Harper's Magazine September 2025

One-Track Minds The International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) is disappointed with Harper’s Magazine’s July cover story, “Shadow of a Doubt” [Report]. This under informed and out-of-date article could have offered a good-faith exploration of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Instead, its author, Andrew Kay, who himself suffers from OCD, discredits evidence-based treatments and derides both individuals with OCD and the professionals who support them. Kay misses the mark in attributing the prevalence of OCD to contemporary American culture. OCD is a widely misunderstood disorder that affects roughly 240 million people worldwide. It involves distressing, intrusive thoughts spanning relationships, morality, religion, cleanliness, sexuality, violence, and even the nature of existence itself. Its global prevalence—up to 3 percent across countries, ages, races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds—points to a complex reality that has existed for decades. Unfortunately,…

There was a brief phase of Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA glow up—sometime after the gold chain appeared, but before he started griping in the “manosphere” about censorship—when he began designing T-shirts with Greek phrases on them. Last year, he appeared onstage in San Francisco for a live podcast dressed in a black shirt blazoned with the phrase πάθει μάθος (pathei mathos, “learning through suffering”). Zuckerberg has long had a thing for the classical world, though his taste typically skews toward Rome. (This is a man who idolized Augustus to the point of adopting his haircut and who used to fire up his employees with the old Roman war slogan Carthago delenda est—“Carthage must be destroyed.”) When asked what the Greek phrase meant to him, he said he thought about it in…

By John Haskell, from Trying to Be, which will be published next month by Fiction Collective Two. At the end of an earlier century, an orator named F. Matthias Alexander codified a way of understanding, or at least thinking about, the body. It’s called the Alexander Technique, and it’s about aligning the body, or realigning it, taking it apart and thinking about how it might fit back together. The problem he found with the body was the way we imagine it. Or really the way we fail to imagine it, letting our bodies adapt to habits we don’t even know we have. We tell our bodies to disregard imbalance. If there’s pain, we say ignore it, turn away, which leads to what Alexander called debauched kinesthesia, or erroneous perception, the…

From statements made since 1992 by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Iran will have a nuclear weapon in three to five years (1992) Iran is racing to arm itself (2006) Iran was probably only one or two years away (2009) Iran has the capability now to make one bomb (2009) They could make several bombs in a year or two (2009) You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs (2009) Iran is 70 percent of the way there (2012) They’re getting closer (2013) Iran will have an entire nuclear arsenal within ten years (2017) Iran’s nuclear program has hit a danger zone (2023) They will achieve a test device within months and certainly less than a year (2025)…

From diary entries written by Ukrainian college students during Russia’s invasion in 2022 and collected by the Center for Urban History, in Lviv, and the Department of Cultural Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Compiled by Michael Holtz and translated from the Ukrainian by Svitlana Bregman, Andriy Masliukh, Mykhailo Tarapatov, Vitalii Pavliuk, Henyk Beliakov, Tetyana Fedorchuk, and Yuliia Kulish. I hate uncertainty. I HATE RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS. To be able to hate this way, one’s got to be not only furious but very strong as well. I want to stand near every Russian mother who will perpetually unfold a bag with the remains of her son. I want to be the darkest darkness that pursues and catches them. I want to cut every apolitical person with a blunt knife. I…

From an email to members of the Oregon State Police soliciting recruits for the agency’s SWAT unit. Would you be interested in hiking through the woods in total darkness using dual-tube night vision in an attempt to quietly sneak onto properties of rural houses where dangerous suspects are holed up? And when that suspect flees, would you like to chase and/or use tools like 40mm less-lethal rounds on them? Are you jonesing to fire gas munitions through windows and at fleeing suspects? How about launching gas canisters with a shotgun launcher? Want to shoot some PepperBall into vehicles or basements or crawl spaces or attics? Do you want to run to an airport to meet one of our pilots to fly you to an active scene where a suspect is…