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.
Poison Pen As a toxicologist and someone who cares deeply about the environment, I was disappointed to read Andrew Cockburn’s “Weed Whackers” [Letter from Washington, September]. At Monsanto, we know we don’t have all the answers about how to make agriculture more sustainable, so we think collaboration is essential. We are proud to support and work with world-renowned institutions such as the Missouri Botanical Garden. We also collaborate with scientists in academia and the government. One of Monsanto’s most important products is glyphosate, a tool that farmers have used to control a broad range of weeds for more than forty years. Like all pesticides, glyphosate has undergone extensive safety evaluations by regulatory agencies around the world. These agencies have consistently determined that all labeled uses of glyphosate are safe for…
I have recently developed a crank theory, for which I can adduce no real evidence, that the human sense of time has its origins in story, or is at least bound up with the telling of stories. If, as science suggests, we were nomadic creatures for a very long time, changing place often—as the mountain gorilla, one of our fellow primates, does today—then the lives of our ancestors would have been shaped by the sense of leaving one place and moving on a path toward a new place. As we went on, we would form a memory of the earlier place and what we did there, and we would begin to imagine the new place. Would it be better? Would we regret leaving the old place? Once, we were there;…
[Definition] THERE’S THE RUB I can’t bring myself to rhyme it with “cottage,” but I’ve heard it pronounced that way. The French pronunciation makes it sound like a delectation, a frill or a whip, a froth. Anyway that’s the one I say when I say it. I don’t know when I first had the word, or whose word it was—not someone I did it with. I know I was doing it without a word for it, and with men who didn’t seem to have a preestablished idea of the thing or its name, young men doing what comes naturally. Put their mouths together in a kiss and between their bodies no room for daylight. Like other sex terms founded in circumspection (I imagine it used capably in one of the…
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. —Louis Brandeis When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. —The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford Between democracy and concentrated wealth the country throughout most of its history has preferred the latter to the former, the body politic asking only that the big money make a credible show of caring for something other than itself. For the past thirty-five years the modest requirement has been met with prolonged and costly stagings of a presidential-election campaign invariably said to be, as it was this past summer by Jeb Bush, “everybody’s test, and wide open— exactly as a contest for president should…
It’s May Day, and a rambunctious crowd of well-dressed people, many carrying blue and yellow parasols, has pushed into a Ford dealership just north of Chongqing, China. Mist from a car wash catches the sun, and I watch a man in a striped shirt poke at the gleaming engine of a midsize Mondeo while his wife sits in the driver’s seat and turns the wheel. Overhead, a giant banner of a Mustang painted Communist Party red ripples in the spring breeze. At the showroom door, I am greeted by three saleswomen who smile and stare, clearly shocked to see a Westerner. Finally, a manager leads me over to a young man, the resident expert in English. Other than the Ford logo and the corporate mantra of the moment, go further,…
Meriem became a prostitute because she lost her virginity. She told me this in a house that I was renting in a Moroccan seaside town. It was 2008 and I had just moved there from Fez because the words people used to describe the place were belle and tranquille. Europeans owned homes in the Old City, which they occupied in the summer, when the town was saturated in blue and the beach looked savage and grand. The rest of the year, you saw vacant homes and hungry people and heroin addicts. Seated on my sofa, Meriem narrated her life story.* I stopped her on occasion to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding her Moroccan Arabic. “Your childhood boyfriend raped you?” I asked. I repeated the word she had used, which I…
