Harper's Magazine November 2025

Kremlinology Being accustomed to criticism from political flanks, I rarely engage with invective, but I feel compelled to respond to Samuel Moyn’s shallow and superficial review of my book The Folly of Realism [“Casus Belli,” August], because Harper’s Magazine is a widely respected and storied publication. Moyn’s review is less a critique of my book than a reflection of his casual approach to the history and stakes of the Russia–Ukraine war. In dismissing my deep historical research as “wish-casting,” Moyn substitutes glib labels and ideological caricature for genuine engagement with the arguments I present. The Folly of Realism is a well-documented historical analysis of three decades of U.S. policy toward Russia and Ukraine, tracing how successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, embraced a Russia-first framework that repeatedly sacrificed Ukrainian security…

This past summer, Robert Graves’s The Big Green Book was on heavy rotation in my two-year-old’s bedtime reading. It’s one of a handful of mostly forgotten children’s books that Graves wrote, a mysterious and vaguely disquieting story in which Jack, a young child being raised by his aunt and uncle, takes a deep dislike to them, uses a book of magic he discovers in their attic to transform himself into an old man, then tricks them into indentured servitude by (magically) cheating at cards. He also forces his uncle’s fingernails to grow through his palm and out the back of his hand, and instills a lifelong fear of rabbits in the family dog, whose illustration by Maurice Sendak is a surprisingly harmonious combination of an Old English sheepdog and Blake’s…

A woman stands in front of a mirror, trying on a vintage dress. It has signs of its previous life, such as where the belt was worn down, having strained against an earlier midriff. With a bright pattern set on flaming crimson and a diaphanous petticoat underneath, the dress fits her perfectly. But when the woman takes it home and hand-washes it, strange things happen. Someone keeps calling her on the landline and leaving voice messages and texting her mobile phone—bits of song lyrics, compliments, and emoticons. It’s flirtatious, almost like sexting, but garbled and infantile. This is the plot of a modern fairy tale written by Marina Warner in 2005. In the short story, the woman has been trying for years with her husband to conceive. It soon becomes…

Today they’ll watch for smoke, black or white, and my grandson will turn a month old. Grandson, so much easier to say than the other name, the one I’ve only ever used for my beloved elderly, but I am fifty-four, which friends keep saying is too young, and part of me wants to agree while the other part knows it’s plenty old enough—in fact, given the scope of history, fifty-four might be too old to be what I am now. What’s your name going to be, friends keep asking. I’ve tried on a few—Honey, Mimi, Gigi. I know a woman called Weezer and one called Happy and in both cases it was the grandchild who chose. On the news they’re talking about names and legacies and who the next pope…

The word “liberty” in America’s currently reactionary scheme of things slows the pulse and chills the blood. The story of Western civilization is for the most part a collection of tales told by, for, and about the ruling families whose smile was fortune and whose frown was death. Alas, nothing seems to do much good. “It’s awful,” the historian said. “All true,” I said. The will toward self-annihilation is a familiar human characteristic. I don’t know what the less enlightened periods of history were like, but at present I can think of nothing easier than to outrage large sectors of public opinion by merely stating the obvious. No leaves on the trees, few birds in the sky; the spacious vistas interdicted in all directions by armed men in black uniforms—police…

Oh, I understand how it happens. Bloodlust comes up and…you know…takes over. —My mother, on the violence of crowds Everyone knows in a basic way what violence is for. Even my mother, a housewife who grew up on a farm. Even me, a small seventy-year-old woman who makes her living with written words. Violence is for getting your way; for asserting your existence as an individual or a group; for venting torrential feeling; for sadistic pleasure. Sometimes, I think, it’s to assuage existential terror. Because if you’re doing the violence, at that moment anyway, it’s not being done to you. I’ve been on the receiving end of violence more than once; sometimes I’ve had to submit to it, sometimes I’ve successfully fought back and escaped it. Because of my bodily…