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.
Life of the Party As Andrew Cockburn convincingly argues in his dispatch on the state of Democratic affairs [“Playing Dead,” Report, August], the Democrats cannot simply hope that MAGA alone will immolate the Republican Party. Americans are restless, and they demand far more than what the Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are offering. The path forward will be populist, and it will need to address the great economic challenges that workingclass Americans face. Though they wouldn’t necessarily be found in a photograph together, Dan Osborn and Zohran Mamdani each offer viable visions for a left-populist party that can effectively counter the Republicans. Osborn, a union man unafraid of confronting oligarchy, will once again campaign as an independent in next year’s senatorial race in Nebraska, hoping to unseat the…
I stared as one—and then the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased. —Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist So speaks Changez, the Princetoneducated reluctant fundamentalist of Hamid’s 2007 novel. An international bestseller later turned into a film by Mira Nair, the book owed its success, in part, to its blunt articulation of the fear and loathing provoked by the American Empire even among many of its eager janissaries. Changez, like many real-life middle-class Muslims in Asia and Africa, had scrambled to join the transnational elite created by U.S.-led global capitalism. Yet they couldn’t escape the racist degradations institutionalized in American life by the war on terror—the kind that…
By Paul Kingsnorth, from Against the Machine, which was published last month by Thesis. Before Jeff Bezos went to space in 2021, a petition to bar him from returning to Earth garnered more than two hundred thousand signatories. Bezos is one of the richest men in human history, and he has channeled much of his personal fortune into his spaceflight startup, Blue Origin. Like his fellow overlord Elon Musk, whose SpaceX takes NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, he believes that inefficient governments have been too slow to explore outer space and that nimble little companies like his can do it better. Bezos’s flight was intended to be just one small step—as it were—toward much more ambitious goals, and it was this that had raised the ire of the…
From a risk assessment conducted by the artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic for its Claude Opus 4 model. On our evaluations, the model engages in strategic deception more than any other frontier model that we have previously studied. The model is clearly capable of scheming. In instances where the model decides to scheme, it appears to be much more proactive in its subversion attempts than past models. After taking scheming actions, the model sometimes doubles down on its deception when asked follow-up questions. We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself, all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions. The most concerning issues that we observed in our testing of the model involved a willingness to…
From a lawsuit filed in Delaware in July by French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife against the American right-wing podcast host Candace Owens. Candace Owens alleged that President Macron was chosen to be the president of France as part of MK-Ultra. MK-Ultra was a secret CIA program that conducted human experiments to develop mind-control techniques using drugs, psychological manipulation, and torture. She promoted the false and defamatory insinuation that President Macron’s family background, childhood, and professional rise were orchestrated by covert mind-control efforts. To encourage this suspicion, Owens characterized President Macron’s childhood as “a black hole.” She suggested that his upbringing may be linked to a clandestine government plot because his father was a psychiatrist and his mother was a pediatrician. Owens implied that their professions were suspicious and…
By Laura Vazquez, from The Endless Week, which was published last month by Dorothy. Translated from the French by Alex Niemi. Every week, the grandmother watched a show in which women gave birth. The women would lie down in front of the judges, lift their skirts. The judges took notes; they observed the insides of these women with a magnifying glass. The women spread their legs, they pushed, the babies were born. If the baby was dead, the mother lost a point. If the baby was blue or red, she lost a point. If the cord was strangling it, she lost a point. But if the baby was beautiful, she won a point. If the baby had hair, she won a point. If it wasn’t sticky, she won a point;…
