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.
Picking Up the Crumbs I have read Dan Piepenbring’s review of Dan Nadel’s biography of me [“New Books,” April], and just to set the record straight, the “victim” who said, “You don’t cop a feel. You cop a ride,” was a big strong woman who INVITED me to hop on her back and then danced around humming a tune just to show how easy it was for her. I was thrilled, of course, “pervert” that I am. She worked for the parks department in San Francisco and boasted of how part of her job involved carrying ninety-pound sacks of manure, which she said was no big deal for her! Wow! Oh, I love big strong ladies. And in case you are unaware of it, there are many such women who…
The only thing everyone can agree on about why Donald Trump does what he does is that his reasons are not obvious. There are innumerable proposals on offer for an intellectual framework that supposedly unifies and explains Trump’s chaos—he is Vladimir Putin’s puppet; an unreconstructed disciple of Pat Buchanan Thought; a loyal servant of the conservative think tanks that concocted Project 2025; or a Machiavellian mobster focused single-mindedly on self-enrichment—and yet I can’t help but suspect that Trump’s own explanation is closest to the mark: “I’m a very instinctual person,” he told Time magazine in 2017, “but my instinct turns out to be right.” One need not agree with the latter judgment to recognize that Trump’s account of himself rings true. He values the irrational quality of his decisions as…
[Essay] LIBEL TO DO ANYTHING By Fara Dabhoiwala, from What Is Free Speech?, which will be published next month by Harvard University Press. Walk into the grand, marbled halls of the United States Capitol in Washington, and you are in the world’s greatest center of power. Every day, legislators in this building make decisions that affect the lives of millions, and sometimes billions, of people in the United States and around the globe. Its architecture is meant to convey the dignity of that task—and also to impress upon American lawmakers that they are part of a glorious history. Over in the House of Representatives chamber, the decor exalts legislative landmarks. At the apex of its central corridor is depicted the nation’s foundational law, the Constitution. Beside a mural captioned the…
“I want y’all to walk to the sign that represents the kind of OCD you most identify with,” announces the moderator, a young woman named Angie Bello who sits crosslegged on the carpet and whose service doodle, Sully, has docked his submarine snout in her lap. Around the room, volunteers hoist placards that say things like violent harm ocd, sexuality ocd, and contamination ocd. They smile benignly, and for an instant all one hundred of us—people ranging from twenty to seventy, joined by nothing but a particular kind of madness—stand frozen, a forest of amygdalas flaring. Outside, San Francisco at dusk: Bob Ross clouds in haphazard sweepings of pink and feathered gray and, darkening beneath them, the city itself, garishly beautiful and troubled. We are in an upstairs conference room…
Once upon a time, the scientific explanation for depression sounded something like this: If one listens patiently to a melancholiac’s many and various self-accusations one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them . . . fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves, has loved or should love. . .. The self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s ego. For a modernist like Sigmund Freud, who wrote “Mourning and Melancholia” in 1917, depression was embedded in history, personal and cultural, and untangling that history, rescuing it from the oblivion of the unconscious by turning it into a coherent story, was the key to a cure. But his fascinating and tragic notion—that we…
It is not inadmissible to think of an epoch . . . not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history. —Mircea Eliade The earthquake shook us awake at 4:31 in the morning. We hurried into a closet while, for fifteen seconds, it finished its business and the car alarms down on Third and California began their complaint. When we emerged, the night sky greeted us through a crack in the wall and chunks of plaster sat smack on the Apple keyboard. The cat had fled. Out on the street, the hanging dust of rendered Sheetrock mixed with the scent of potted plants and, for those of us standing in our nightclothes, a dose of adrenaline improved…
