Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i Harper's Magazine

Just I suspected everybody in here nursin drinks. Don’t go on gulpin shit down now. I already exposed y’all for the pussies y’all are. I already knew I was the only nigga in Maycomb who could take whiskey to the head, no nose pinchin. Where the fuck Cooter at? Cooter, where you at? Come out, come out, wherever you are! I’m a fine madame with her twat open. There the motherfucker is. Cooter, you hide right under my nose again and I’m liable to smack you with my good arm. You better turn that stool round when I’m talkin to you. I gotta start swingin my johnson? You don’t know who your daddy is? You know I’m just gettin on you like I do. Some of y’all in here dumb…

Discussed in this essay: The Deserters, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions. 192 pages. $16.95. Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, his twelfth novel and sixth to be translated into English, bears the marks of its own interrupted composition with unusual vividness; historical events broke it open like the burst of a shell. As Énard has described it, he had been working on a research-heavy project appropriate for quarantine isolation—a historical novel about an emblematic twentieth-century life, an East German mathematician-poet and survivor of Buchenwald whose idealistic loyalties and disappointments charted sixty years of European history—when, in February 2022, the twenty-first century intervened. The war in Ukraine, as Énard puts it, invaded his notebooks. It would leave in his project a datable trace, the way tree rings record catastrophes.…

The bar pattern in this puzzle has four-way symmetry—that is, the pattern of heavy bars remains the same no matter which side is up. Therefore the clues have been grouped into foursomes, each group comprising the four entries sharing symmetrical placement. But within each foursome, the clues are listed in random order; the solvermust place them correctly in the diagram. Answers include four proper nouns and one foreign word. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 89. CLUES 1A, 33A, 9D, 15D (8) Leading character in Shakespeare was indebted to dog in the past Relocating the bears is inspiring Parents foil entry requirement Clipper ship cruise initially is right to enter a cry for help…

Kentuckiana is cursed. François-René de Chateaubriand, on vacation from the French Revolution, coursed down the Ohio River and got misty-eyed about the “magnificent country” of Kentucky, “which means ‘river of blood,’ ” he would scribble, wrongly. The lamplight of Louisville, seen from the river, became a chain of beacon fires bringing news from Old Europe, where King Louis XVI, who gave the city its name, would be beheaded. The aristocrat was scared and confused, yet dazzled by the river valley, so he plagued it with mythic questions: Will the European generations on its banks prove more virtuous and free than the annihilated American generations of old? Will slaves not plow the earth beneath the lashing of their masters in these wastelands of man’s primordial independence? Will prisons and gallows not…

“There are very few things in this world which it “ is worth while to get angry about; and they are just the things that anger will not improve.” With these words, on September 18, 1851, Henry Jarvis Raymond introduced his New-York Daily Times to the world, scarcely a year after he had helped launch Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, thus fixing a journalistic tone and temper that would endure, improbably, from the clatter of horse-drawn omnibuses to the buzzing of the iPhone. “We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good,” announced Raymond, “and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform.” Neither Adolph Ochs nor Ezra Klein could have said it better.…

The simple habits of Mr. Lincoln were so well known that it is a subject for surprise that watchful and malignant treason did not sooner take that precious life which he seemed to hold so lightly. He had an almost morbid dislike for an escort, or guard, and daily exposed himself to the deadly aim of an assassin. A cavalry guard was once placed at the gates of the White House for a while, and he said, privately, that he “worried until he got rid of it.” On more than one occasion the writer has gone through the streets of Washington at a late hour of the night with the president, without escort, or even the company of a servant, walking all the way, going and returning. Considering the many…

Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counternarrative. There are a hundred thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world. Where we were, whom we know, what we’ve seen or heard. There are the doctors’ appointments that saved lives, the cell phones that were used to report the hijackings. Stories generating others and people running north out of the rumbling smoke and ash. Men running in suits and ties, women who’d lost their shoes, cops running from the skydive of all that towering steel. People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us. There are stories of heroism and encounters with dread. There are stories that carry around their edges the…

NOTES FOR “MIX ’N’ MATCH” The four related entries in the top half of the diagram and the four in the bottom half are anagrams: CONSTRUE, RECOUNTS, COUNTERS, and TROUNCES; TEARDROP, PREDATOR, PRORATED, and PARROTED. Note: ∗ indicates an anagram. ACROSS: 13. two mngs.; 14. u–surer; 15. s[tudents]–ect∗; 16. odd letters; 17. ∗; 19. ∗; 26. two mngs.; 28. po[diatry–ups]et; 29. ∗; 30. hidden; 36. hidden; 37. ∗; Marat[hon]; 41. ∗; 42. ∗; 43. ∗. DOWN: 1. counter–point; 2. ∗; 3. ∗; 4. [ab]surd; 5. ∗; 6. U–nused∗; 7. homophone; 8. ∗; 9. ∗; 10. teas[e]; 11. two mngs.; 12. spins–terhood∗; 18. two mngs.; 20. ∗; 23. ox[h]ide; 24. up(Ca)st∗; 25. [sky]scraper; 27. dad–o[pera]; 30. g(elat, rev.)o; 31. [sec]rets; 33. hidden; 35. two mngs.; 38. hidden in reverse; 39. [g]rasp;…

Climate change, which researchers warned may have a catastrophic effect on butterflies, is causing despair among the adolescents of southern Madagascar, and the warming of the atmosphere is thinning the thermo sphere, reducing its capacity to burn up space junk and the carrying capacity for satellites in low Earth orbit. The disappearance of an estimated 2,891 gigatons of terrestrial soil moisture between 2000 and 2016 accounted for about 7.1 millimeters of the sea-level rise observed in that period. Cratonic thinning under North America may be driven by the Farallon slab. Hydroacoustic imaging revealed ottertrawl damage to the floors of the Kiel and Mecklenburg Bights and mussel-dredge damage to the floor of the Flensburg Fjord. Researchers created shear and compressional seabed geoacoustic profiles at the New England Mud Patch. Martian dust…

[Essay] LIBERAL BIAS By Kevin M. Schultz, from Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), which was published last month by the University of Chicago Press. In February 1949, Bill Atwood, a young journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, took to the streets of New York City to quell a nagging query. A single word seemed to be on everyone’s lips. The Second World War had ended (Atwood had been a paratrooper), the Cold War was heating up, and lots of people in the United States seemed to be talking about how great it was to be “liberal.” The “liberal” form of government was the sweet spot between Communism and fascism, a vital center. “Liberals” were defending “the American way of life,” protecting the virtues of “the common…

Could some kind of Mark Twain revival be afoot in this, the 175th-anniversary year of Harper’s Magazine, a periodical that more consistently than any other provided a home for Twain’s writing during the half-century-long major phase of his career? 1 The signs are come unto us. The writer Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, in which Everett reimagines the story of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s raft mate on the Mississippi, the selfemancipated Jim, took home last year’s National Book Award for Fiction. Only two months ago, we got a major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it. Jim is the title, and subject, of Fishkin’s…

I don’t believe that a single one of us arrived in the world, or has since arrived anywhere else, on time. But none of us dawdled so intolerably about the business of being born as did my baby sister. We sometimes amused ourselves, during those endless stifling weeks, by picturing the baby sitting in the safe, warm dark, bitterly regretting the necessity of becoming a part of our chaos and stubbornly putting it off as long as possible. Death, however, sat as purposefully at my father’s bedside as life stirred within my mother’s womb, and it was harder to understand why he so lingered in that long shadow. It seemed that he had bent, and for a long time, too, all of his energies toward dying. Now death was ready…

The United Nations Staff Recreation Council singers came from all over the world—Guatemala, Namibia, Malaysia, Slovakia, Spain—but about half the songs at their holiday concert last December were British or American. To create an impression of neutrality, the choir chose one tune from Russia and one from Ukraine; one song from Israel and one from Lebanon. But for much of the evening, vocalists wearing “national dress” —including a fez, a kimono, a dirndl, a gele head wrap, and the striped shirt and red scarf of a Venetian gondolier—harmonized on staid arrangements of songs like “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Silent Night.” Near the entrance to the concert, at the Church of St. Monica on East 79th Street in Manhattan, was a basket of lollipops, to which a surprisingly large number of…

Harper’s Magazine turns 175 this month, but New Books is only twenty-three—too young to rent a car without incurring an additional fee. It feels older, doesn’t it? Those two imperious monosyllables, unsullied by anything so profane as a subhead or search-engine optimization, sound as if they’ve always been there. Granted, today’s column has its predecessors. The New Books, which sometimes dropped its article, ran from the late Thirties to the late Sixties and resembled the column we know today. Buried deeper in the archive you’ll find Among the New Books, which ran from 1924 to 1938; its name makes the books sound like a secretive tribe infiltrated by an anthropologist. That’s something of the spirit in which Guy Davenport, who wrote the inaugural New Books reboot in August 2001, approached…