Harper's Magazine December 2025

In the decades that I’ve been a reader of Harper’s Magazine, I don’t think I’ve encountered an article as naïve as “The Homemade Scholar,” by Chandler Fritz [Report, September]. Fritz notes that “most, perhaps all,” of his students at Refresh Learning Center are white, without acknowledging how the lack of diversity might be a disadvantage of the program. The microschool, he writes, “reflects their open-armed evangelical spirit.” I guess we’re not concerned about LGBT kids, or non-Christian students. Fritz refers to “life on the frontier” as though it were something to be admired, even though many of our Western frontiersmen were thieves, cutthroats, and slave owners. He recounts his not being allowed to read the Bible in the third grade, but doesn’t acknowledge that most public schools permit students to…

“ The West as we knew it,” Ursula von der Leyen claimed earlier this year, “no longer exists.” It is not necessary to explore what the president of the European Commission means by “the West” to realize that we have witnessed the extraordinary collapse of a once-potent idea. It was forged during the Cold War, largely by American politicians and commentators insisting on its foundations in democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Not only had the United States helped install antifascist and anti-Stalinist constitutions in Germany, Italy, and Japan, the story went; its intellectual-industrial complex had also produced a sanguine account of the world in which the moral arc of the universe, looming high over the aberrations of Communist and Nazi totalitarianism, bent toward an American-style free society.…

I want to believe that there is always a trail, however faint, leading readers back to a book that, like a hiker lost in the wilderness, is on the brink of perishing. But where does the trail start? In 2020, one of my undergrads at the University of Southern California told me that her mum was a writer. Good for her, I thought. The following week, my student said I’d really like her mum’s writing and offered to bring in a book by her. Um, okay. At the end of the semester, she gave me a harmless-looking paperback called Lives of the Saints, published in 1985 by Louisiana State University Press. I put this little book on a shelf in my office and forgot about it. In 2023, the writer…

The desire of my soul is that my son should be a man and not a child all his life. My son, before you do an act, consider our Savior’s Golden Rule, viz., Do so you would be done by. Never do anything that would wound your conscience or you would be ashamed by afterward. My dear son, learn eloquence; not barely what you say, but the proper manner of speaking. My son, learn music but don’t be a pedant in it. My son, court not popularity but always rise by virtue and merit. Above all things, my son, do not seduce innocent girls.…

The ways in which houses can be infested by unclean spirits are varied. Sometimes they show themselves as ghosts. Sometimes they hiss, speak, laugh, and simulate many other noises. Sometimes they move or break furnishings, or inflict serious evils, such as throwing stones, knives, and other such actions, even inflicting beatings. Sometimes they appear in the guise of billy goats, snakes, cats, or other animal or monstrous forms that cannot be clearly defined. Sometimes they cause disturbances—for example, by waking sleepers with the noise of slamming doors, by heavy footsteps in corridors or attics, by tearing clothes, or by pulling blankets and sheets while people are in bed. A personal meeting is not necessary for the first exorcism interview. It may be sufficient to read a report transmitted by email.…

DAVID GARNETT: When a man is working, he focuses his mind on a particular point and everything else ceases to exist. In art and literature, men do the same—they concentrate on one point after another. As when one is driving at night, our eyes are focused on the little patch of road in front of us, and we don’t see the woods and fields racing fast on each side, or the starry sky ahead. In Virginia’s work, that isn’t so. Almost all woman writers have imitated men in that way. But Virginia’s work seems to me to be like the woman who is mending clothes in the kitchen while she watches the pot simmering on the stove and is telling a story to her children on their knees, without forgetting…