the twenty-first century? Do populist movements pose an existential threat to liberal values and institutions? Must a democratic society necessarily be a liberal one? Has liberalism failed in its…
