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November 1985

October 1985 December 1985

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage appointed by President Reagan who are : 22.5

[Harper’s Index]

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

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage whose leaves turned red 35 years ago : 9

[Harper’s Index]

Greatest pumpkin ever grown (in pounds) : 612

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

Wholesale price of an AK-47 : $230

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of boys born in Britain who were : 0.4

[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]

Today : 10.6

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

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

[Harper’s Index]

In the first six months of 1985 : 7,589

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

Today : 1/4

[Harper’s Index]

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

[Harper’s Index]

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

[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,

[Findings]

The U.S. municipal bond market penalizes communities in proportion to the percentage of their population that is black but generally ignores their vulnerability to climate change.

[Findings]

Somalis, surveyed as proxies for earlier inhabitants of the Cradle of Humankind, were found to fear spiders less than scorpions but snakes to the expected degree.

[Findings]

The collapse of the Qing Dynasty was driven by the quadrupling of its population and consequent rural impoverishment, an overabundance of qualified applicants for elite academic degrees, rising costs and trade deficits, and falling productivity, which were variously associated with internal unrest, opium imports, and the depletion of silver reserves.

[Findings]

Geoscientists were confident that, given access to the oldest barnacles on the flaperon of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, they could help pinpoint its crash site.

[Findings]

Scientists were not certain whether the globally synchronized waves observed in the brains of wakeful rats on ketamine or LSD were a cause or a symptom of hallucinations.

[Findings]

Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test for children with shorter attention spans.

[Findings]

The depression-prone are less attracted to the political right.

[Findings]

The nocturnal heart rate of young men can be predicted by their female partners’ daytime feelings of intimacy or annoyance.

[Findings]

Men who pose for photos with cats are seen as less datable.

[Findings]

Men can rate the facial attractiveness of women without paying attention, but women cannot do the same for men; gay men find the faces of purportedly fertile women and men more attractive; adolescents and adults both rate the faces of children younger than 4.6 years old as more appealing than those of older children; and body odors associated with fear quicken the visual processing of others’ facial expressions of fear.

[Findings]

Beak covering and nape-feather ruffling indicate calmness in sulfur-crested cockatoos.

[Findings]

Repetitive negative thinking was associated with an increased risk of dementia, and self-harm in female adolescents may prevent suicide.

[Findings]

Psychopaths recommend harsher punishments for homicides, whether accidental or motivated by profit, but exhibit relatively low concern about killing in general.

[Findings]

Online murder-for-hire advertisements seek to convey professionalism yet tend not to provide references up front.

[Findings]

Convalescent plasma helps Syrian hamsters fight SARS-CoV-2.

[Findings]

Plastic surgeons suggested that Botox could reduce the expression of negative emotions by masked faces.

[Findings]

The presence of a professional sports team increases a city’s seasonal flu deaths.

[Findings]

A psycholinguistic analysis of posts on Twitter and Weibo during COVID-19 lockdowns found that residents of Lombardy grew increasingly focused on leisure and residents of Wuhan grew increasingly focused on religion.

[Findings]

Recent toilet-paper hoarding was more prevalent among Americans than Europeans and more prevalent among the old than the young.

[Findings]

Gerontologists cautioned that it would be difficult to predict individual Holocaust survivors’ trauma or resilience in response to the pandemic, which was expected to strengthen the market for laboratory mouse-suffocation chambers.

[Findings]

Researchers proposed replacing the paradigm of extinction with that of evanescence.

[Findings]

Climate change was expected to drive American lobsters to seek deeper waters, beavers to colonize new parts of Canada, and wolf spiders in the high Arctic to produce a second annual brood.

[Findings]

Humboldt penguins who nest in the open have more pollutant metabolites in their blood than do penguins who nest in guano-rich burrows.

[Findings]

The tiger snakes of Perth have heavy metals in their livers.

[Findings]

Satellite imagery captured ecosystem damage from fog loss, and aerial photography confirmed the existence of Roman military camps revealed by the 2018 Welsh drought.

[Findings]

A young woman in a Vilnius plague pit was found to have been coinfected with yaws.

[Findings]

A man buried at Newgrange passage tomb was found to be the product of first-degree incest, indicating that he was a member of the elite.

[Findings]

Scientists trained subjects to exercise control over a single neuron, linked the hippocampus to regret, and concluded that humans smell in stereo.

[Findings]

Straight Slovakians assume that a woman in high heels will inspire more intense mate-guarding.

[Findings]

Women who receive continuous rather than interrupted sutures for perineal repair after vaginal delivery report higher sexual levels of arousal and orgasmic function.

[Findings]

Pinkness predicts aggression in flamingos.

[Findings]

Chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts.

[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.

November 1985

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

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

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

Percentage appointed by President Reagan who are : 22.5

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

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

Percentage that test today : 25

Pairs of sunglasses owned by Jack Nicholson : 15

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

By the Kremlin : 10

Percentage of women who say this : 85

Per square foot elsewhere in the store : $7.76

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

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

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

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

Percentage whose leaves turned red 35 years ago : 9

Greatest pumpkin ever grown (in pounds) : 612

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

Wholesale price of an AK-47 : $230

Percentage of boys born in Britain who were : 0.4

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

Today : 10.6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the first six months of 1985 : 7,589

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

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

Today : 1/4

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

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

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

The U.S. municipal bond market penalizes communities in proportion to the percentage of their population that is black but generally ignores their vulnerability to climate change.

Somalis, surveyed as proxies for earlier inhabitants of the Cradle of Humankind, were found to fear spiders less than scorpions but snakes to the expected degree.

Geoscientists were confident that, given access to the oldest barnacles on the flaperon of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, they could help pinpoint its crash site.

Scientists were not certain whether the globally synchronized waves observed in the brains of wakeful rats on ketamine or LSD were a cause or a symptom of hallucinations.

Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test for children with shorter attention spans.

The depression-prone are less attracted to the political right.

The nocturnal heart rate of young men can be predicted by their female partners’ daytime feelings of intimacy or annoyance.

Men who pose for photos with cats are seen as less datable.

Beak covering and nape-feather ruffling indicate calmness in sulfur-crested cockatoos.

Repetitive negative thinking was associated with an increased risk of dementia, and self-harm in female adolescents may prevent suicide.

Recent toilet-paper hoarding was more prevalent among Americans than Europeans and more prevalent among the old than the young.

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.