Harper's Magazine March 2025

Don’t Stop the Muzak Liz Pelly’s article on Spotify’s collusion with the stock-music industry [“The Ghosts in the Machine,” Report, January] is fascinating and well researched, but it could have used more historical perspective. The move toward corporate-produced music seemed inevitable for decades, ever since record labels (along with publishers, periodicals, film studios, and radio stations) began to consolidate and, with the help of new technology and marketing science, maximize corporate control at the expense of artists’ agency. Technological advances in digital recording, sampling, and vocal editing, as well as the advent of streaming platforms, only made it easier to reduce music to “content” and market it like fast food. Until the 2000s, the structure of the music business involved record companies’ finding promising artists and signing them to exclusive…

They make a wilderness, and they call it peace. —Tacitus, Agricola Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump’s return to office has only put a tin plate on the coffin. The doctrine lost all legitimacy through its dependence on American global power and the hopeless contradictions this has entailed. Its demise was a failure of American and other Western politicians, of experts and journalists, to live up to the standards of ethics and courage on which they founded their claims to hegemony—and which they preached to the rest of the world. Many liberal institutions and individuals played their part in the doctrine’s death, either by actively supporting Israel or by allowing themselves to be intimidated into silence—and in many cases, by engaging in the repression…

The curse of Englishness is something whose magnitude we are still taking the measure of in our time. The English habit of not finding others as real as themselves forms a substantial part of this curse. It has fallen on numerous English writers; it fell heavily on Martin Amis. Many of these writers were perhaps not aware that it was a curse, for it surprisingly often and for long periods wore the guise of a gift. But Amis was aware of it. Amis’s father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, was one of the twentieth century’s great chroniclers of his fellow countrymen. Kingsley Amis was gloriously witty, drunken, bigoted, anti-intellectual, and profoundly lacking in empathy and self-awareness: he was something of an embodiment of the national character. Among the many things Kingsley…

A WOMAN Every night without fail I try to tear the swastika off the Nazi flag. I’m proud of myself and happy when I do it, but the next day it’s always sewn firmly on again. A MATH TEACHER It was forbidden under penalty of death to write down anything to do with math. I took refuge in a bar. I took an extremely thin sheet of paper out of my bag and wrote down a couple of equations in invisible ink, deathly afraid. A FACTORY OWNER Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter…

There’s nobody like Vermeer. Or is there? His modest known output of some thirty-five paintings—a number that keeps fluctuating—inspires something more than appreciation, or even fascination, in those who latch on. We could speak of awe, an almost religious reverence. In 1929, crowds flocked to London’s Royal Academy of Arts for a massive exhibition of four hundred and fifty years of Dutch art. Gracing the cover of the illustrated exhibition publication was Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa of the Low Countries. Not a Hieronymus Bosch or a Rembrandt, but this small and modest painting by Vermeer, not even a portrait, but a tronie, a stock character, rather low-ranking in the hierarchy of painting. What is it about her? I ask this honestly: Where does value lie in…

Q: There are two ladies in love with me to the degree that nothing will satisfy them but marrying me. They both are content to take each other as a partner rather than lose me, yet fearing it’s a sin, we know not what to do but will await your advice. A: It’s a hundred to one that you will not be liked as well after marriage as before, and it’s probable you won’t much like the prohibition of one woman or the other. Therefore, you’d better try them out first and afterward let her take you that likes you best. Q: A lady of good birth and fortune has granted some private favors to me, but so discreetly as to preserve her reputation. A friend of mine courts her…