In Memoriam We at Harper’s Magazine are deeply saddened by the loss of our former contributing editor Barry Lopez (1945–2020), who died on Christmas Day. Over the course of four…

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hearsay What did you say I said? What? And in that dream I was married to her, and she, I don’t know who she was, perhaps she was you, Perhaps…

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Richard Rothman has gone looking for that obvious yet elusive thing: the American character. Like generations of photographers before him, Rothman is interested in how that character has been shaped…

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Too early for spring, you couldn’t trust such blinding-white sunshine in mid-March. And the smell of damp earth thawing, reviving—too soon. Abigail was feeling light-headed. Unreal. A seismic sensation, as…

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Naître à soi, by Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux © The artist. Courtesy Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Paris In The Year of Living Dangerously, the actress Linda Hunt puts on an unforgettable performance…

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Philip Roth reviews his own biographer

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Por debajo de la mesa, a painting by María Fragoso Jara © The artist. Courtesy 1969 Gallery, New York City The preliminary findings of the Freigeist Junior Research Group on…

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When I moved to New York City in 2008, my perception of safety (and everything else) was conditioned by a lifetime of American cop shows. Though I’d grown up in…

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From Living in Data, which will be published in May by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thorp is a data artist and an instructor at New York…

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From passages of letters included in Love, Kurt, a collection of messages written between 1941 and 1945 by Vonnegut to his girlfriend Jane, whom he married in 1945, which was…

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From a list of words banned by software used at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which took place remotely in October 2020. The program prevented these…

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From abstracts of articles published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Early Human Development. The works were flagged for review by the publisher, Elsevier, after a college student wrote a letter…

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From anonymous accounts written by seven different men on death row in the United States, collected in Right Here, Right Now, edited by Lynden Harris, which will be published next…

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From a statement made via Zoom by Father Tim Hazelwood, a spokesman for the Association of Catholic Priests, which is based in Ireland, during the organization’s annual meeting last October.…

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From the notebook of an editor at the New York Post who interviewed Melvin Paulino, an employee at a Chipotle restaurant in New York City, in December. Interpreted on-site from the…

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From a December 2020 telephone conversation between Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev, an FSB agent, and Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader whom Kudryavtsev attempted to assassinate on an airplane in August…

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From an email conversation between Mikaël Gómez Guthart and Ariana Harwicz after meeting at a book launch for their works in Paris last year. The discussion was published in the…

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From a letter written by Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens in July 1935, included in The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3, edited by Mark Richardson et al., which will…

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From Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas, which was published in October 2020 by Flood Editions. Dumas (1934–1968) was an American poet involved in the…

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From The Committed, which will be published this month by Grove Press. The hemorrhoidal clerk grunted painfully when he saw me that afternoon. He struck a match, and the flash…

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From “Girl on a Motorcycle,” from the collection The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020, which will be published in April by Scribner. The Cabo 1000 was an annual one-day motorcycle race…

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From the 1957 script “C’est Toi Alors: Scenario for Existing Props and French Cat,” in The Hipsters, a collection edited by Nile Southern, which will be published in May by…

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From posts to the Missed Connections section of Craigslist, where users recount interactions with strangers in the hopes of finding them again. 6 train smile, new york city I just…

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From a video recorded in October 2020 by a shopkeeper in Liverpool, England, documenting an encounter with local police officers. shopkeeper: Can I help you? officer 1: The area’s not…

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From a series of columns published in January 1927 by the German tabloid B. Z. am Mittag, about his experiences as a paid nightclub dancer. The columns are included in…

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From replies to the following November 2020 Craigslist post: “My sister is having an outdoor wedding in New Canaan, Connecticut, in May. I want someone to be naked in the…

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From the novel In Memory of Memory, which will be published this month by New Directions. Translated from the Russian. Let’s suppose for a moment that we are dealing with…

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