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August 1992

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[Harper’s Index]

Rank of Bill Clinton, among all Democratic presidential nominees since 1956, in percentage of primary votes won : 1

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Chances that a cigar costing more than $1.25 will be smoked by a millionaire : 1 in 3

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Ratio of the average number of political jokes in a Jay Leno Tonight Show monolog to those in a Carson monolog : 3:2

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change, since 1989, in the number of times the phrase “war on drugs” has appeared in news articles : ???32

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of cancer specialists who say they would prescribe marijuana for their patients if it were still legal to do so : 48

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of medical school obstetrics-gynecology programs that offer routine training in first-trimester abortions : 1/8

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Portion that did in 1985 : 1/4

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Chances that a Republican woman running for Congress this fall is pro-choice : 1 in 3

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of Pat Paulsen, among candidates winning the most votes in North Dakota’s Republican primary in June : 2

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Campaign contributions George Bush has received from people he later appointed to ambassadorships : $900,000

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say that “there is no chance” they would vote for Clinton in November : 48

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage change in the GNP during each four-year Democratic administration since 1949 : +20

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage change in the GNP during each four-year Republican administration : ???9

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs who say they will vote for Bush in November : 78

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say that President Bush has “mainly just talked about protecting the environment” : 70

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Tons of trash generated by the Rio Earth Summit in June, per day : 7

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of Latin Americans who live below the poverty line : 44

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Fine for appearing bare-chested or in a swimsuit on the streets of Venice : $24

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Days it would take to exhaust Ross Perot’s fortune if it were used to pay the interest on the federal deficit : 5.7

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of the 32 sitting federal appellate judges appointed by President Bush who are black

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of Hispanics, among those arrested during the Los Angeles riots : 1

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Ratio of the number of homebuyers in Orange County, California, last year named Smith to those named Nguyen : 1:2

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Chances that an American is of English ancestry : 1 in 8

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Chances that an American does not consider himself or herself a rock-music fan : 2 in 3

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of countries that have issued at least one Elvis Presley postage stamp : 13

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of U.S. Postal Service employees murdered by their colleagues since 1983 : 30

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change, since 1990, in the number of documented cases of journalists murdered, worldwide : +91

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Bonus the Chinese government pays selected scholars and scientists each month to discourage emigration : $20

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change, since 1970, in beer production in China, per capita : +372

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of different versions of Crystal Pepsi tested before the product was introduced in April : 3,000

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change, since 1979, in wine consumption in France : ???42

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change, since 1979, in frozen-food consumption in France : +463

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of French women who do not view being asked to undress for a job interview as sexual harassment : 20

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of subscribers to Surfer Magazine who live in Saudi Arabia : 2

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage in 1980 : 41

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Years it would take a Nike worker in Indonesia to earn Michael Jordan’s endorsement fee : 44492

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of all hats sold in the United States each year that are baseball caps : 70

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of the 3 items looted from the Frederick’s of Hollywood Museum in L.A. last April that have been returned : 2

August 1992
[Harper’s Index]

Number of extra dancers a Houston topless bar plans to hire during the Republican Convention this month : 20

August 1992
[Article]

The trickle down of judicial racism
by ,
[Article]

Pandering to the dyslexic vote?
by ,
[illustration]

Mapping L.A.’s air
Art by , ,
[]

The buying of the president
by ,
[Article]

Tight lips at the Census Bureau
by ,
[Article]

A new boom and bust theory
by ,
[]

Backseat space walkers
by ,
[Article]

Virginia is for enemies
by ,
[Photography]

Readings
by ,
[]

A very little light
by ,
[]

Rush to judgment?
by ,
[Cartoon]

The drama of the inner adult
Drawn by ,
[Article]

Guns and hoses
by ,
[Article]

Dying, in part(s), for dollars
by ,
[]

Heir mail
by ,
[]

Wish you were whole
by ,
[Article]

Means to an end
by ,
[Price List]

Ghoulery
[Article]

The ones who live alone
by ,
[Article]

Blonde ambitions

The rise of Madonna studies
by ,
[Photography]

Readings
by ,
[illustration]

Sacred condoms
Art by ,
[Article]

In the space of a sentence
by ,
[Poetry]

Mrs. Ripley gets it off her chest
by ,
[Poetry]

Mr. Ripley writes a preface
by ,
[Illustration]

Untitled
Art by ,
[Letters]

Letters
by ,
[Notebook]

Captain money
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s index
by ,
[Collection]

A night at the Ripleys
by ,
[Article]

To be continued . . .
by ,
[Fiction]

Gregor

My life as a bug

by ,
[Collection]

To be continued . . .
by ,
[Fiction]

The late Gatsby
by ,
[Fiction]

Rabbit Resurrected
by ,
[Fiction]

Tadzio’s farewell
by ,
[Fiction]

Franny at fifty
by ,
[Fiction]

Gulliver goes south
by ,
[Article]

The new free-trade heel

Nike's profits jump on the backs of Asian workers

by ,
[Fiction]

I want to live!
by ,
[Article]

The last cold-war monument

Designing the "keep out" sign for a nuclear-waste site

by ,
[Article]

Picking plums

Fathers and sons and their lovers

by ,
[Article]

It gets deep

Learning not to learn to swim

by ,
[Double acrostic]

No. 116
by ,
[Puzzle]

Milestone
by ,
[Findings]

Robot elephants are becoming increasingly popular at Indian temples.

[Findings]

Early Bronze Age burials in the Upper Tigris may have accorded special favor to dead adolescents, whereas after the emergence of social hierarchy burial privilege shifted to dead elites.

[Findings]

The dismembered skeletons in a pit at Bayanbulak, possibly the site Emperor Wu of Han’s chief historian termed the Fortification for Receiving Surrender, were likely farmers from northern China conscripted during the Han–Xiongnu Wars.

[Findings]

The first antique instance of cinnabar-stained teeth was documented in a Subeshi woman in Grave M11 at Shengjindian Cemetery.

[Findings]

Greco-Roman sculpture was perfumed.

[Findings]

Dogs act more jealous when their owners interact with robots than when they read magazines.

[Findings]

The foreheads of teddy bears grew significantly taller between 1900 and 1980, though the bears did not become appreciably cuter over the same period.

[Findings]

Across racial categories women’s eyelash length is perceived as increasingly healthy up to one third of the width of the eye, past which further elongation becomes perceived as less healthy but increasingly indicative of sexual receptivity.

[Findings]

Male fruit flies seek out alcohol because it makes them more attractive to female flies and more successful at mating, not, as was previously theorized, because they are depressed about not yet having mated.

[Findings]

Male bluelined octopuses inject poison into the aortas of their female partners at the start of copulation, likely to avoid being eaten afterward.

[Findings]

Chemists grew gold in total darkness.

[Findings]

Five zebra fish per liter of tank water can be collectively euthanized by electric shock.

[Findings]

Rats can distinguish between Riesling and sauvignon blanc.

[Findings]

A literature review enumerated cases of envenomation by dead snakes, including those of a Chinese chef killed by the severed head of a spitting cobra, a child in Minnesota injured by a freeze-dried prairie-rattlesnake head worn as a tie tack, and two drunk Indians hospitalized after they chewed on the head of a dead krait.

[Findings]

Americans with open personalities are less likely to express end-of-life regret about how much they spent on food, whereas agreeable people are disposed to regret spending money on food, clothing, leisure, and financial help to others.

[Findings]

Polish doctors urged further investigation into compulsive frotteurs.

[Findings]

Scottish hen parties were deemed to contain ritualistic profanation.

[Findings]

The mummy of the Mysterious Lady was not pregnant.

[Findings]

A skull previously thought to belong to Cleopatra’s sister was found to be that of an Italian boy with a deformed jaw.

[Findings]

Fifty-two experts were consulted to produce a six-criteria test for predicting vasectomy regret.

[Findings]

French archaeologists discovered a Gaulish curse tablet tucked between a skeleton’s legs.

[Findings]

A Viking grave in Norway appeared to contain a vulva stone.

[Findings]

Chinese scientists successfully raised to adulthood, then dissected, mice born of two fathers.

[Findings]

Rabbits are capable of digesting their teeth as they wear down and reusing the calcium to grow new ones.

[Findings]

It is possible that songbirds who migrate at night socialize with one another in flight and speak to other species.

[Findings]

A survey of 1,328 urinary events found that, unlike contagious yawning, the contagious urination of chimpanzees appears to be correlated to social rank rather than social closeness.

[Findings]

Coyotes in dense areas of Chicago die younger if the average human income is high.

[Findings]

Physicists detected negative time.

[Findings]

Excessive tearfulness in the right eye of a fifty-five-year-old Japanese woman was traced to a supernumerary punctum.

[Findings]

Six dead dolphins who washed up in Texas were found to have fentanyl in their blubber.

[Findings]

Archaeologists speculated that, in the largest known Bronze Age massacre in Britain, attackers killed, butchered, and ate men, women, and children as a political statement.

[Findings]

Scientists urged the abandonment of attempts to create mirror life, against which existing life-forms may possess no defenses.

[Findings]

Monkeys are faster at spotting a snake among salamanders than a salamander among snakes.

[Findings]

Medication may treat those who suffer from disorders that make them smooth-brained.

[Findings]

Brain scans corroborated the unpleasant psychoacoustic effects of Aztec death whistles.

[Findings]

Assamese tribesmen were found to identify with elephants through a sense of mutual loss, poverty, and uncertainty.

[Findings]

Scientists suggested that human culture is superior to that of other animals because it can integrate limitless sequences of subgoals.

[Findings]

In Europe, conservatives are outbreeding progressives.

[Findings]

Researchers noted the positive effects of ecstatic epilepsy and synthesized fifty-three theoretical models of delusion.

[Findings]

Witnessing cringeworthy moments improves the observer’s self-perception.

[Findings]

In Japan, erectile function among young men was determined to be low by the first nationwide survey employing the internationally validated Erection Hardness Score.

[Findings]

Pentoxifylline can mitigate the damage caused by subjecting stallions to scrotal heat stress.

[Findings]

Bay Area researchers debuted a Narcissism Interview Scale for Employment.

[Findings]

More than half of U.S. civilians tasked with evaluating a bombing target endorsed killing unidentified bystanders.

[Findings]

Solitary chicks emit fewer anxious peeps if given a mirror for company.

[Findings]

Marine biologists described the Red Sea’s grumpy dwarfgoby.

[Findings]

Bottlenose dolphins, who were found to inhale and exhale microplastics, respond to a smile with a smile one third of the time.

[Findings]

Archaeologists identified the skeleton recovered from the Sverresborg Castle’s well in 1938 as the man described in the Sverris Saga as having been thrown into the well in 1197.

[Findings]

A primatologist, a mammalogist, and a linguist concluded that the jerky, rhythmic dance of sexually mature female black crested gibbons is innate rather than culturally transmitted.

[Findings]

Parmesan researchers found that “benevolently sexist” adults are less likely to own “clit-oriented” sex toys.

[Findings]

Germans under thirty experience more climate distress and have more rough sex.

[Findings]

Mars gained and then lost a second moon in the autumn.

[Findings]

Scientists determined why some aging gray horses turn white faster than others.

[Findings]

The stranger churches of sixteenth-century London extensively spied on their congregants, noting when women accused other women of being “pocked whores.”

[Findings]

Evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Proto­-Indo­-European language was spread by humans on horseback may have overlooked how humans who ride cows, donkeys, and wild asses exhibit the same hip­ -socket deformations, as previously observed in twentieth­-century nuns.

[Findings]

Scientists allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a soft five-limbed robot and a four-wheel vehicle.

[Findings]

Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills.

[Findings]

EEG experts disagreed on whether, in the future, brain waves could be used to read dreams and long-­term memories.

[Findings]

Turkish doctors reported a case of penile autoamputation with religious delusion.

[Findings]

AI researchers determined that large language models pose no existential threat to humanity and created an AI algorithm that can detect scientific articles written by other AI algorithms.

[Findings]

Mammoths may have been killed with planted pikes rather than with thrown spears.

[Findings]

The birth of a white buffalo fulfilled a Lakota prophecy portending better times.

[Findings]

Wildfires near Canadian mines were found to have released unprecedented levels of arsenic, and wildfires in Maui were making residents unhappy.

[Findings]

Living near oil and gas development sites depresses people who are trying to get pregnant.

[Findings]

The Journal of Pediatric Genetics retracted a study on Islamic beliefs concerning the possible supernatural causes of birth defects on the grounds that the research lacked a scientific basis.

[Findings]

A researcher noticed that a Tartessian slate tablet depicting battle scenes also contains a previously unknown alphabet.

[Findings]

The royal swan marker reported that the depression of the Thames population, previously noted during the late queen’s reign, continues under the king.

[Findings]

Researchers claimed that researchers have been underreporting same-­sex sexual activity among animals.

[Findings]

Cocaine trafficking was found to threaten the golden­-cheeked warbler.

[Findings]

A survey of 7 million parliamentary speeches across eight countries and several decades found that politicians use less complex language as it gets hotter.

[Findings]

The diet of Japanese youth is growing more confectionary, and Americans are poisoning themselves more severely.

[Findings]

Unaffiliated voters are growing more spiteful toward both Democrats and Republicans.

[Findings]

Researchers debuted an 88 percent accurate hate­-speech detector and a superior sarcasm detector and may be able to send messages back in time.

[Findings]

Increased border­-wall height was tentatively linked to a thirtyfold increase in the rate of migrant drowning deaths off San Diego.

[Findings]

Women bond more closely with therapy bulls than men do.

[Findings]

The perceived onset of old age increases by approximately one year for every four to five years a person ages.

[Findings]

A study of brain­-injured but not brain­-dead patients found that many would have survived had their families not chosen to withdraw life support.

[Findings]

Sets of both fraternal and identical twins exhibit internally similar metacognitive abilities, suggesting that metacognition is environmental rather than heritable.

[Findings]

Southern California beach erosion is expected to increase by 50 percent by 2050.

[Findings]

Archaeologists translated cuneiform tablets recording shareholder agreements for the first company in Anatolia.

[Findings]

The melting of the poles is making Earth’s days longer.

[Findings]

The hatching season of a male spear squid (Heterololigo bleekeri) determines whether he will pursue bold or sneaky mating tactics.

[Findings]

A bionic eye deciphered a scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that reveals the burial place of Plato, who was found to have complained about the musical abilities of the enslaved Thracian girl who played the flute for him as he lay dying.

[Findings]

Humans are losing their ability to digest cellulose.

[Findings]

Toxicity has remained a consistent feature of online interactions since 1989.

[Findings]

Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas.

[Findings]

A metal scar on the surface of the white dwarf WD 0816-310 indicated that it has cannibalized other bodies in its orbit.

[Findings]

An orca acting alone killed a great white shark and ate its liver.

[Findings]

Genomic analysis indicated that psychedelic mushrooms emerged around the time of the Mesozoic–Cenozoic mass extinction.

[Findings]

The playing speed of a metal guitarist directly correlates with his intrasexual competitiveness but not his mating success.

[Findings]

Depression in humans is correlated with higher body temperature, and cold-water swimming mitigates menopause symptoms.

[Findings]

Researchers warned that, as temperatures rise, humans should prepare for more diarrhea.

[Findings]

A mother is 4.6 percent more likely to give birth in the same month she was born, and adjacent siblings are 12.1 percent more likely to be born in the same month as one another.

[Findings]

Electric eel discharge transforms the DNA of zebrafish larvae.

[Findings]

An AI that was fed the employment and health data of six million Danes turned out to be more accurate than existing sociological methods at predicting if a given person was about to die.

[Findings]

Onshore wind turbines severely deter German bats from foraging.

[Findings]

Astrophysicists argued that the development of advanced alien technology requires an atmosphere composed of at least 18 percent oxygen.

[Findings]

Off the Five Finger Islands, a team of cetologists aboard the Glacier Seal conducted an extended conversation with a female humpback named Twain.

[Findings]

True crabs independently evolved to live out of the ocean up to seventeen times.

[Findings]

The average American girl born in 2019 will take prescription drugs for more than half her life.

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