Harper's Magazine August 2025

United Notions As a U.S. citizen who lives on a threatened planet, I was dismayed by Amanda Chicago Lewis’s cheap shots at the United Nations [“Wishful Thinking,” Report, June]. As a former U.N. official who has spent a half century researching the organization, I was also struck that her reporting consisted entirely of conversations within the U.N. Headquarters’ corridors, cafeterias, conferences, and cocktail lounges. Lewis might have interviewed refugees whose suffering has been lessened by U.N. agencies, children who have received life saving vaccines, women who have benefited from human-rights conventions, or inventors whose patents address U.N. findings on climate change. When the blind touch an elephant, opinions about its shape vary. Waste and nonsense constrain the United Nations just as they do governments and corporations. Gossip and internal politics…

“It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, “that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.” Wilson, born in 1895, came of age when national energies were still turned inward, and a largely Europhilic American intelligentsia possessed little cultural capital or self-confidence. He lived long enough to deplore his country’s midcentury turn from doctrinaire isolationism to righteous superpowerdom. “Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country,” he wrote in Patriotic Gore (1962), “it is always to liberate somebody.” Wilson came to dislike the “all too conscious American literary self-glorification which is a part of our American imperialism.” He caustically noted the behavior…

For nearly a century, presidents were presidents, regardless of party. All presidents of that long-running era felt the pressure to lead and achieve, and they all sought to exercise the powers of the presidency in pursuit of their agendas and legacies. A prime consequence of this was the incremental construction of a bipartisan institutional presidency that gave them a growing capacity to pursue their goals, largely by securing greater control over the administrative state. In the everyday course of governing, Republican and Democratic presidents developed ways to leverage a vastly larger state to pursue policy, both foreign and domestic. Just by virtue of what it had to offer them, the modern administrative state was a boon to presidential power and became a defining feature of the presidency. Throughout this period,…

Unlike what most people and the media think, The Base wasn’t founded in 2018. It was founded in late 2016 by Roman Wolf/Rinaldo Nazzaro/Norman Spear. At the very beginning, Atomwaffen officials suspected Roman of being a fed. As The Base started developing into something “more organized,” red flags started popping up. For example, he presented himself as an Army veteran who has been to Afghanistan, however at gun ranges he mentioned how he’s never touched a long gun in his life. Things started becoming really sus when a few members could see him texting in Russian. He was writing fast and seemingly naturally, leading to the belief that Roman might be a Russian federal asset, and at that time it was already obvious that he was flying to Russia back…

RANDALL SULLIVAN: When I was young, I didn’t have any religious orientation. Then, in Bosnia, I had the experience that God, for some reason, gave me his full attention for a short time. FINN COHEN: Can you describe that experience? SULLIVAN: I was staying in Medjugorje, a site of Catholic devotion. The center had formed around this group of young people who claimed they were having visions of the Virgin Mary. I ended up staying in the home of one of them, Mirjana. We were talking outside one day about the place and what it meant to the country and to its people. At one point, when we were talking about these apparitions of the Virgin Mary, she looked sort of startled and said, “You don’t believe. You’re not a…

Most days are bad days. That’s just the way it is right now. I used to say I wanted to live as long as possible. I wasn’t even joking; I had a psychological investment in the passage of time. Lately, one day is enough, more than enough. By afternoon, I regret the morning. I start to hope my life might develop the capacity to move in a backward direction. Walks help. The LINE is twenty minutes from my apartment. The LINE is a hotel that doesn’t really look like anything. It has rooms, but I haven’t seen them; they’re beside the point. Usually when I go, I’m wearing something incredibly stupid. I catch my reflection in the mirror behind the concierge and think, I can’t believe she left the house…