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November 1985

October 1985 December 1985

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of boys born in the United States in 1984 who were circumcised : 80

[Harper’s Index]

Today : 1/4

[Harper’s Index]

Cavities the average 15-year-old has today : 8

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of boys born in Britain who were : 0.4

[Harper’s Index]

Average number of jokes Henny Youngman delivers in a 40-minute monologue : 245

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Iowans who say they would like to be reincarnated as themselves : 64

[Harper’s Index]

U.S. spending on health care in 1960, expressed as a percentage of the gross national product : 5.3

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of men who say they are happier since their divorce or separation : 58

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of trees in New Hampshire whose leaves turned red this fall : 13

[Harper’s Index]

Today : 10.6

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of women who say this : 85

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage whose leaves turned red 35 years ago : 9

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans’ disposable income spent on insurance premiums : 11.1

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase, since 1980, in the number of lawyers who specialize in divorce cases : 100

[Harper’s Index]

Greatest pumpkin ever grown (in pounds) : 612

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of South Korea’s gross national product accounted for by export earnings : 33

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of federal district court judges appointed by President Carter who are millionaires : 4

[Harper’s Index]

Rank of Richard Nixon masks among the best-selling Halloween masks bought by adults : 1

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Japan’s gross national product accounted for by export earnings : 17

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage appointed by President Reagan who are : 22.5

[Harper’s Index]

Amount Latin American countries earned on their exports in 1984 : $125,000,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of all federal judges appointed by President Reagan who graduated from Ivy League law schools : 10

[Harper’s Index]

Amount they paid in principal and interest on their debts : $49,000,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Fortune 500 companies that tested employees and job applicants for illegal drug use in 1982 : 10

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of the 90,000 Latin Americans who have “disappeared” since 1963 who were Guatemalan : 39

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage that test today : 25

[Harper’s Index]

Wholesale price of an AK-47 : $230

[Harper’s Index]

Pairs of sunglasses owned by Jack Nicholson : 15

[Harper’s Index]

Price of a fully equipped “terrorist-proof” Mercedes 500 at Washington’s Counter Spy Shop : $208,000

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Faberg? Imperial eggs owned by Malcolm Forbes : 11

[Harper’s Index]

Number of white South African males who failed to report for military service in 1984 : 1,596

[Harper’s Index]

By the Kremlin : 10

[Harper’s Index]

In the first six months of 1985 : 7,589

[Harper’s Index]

Weekly sales per square foot near the cash registers in the average supermarket : $22.80

[Article]

How to get the poor off our conscience

By John Kenneth Galbraith,

[Cartoon]

Readings

By Harper’s Staff,

[Article]

Armageddon by the numbers

By Bruce G. Blair,

[Article]

Secular-humanist busters

By Gerald B. Leib, Christopher C. Sundseth,

[Article]

Bulletin

The rich are happier

By Ed Diener, Jeff Horwitz, Robert A. Emmons,

[Article]

Abusing human rights abuse

By Harper’s Staff,

[illustration]

Paris, three moments

Art by Gary Wright,

[Article]

Smile–or else

By David O., Jr. Belew,

[Article]

Grant swinging

By Harper’s Staff,

[Cartoon]

Readings

Drawn by Gary Larson,

[Poetry]

To Marie Osmond

By Jack Skelley,

[Article]

Revisionist cowboy

By Gretel Ehrlich,

[Photography]

Readings

By Richard Avedon,

[Fiction]

Men at sea

By Margaret Eleanor Atwood,

[Drama]

A professional exercise

By Howard Brenton, David Hare,

[Article]

In praise of tuxedos

By Stanley Elkin,

[Article]

Two actors

By Anthony Haden-Guest,

[Cartoon]

It soon became apparent that this was young Lambton’s first tournament

Drawn by Glen Baxter,

[Illustration]

Untitled

Art by Richard Mantel,

[Letters]

Letters

By Harper’s Staff,

[Notebook]

The American dialectic

By Lewis H. Lapham,

[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s index

By Harper’s Staff,

[Article]

The Pentagon vs. the press

By Charles R. Nesson, Alexander Meigs Haig, Jack Nelson, Van Gordon Sauter, Daniel Schorr, Charles Madigan,

[Article]

Liberty under siege

The Reagan Administration's taste for autocracy

By Walter Karp,

[Article]

Remembrances of things played

Presence and memory in the pianist's art

By Edward W. Said,

[Annotation]

What has been learned so far

A cheap ticket to a fine college

[Double acrostic]

No. 35

By Thomas Hazlehurst Middleton,

[Puzzle]

Boot camp

By E.R. Galli, Richard E. Maltby Jr.,

[Findings]

Rising population density, poor hygiene, and cold, moist weather led to a spike in ear infections in the Levant around 4000 bc, and postwar atmospheric nuclear testing led to increased cloud thickness and rainfall in the Shetland Islands.

[Findings]

A period of global coolness 4,200 years ago accelerated the diversification of japonica rice.

[Findings]

Ostrich-shell beads indicating the onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 bc, and strontium isotope levels revealed the social exchange of ostrich-shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the Karoo Supergroup.

[Findings]

Interviews with reptile poachers in southwestern Balochistan indicated that the Caspian cobra, the desert monitor, the Iranian mastigure, Maynard’s longnose sand snake, the Persian spider gecko, and the Tartar sand boa were being captured for use by snake charmers.

[Findings]

Herpetologists inventoried the scars of snakes found in the Danube Gorge.

[Findings]

Half of Algeria’s marine turtle strandings are inexplicable.

[Findings]

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-metal chelator.

[Findings]

The mating calls of male Panama cross-banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

[Findings]

Arson dogs’ noses remain better than lab equipment at detecting certain accelerants.

[Findings]

CBD improves quality of life in arthritic elderly dogs.

[Findings]

Finnish scientists identified the genomic region associated with fearfulness in Great Danes.

[Findings]

The decreasing transpiration of plants, a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, was partly to blame for recent heat waves in northern latitudes.

[Findings]

Peatlands, which now store roughly as much carbon as Earth’s forests or its atmosphere, can hold more carbon if exposed to low-intensity fires.

[Findings]

Inland waters are emitting previously unaccounted-for levels of carbon dioxide, and freshwater insects are flourishing even as terrestrial insects are dying off.

[Findings]

Ocean acidity can now be predicted five years ahead of time.

[Findings]

Green snow is spreading across Antarctica.

[Findings]

The deepest octopus observed to date was photographed in the Java Trench.

[Findings]

Terrestrial bacteria can grow on extraterrestrial nutrients; the black hole nearest Earth was discovered in the constellation Telescopium; and X-ray experiments conducted at the European Synchrotron indicated that moisture is destroying The Scream.

[Findings]

A fungal parasite that afflicts the reproductive organs of millipedes was named in honor of Twitter.

[Findings]

In Maine, a loon stabbed a bald eagle through the heart.

[Findings]

Six new coronaviruses were discovered in bats.

[Findings]

Falling levels of tourist trash during pandemic lockdowns was found to have caused rat infighting, and macaques were reported to have attacked a lab assistant in Delhi and stolen vials of COVID-19-infected blood, which at least one monkey then tried to eat.

[Findings]

Vampire bats who are strangers will groom one another before sharing blood via regurgitation.

[Findings]

Skin swabs are three times as accurate as fecal samples at predicting a person’s age.

[Findings]

Young burglars are driven first by thrills, then by skills.

[Findings]

Half of the flights taken by British men aged twenty to forty-five are for stag parties.

[Findings]

Drivers of fancy cars yield to pedestrians less often than drivers of humble cars, and still less if the pedestrians are non-white men.

[Findings]

Los Angeles scientists found that the city’s road network could be more efficiently designed by P. polycephalum, a slime mold.

[Findings]

Stinging water was blamed on jellyfish mucus.

[Findings]

Engineers reported success in deploying “ultra-gentle” robotic “linguine fingers” to grab deep-sea jellyfish.

[Findings]

Children, unlike adults, are resilient against the Pinocchio Illusion when their fingers are pulled upward in sync with a tone ascending from 700 to 1200 Hz.

[Findings]

Fingertip injuries can indicate child abuse.

[Findings]

Damage to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes that spares the anterior hypothalamus was linked to the emergence of acquired pedophilia.

[Findings]

Five primate electrophysiologists agreed that, upon 50 Hz stimulation of the central lateral thalamus, anesthetized Wisconsin monkeys become wakeful.

[Findings]

The high contrast provided by humans’ white scleras enhances our awareness of one another’s gazes.

[Findings]

It remained unknown whether Shanidar Z received a Neanderthal flower burial.

[Findings]

An extinction-risk model was found to work well for bumblebees.

[Findings]

An interdisciplinary team suggested that climate-driven societal collapse may stabilize once humans start accepting years with many disasters as the new normal.

[Findings]

The formation of pre–Silk Road Eurasian empires was driven partly by the spread of northern Chinese broomcorn millet; nanodiamonds and meltglass at Abu Hureyra point to a cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas; the collapse of Harappan society coincided with the loss of the Ghaggar River’s perenniality and the onset of the Meghalayan Stage; the breakdown of Easter Island society and the cessation of megalithic statue-building postdated European contact; and epigraphic evidence suggested a descent into total war during the Terminal Classic era of Mayan civilization.

[Findings]

A 46,000-year-old bird recovered from the Siberian permafrost was determined to be a female horned lark.

[Findings]

The tail of an unidentified herbivorous dinosaur in Alberta was found to contain a type of histiocytic tumor that primarily affects young children.

[Findings]

The exoplanet NGTS-10b was found to have a year lasting eighteen Earth hours and to be at risk of falling into its star.

[Findings]

Astronomers recorded, in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, the largest known post–Big Bang explosion, which lasted several hundred million years and created a void of fifteen galactic widths in the plasma around the cluster’s central black hole. “People were skeptical because of the size of the outburst,” said one of the scientists. “We don’t know why it’s so big.”

[Findings]

A spineless hedgehog in Fishcross regrew its spines and was released into the wild, and officials blamed the deaths of British black bees at Wisbech Castle on “morons.”

[Findings]

A soggy Suffolk owl found in a ditch was diagnosed as too fat to fly.

[Findings]

Mount Vesuvius turned a Herculaneum man’s brain to glass, according to archaeologists, who also revived the voice of a priest from the reign of Ramesses XI and determined that a mummy in the Ulster Museum had been stabbed in the back.

[Findings]

Crystallized mud-wasp nests were used to revise the age of Aboriginal rock art, and a sheep hunters’ encampment was discovered in Nachcharini Cave.

[Findings]

India’s Supreme Court approved the importation of Namibian cheetahs.

[Findings]

Researchers who wear orange catch more anoles, and Australia began culling thousands of camels with helicopter snipers.

[Findings]

Sheep compensate well for lameness.

[Findings]

Southern white rhinos are threatened by inbreeding.

[Findings]

Veterinarians developed an ultrasound schedule for pregnant dolphins, and marine biologists discovered four new species of walking sharks and found that gray seals clap at each other to communicate underwater.

[Findings]

Cetaceans are least likely among mammals to dream profoundly.

[Findings]

African penguins were found to be the first non-primates whose speech exhibits both the Menzerath–Altmann Law and Zipf’s Law of Brevity.

[Findings]

The asteroid strike at Yarrabubba may have ended Snowball Earth.

[Findings]

Ocean currents are speeding up.

[Findings]

Scientists looked forward to studying the flow of Antarctic bottom water from the Weddell Sea into the Scotia Sea.

[Findings]

Climate change will not encourage sugar maples to move northward, but it will drive Americans from the coasts toward Las Vegas.

[Findings]

Rising climate skepticism among Republicans in recent decades was attributed to backlash against Democratic elites.

[Findings]

Automation of the labor force may lead humans to overcome their differences, and researchers seeking to use personal voice-assistance to detect dementia among their users were awarded a $12 million grant.

[Findings]

Sugar ants will mine dried urine from sand.

[Findings]

The axolotl’s unusually large genome may be useful for something.

[Findings]

The world’s oldest bamboo fossil turned out to be a conifer.

[Findings]

Rumors seem more truthful when sourced to a friend of a friend.

[Findings]

Adolescent Dutch boys who instrumentalize sex are highly likely to nonconsensually forward sexts they receive from strangers.

[Findings]

A review of 250,000 pieces of erotica published between 2000 and 2016 found no significant increase in “transgressive” content, Saudi Arabians do not linger on porn websites, and neuroscientists reported that forceful, prosaic self-squeezing of the penile shaft more closely evokes the neurological signature of erotic touch than does gentle, prosaic self-squeezing of the glans.

[Findings]

Heterosexual women and men rated the erogeneity and appropriateness of having digital avatars of themselves touched by virtual men or women.

[Findings]

Straight women who can see and those who are blind care equally about dating good-looking men, though blind women place more importance on their partners having pleasant voices and odors.

[Findings]

Taiwanese men increase their odds of getting married in a given year by 3.92 percent for every 10 percent increase in the value of their real estate.

[Findings]

Red-haired or freckled women in high-UV latitudes have lower mortality risks, light-skinned sex workers in Mexico command higher rates, Brazilian men who self-identify as black are slightly happier with their penis size than those who self-identify as white, and a survey of forty countries found Colombian women to be more than five times as happy with their breast size as Japanese women.

[Findings]

Japanese macaques were recolonizing the abandoned zone around Fukushima.

[Findings]

Mantled howler monkeys howl for longer in the resource-rich interiors of forests than in areas impacted by human activity.

[Findings]

Baboons’ clear articulation of proto-vowels led scientists to conclude that speech could have begun developing twenty million years earlier than was previously thought.

[Findings]

Female Chinese university students who shift their vocal pitch up are perceived as more attractive, whereas male counterparts who shift their pitch down become less attractive.

[Findings]

Women, but not men, experience better orgasms with worse socioeconomic circumstances.

[Findings]

Sexually exploitable men are less attractive to straight women than sexually exploitable women are to straight men.

[Findings]

A study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes reported the stress-relieving effects of “enjoyed flirtation” in the workplace.

[Findings]

Patients from the McLean Hospital Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute who each had one of their real hands and a rubber hand stroked synchronously by Harvard doctors who then dabbed fake feces on the rubber hand before returning to stroking both hands displayed nearly twice as much facial disgust as patients whose real and rubber hands were stroked asynchronously.

[Findings]

Liberals are likelier than conservatives to experience caring emotions in their chests, whereas conservatives are likelier to experience them in their faces.

[Findings]

Italic fonts were rated more liberal than boldface ones, and a feeling of vulnerability to disease was found to predict political conservatism.

[Findings]

Military interrogators at the end of Word War II were found to have improperly disregarded Nazis’ claims of having invented a form of DDT much safer for mammals.

[Findings]

European zoologists urged the preservation of tree cavities to accommodate honeybees, and a reward remained on offer for information leading to the poisoner of seven million Florida bees.

[Findings]

Illuminating bat caves disturbs bats.

[Findings]

The sounds of underwater pile-driving elicit signs of both alarm and habituation in longfin squid, and the medium-term stress level of fish can be determined by plucking their scales and testing for cortisol.

[Findings]

In Australia, hypersaline effluent at the Sydney Desalination Plant was found to have increased the local population of one-spot puller.

[Findings]

Fish farmers freed a bald eagle from an octopus.

[Findings]

Established brands are resilient against fake news, which was also found to implant false memories.

[Findings]

In the past two hundred years, American men have cooled by a temperature of 1º F.

[Findings]

The last remaining Pacific glaciers between the Himalayas and the Andes were expected to melt in the coming decade.

[Findings]

Megadroughts encouraged farmers to clear and cultivate Andean cloud forests.

[Findings]

Runologists determined that the nine riddles of the Rök stone bespeak Vikings’ fear of another Fimbulwinter, and a star-shaped magnetic anomaly resulting from an ancient lightning strike was discovered at the Calanais Standing Stones’ Airigh na Beinne Bige.

[Findings]

In a gold-lined tomb next to that of the Griffin Warrior, archaeologists found a gold pendant of the Egyptian goddess Hathor.

[Findings]

The earliest known use of lead-tin-yellow pigment predating 1300 ad was found in sixth-century bc limestone reliefs, which also contain Egyptian blue, from the Palace of Apries.

[Findings]

Eighty-five-hundred-year-old human tooth pendants were found at Catalhöyük.

[Findings]

The collapse of Norse colonies in Greenland was blamed on walrus depletion that in turn arose from falling wholesale prices for walrus ivory.

[Findings]

Jimi Hendrix was cleared of responsibility for the proliferation of London’s non-native parakeet population, whereas humans were found solely responsible for the extinction of the United States’ only native parrot.

[Findings]

Cocaine is ubiquitous, and ketamine widespread, among Suffolk river shrimp.

[Findings]

Astronomers reported a Marsquake and a Great Dark Spot moving westward across Neptune.

[Findings]

Changes in human and animal urine at As?kl? Höyük track the transition from hunting to herding eleven millennia ago.

[Findings]

November 1985

Estimated number of Vietnam draft resisters still living in Canada : 10,000

Per square foot elsewhere in the store : $7.76

Portion of American households made up of a single person in 1955 : 1/10

Cavities the average 15-year-old had in 1970 : 12

Estimated percentage of boys born in the United States in 1984 who were circumcised : 80

Today : 1/4

Cavities the average 15-year-old has today : 8

Percentage of boys born in Britain who were : 0.4

Average number of jokes Henny Youngman delivers in a 40-minute monologue : 245

Percentage of Iowans who say they would like to be reincarnated as themselves : 64

U.S. spending on health care in 1960, expressed as a percentage of the gross national product : 5.3

Percentage of men who say they are happier since their divorce or separation : 58

Percentage of trees in New Hampshire whose leaves turned red this fall : 13

Today : 10.6

Percentage of women who say this : 85

Percentage whose leaves turned red 35 years ago : 9

Percentage of Americans’ disposable income spent on insurance premiums : 11.1

Percentage increase, since 1980, in the number of lawyers who specialize in divorce cases : 100

Greatest pumpkin ever grown (in pounds) : 612

Percentage of South Korea’s gross national product accounted for by export earnings : 33

Percentage of federal district court judges appointed by President Carter who are millionaires : 4

Rank of Richard Nixon masks among the best-selling Halloween masks bought by adults : 1

Percentage of Japan’s gross national product accounted for by export earnings : 17

Percentage appointed by President Reagan who are : 22.5

Amount Latin American countries earned on their exports in 1984 : $125,000,000,000

Percentage of all federal judges appointed by President Reagan who graduated from Ivy League law schools : 10

Amount they paid in principal and interest on their debts : $49,000,000,000

Percentage of Fortune 500 companies that tested employees and job applicants for illegal drug use in 1982 : 10

Percentage of the 90,000 Latin Americans who have “disappeared” since 1963 who were Guatemalan : 39

Percentage that test today : 25

Wholesale price of an AK-47 : $230

Pairs of sunglasses owned by Jack Nicholson : 15

Price of a fully equipped “terrorist-proof” Mercedes 500 at Washington’s Counter Spy Shop : $208,000

Number of Faberg? Imperial eggs owned by Malcolm Forbes : 11

Number of white South African males who failed to report for military service in 1984 : 1,596

By the Kremlin : 10

In the first six months of 1985 : 7,589

Weekly sales per square foot near the cash registers in the average supermarket : $22.80

How to get the poor off our conscience

Readings

Armageddon by the numbers

Secular-humanist busters

Bulletin

Abusing human rights abuse

Paris, three moments

Smile–or else

Grant swinging

Readings

To Marie Osmond

Revisionist cowboy

Readings

Men at sea

A professional exercise

In praise of tuxedos

Two actors

It soon became apparent that this was young Lambton’s first tournament

Untitled

Letters

The American dialectic

Harper’s index

The Pentagon vs. the press

Liberty under siege

The Reagan Administration's taste for autocracy

Remembrances of things played

Presence and memory in the pianist's art

What has been learned so far

A cheap ticket to a fine college

No. 35

Boot camp

Rising population density, poor hygiene, and cold, moist weather led to a spike in ear infections in the Levant around 4000 bc, and postwar atmospheric nuclear testing led to increased cloud thickness and rainfall in the Shetland Islands.

A period of global coolness 4,200 years ago accelerated the diversification of japonica rice.

Ostrich-­shell beads indicating the onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 bc, and strontium isotope levels revealed the social exchange of ostrich-­shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the Karoo Supergroup.

Interviews with reptile poachers in southwestern Balochistan indicated that the Caspian cobra, the desert monitor, the Iranian mastigure, Maynard’s longnose sand snake, the Persian spider gecko, and the Tartar sand boa were being captured for use by snake charmers.

Herpetologists inventoried the scars of snakes found in the Danube Gorge.

Half of Algeria’s marine turtle strandings are inexplicable.

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-­­metal chelator.

The mating calls of male Panama cross-­banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

Arson dogs’ noses remain better than lab equipment at detecting certain accelerants.

CBD improves quality of life in arthritic elderly dogs.

Ostrich-shell beads indicating the onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 bc, and strontium isotope levels revealed the social exchange of ostrich-shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the Karoo Supergroup.

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-metal chelator.

The mating calls of male Panama cross-banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

Peatlands, which now store roughly as much carbon as Earth’s forests or its atmosphere, can hold more carbon if exposed to low-intensity fires.

Terrestrial bacteria can grow on extraterrestrial nutrients; the black hole nearest Earth was discovered in the constellation Telescopium; and X-ray experiments conducted at the European Synchrotron indicated that moisture is destroying The Scream.

Falling levels of tourist trash during pandemic lockdowns was found to have caused rat infighting, and macaques were reported to have attacked a lab assistant in Delhi and stolen vials of COVID-19-infected blood, which at least one monkey then tried to eat.

Engineers reported success in deploying “ultra-gentle” robotic “linguine fingers” to grab deep-sea jellyfish.

An extinction-risk model was found to work well for bumblebees.

An interdisciplinary team suggested that climate-driven societal collapse may stabilize once humans start accepting years with many disasters as the new normal.

African penguins were found to be the first non-primates whose speech exhibits both the Menzerath–Altmann Law and Zipf’s Law of Brevity.