Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i Harper's Magazine

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…

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 Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words, by Miya Ando, which will be published next month by MIT Press. AKEBI-KUSARASHI: Never-ending autumn rain that rots the akebi fruit BAKEAME: Rain in the sunshine CHI NO AME: Blood rain during a war DEIU: Rain mixed with ashes EMORI: Rain that leaks through the umbrella FUCHIKUNUN: Rain that comes indoors GŪU: Rain that one encounters by coincidence or chance HIFŪ SAN-U: Merciless rain and wind that provoke a feeling of sorrow isoshigure: Rain that falls on the coast or in the bay JUU: Rain that falls at just the right time KAISOŪ: Rain that melts frost to protect crops MEGURUSHIGURE: Rain and clouds sent by the wind toward the mountains NAMIDA NO SHIGURE: Rain that falls like…

By Jana Prikryl, from the Winter 2025 issue of Nimrod International Journal. Belief in that ozone does float by and onto the layer of night accommodatingaccidental stars—belief or excessof feeling, a surplus of cloth.The garments have shipped and the fabricremaining accepts another use, a shape.A tailor made thee. Then see it float away. It goes on drifting home, to outer spaceand part of me goes with or else the motionitself orients. To get to the bottomof what buoys it, often common fear, a round:the fear that pushes up belief is pushedup by belief that’s already afraidthat I don’t want to talk about it now. But once upon a time in OstravaTeta Vanda taught me a Polish prayerI heard about later. At three or fourdeposited a week at Celadná, ˇthe ancient…

Many Americans seem to have made up their minds—more or less reluctantly—that the United States will have to maintain a very large and expensive military establishment for an indefinite period. They are convinced that we must never again be caught so unprepared for war as we were in 1917 and again in 1941, and they conclude that this will mean a permanent standing army of a million men or more, plus the world’s largest navy and air force. An indication of congressional thinking was given recently by a senator from Oklahoma, who spoke with some authority as a member of the appropriations subcommittee that handles Army and Navy requests for money. He predicted that the nation would have to keep up an armed force of at least two million men…

Your dad never said he wanted a boy. He says he never said it too. He says he wouldn’t have changed a thing. Same same but different. There are universal standards for technique. For preparation. If you’re mediocre at the end of the day, he says, that’s on the competition. Those women weren’t good enough to make you great. You are sixty pounds, a little taller than four feet. Above-average weight and height for a seven-year-old girl. You wrestle at the Junior Demons Wrestling Club. You do Brazilian jujitsu at the kids’ program at Wabash Grappling Academy. Once money gets better, your dad says, you’ll start boxing too. You’re going to fight. On the mats, in a ring, in a cage. He says there’s nothing in the world like it.…

Discussed in this essay: Plain Pleasures: Stories, by Jane Bowles. Picador. 192 pages. $16. Two Serious Ladies: A Novel, by Jane Bowles. Picador. 272 pages. $18. Holidays, in themselves, are no longer interesting and I’ve no desire to hear any more about them. To quote Mrs. Quill, from Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies—there was famously only ever one novel and a handful of stories: “Must I always be told what other people do? I’ve had just about enough of it.” When a person starts talking to me about their holiday I’m usually thinking, Please stop. Holidays, and by extension tourism, are now a succession of empty images: a beach, a bikini, a plate on a table, someone’s back, everything dull, tasteful, nothing reckless or unsophisticated. It all paints a rather…

Dogs, two of whom were found able to smell Parkinson’s, are likelier, if they have excitable personalities, to respond to moving objects on television as if they were real. Britain likely experienced a modest rise in dog thefts from 2020 to 2022, not the epidemic that has been widely suggested. Octopuses and mice are susceptible to the Rubber Hand Illusion. Psilocybin encourages hair growth and discourages graying in mice. Extensive equine-coat scoring determined that horses kept on pasture have higher tail moistness, that heavier horses have thicker skin, and that older horses have less-moist skin, even though their hair becomes more lustrous with age. Blue sharks’ changing skin color is enabled by a combination of guanine crystals and melanosomes. Peacock tail feathers can be treated to emit laser beams. British…

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…

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 Lauren Rothery, from Television, which will be published in December by Ecco. When I was in my twenties, I thought I would be successful in my thirties. When I was thirty-five, I gave myself until my late forties. When I turned forty, acquaintances stopped asking if I was working on anything new and started asking if I was seeing anyone new. When the lottery was announced, I was working on a play. The play would take place backstage at a play. The stage would be set up to look like the wings and dressing rooms. At the back of the stage, there would be the back of a backdrop. Slightly sheer. You would see the “play” going on beyond the play. I thought it would be great to do…

From an interview with André Breton, conducted in 1954 by Jean Carteret and Roger Knabe for L’Astrologie Moderne, that appears in Cavalier Perspective, which was published in August by City Lights Books. Translated from the French by Austin Carder. jean carteret and roger knabe: Do you respect astrology? ANDRÉ BRETON: In my view, astrology is a grande dame, exceedingly beautiful and coming from so far away that she can’t help but charm me. In the purely physical world, I see nobody whose attire can rival hers. Plus, she seems to keep one of the world’s highest secrets. It’s a shame that today—at least for the common folk—a prostitute sits on her throne. CARTERET AND KNABE: What relationship did the Surrealists have to astrology? BRETON: Relationships that were unfortunately episodic and…

Just consider, at the end of this short novel, how the bodies have fallen. David, our narrator, is passing what he calls the worst night of his life, standing vigil in an empty rented house in the south of France, abandoned by his fiancée, Hella, and contemplating his betrayal of Gio van ni, a man he insists he loved and who undoubtedly loved him. Hella, having discovered David in a gay bar on a days-long bender, in the arms of a sailor who bursts into incredulous laughter at the sight of her, is on a steamer back to America, maybe already plunged into the promiscuity she fears will characterize her single life. This promiscuity can only ever signify moral chaos and degradation for Baldwin, who—despite the charges of obscenity, even…