Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Harper's Magazine

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 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.…

Goethe’s secret was that he was an alchemist. He understood his life as an opus magnum or divinum. So he is correct in saying that Faust was his “principal task,” and hence that his life is defined by Faust. You can see that, for him, in a spectacular way, this is his living substance, vitally alive and active. With Thomas Mann, I always had the feeling that he has such a differentiated sense of culture, intellect, and feeling that he can see everything correctly without his life somehow being gripped by it. This turned me off. I recoiled from him. He terrified me, like one of those South American vampires who fly around at night sucking blood from toes while people sleep. I had the feeling that he would suck…

“ 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.…

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.…

I was working at the magazine as a fact checker, and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired the magazine, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives, it sparkled on their tongues. For almost two years, things went smoothly. I checked a lot of the “back of the book” pieces, which often involved going to the movies or reading novels on company time. I would write emails suggesting minor corrections: Almodóvar’s debut was released in 1980, not ’79, as is written, and Penelope Cruz’s character has sex in the first ten, not five, minutes of the film. Screenshots with timings attached. I would then spend the rest of the afternoon sitting in an armchair by the window, watching the…

Discussed in this essay: The Four Spent the Day Together, by Chris Kraus. Scribner. 320 pages. $29. Chris Kraus began writing her first book in “an act of complete desperation.” “I didn’t know I was writing a book!” she later explained. In the winter of 1994–95, she and her husband, the Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, were holed up in a cabin in the mountains not far from Los Angeles, where they were spending Lotringer’s sabbatical. Kraus was thirty-nine years old and at a low ebb. Her marriage to Lotringer was moribund. He was older and famous, an in-demand lecturer and the founder of Semiotext(e), a publisher that had acquired a punkish renown in the Eighties for importing French theory to countercultural New York. Kraus had pioneered her own Semiotext(e) series,…

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…

No part of the skydisplayed any discernible characteristics Land, too, lost its recognizable polygons There was no sound The only feeling was a powdery scratchiness There was no one to direct the workerbut there was a rod for gauging width between two surfaces that fold like a bookwhich is the reason books exist to prompt comparison just as eating anything “like an apple”means you’re a fool…

A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term “species” is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight,…

NOTES FOR “FILL IN THE BLANKS” WORDS IN THE BLANKS: a) BOA-THO-USE b) PRO-LIFE-RATE c) SIGN-IF-I-CAN’T d) ALTO-GET-HER e) TO-READ-OR Note: * indicates an anagram ACROSS: 9. up-rising; 10. two mngs.; 12. two mngs.; 13. homophone; 16. two mngs.; 17. stat(rev.)-i.c. (initials); 18. car-esses; 19. hidden; 24. Rast*-a; 25. ban-FF; 27. per-se-vere*; 28. hidden; 30. gee-zer[0]; 33. Hi-Bach-I; 35. Ev(it)e; 36. two mngs. DOWN: 1. *; 2. hidden; 3. homophone; 4. Ni(rev.)-Cole; 5. fin(ess)es; 6. inn-at-[rid]e; 7. a-B-bot; 8. *; 11. [ch]eerier; 15. two mngs.; 19. el-avenue-z*; 21. Lava-L(i.e.)R; 23. rev.; 25. be-eh-I’ve; 26. fre(she)t; 29. C-Act I; 32. 0-mar; 34. first letters. Correction: In the October puzzle diagram, a vertical bar indicating a four-letter answer at 31 Across was missing. We regret the error.…