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November 1998

October 1998 December 1998

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of American women arrested for child abuse since 1977 after using drugs or alcohol while pregnant : 200

[Harper’s Index]

Number of “I Slept with Kenneth Starr‚” bumper stickers sold by a Little Rock gift shop since last April : 990

[Harper’s Index]

Total amount that individuals have spent since 1994 on legal fees related to Starr’s investigation : $23,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Chances that a 1996 campaign contribution of over $200 came from a white man earning at least $100,000 a year : 2 in 3

[Harper’s Index]

Chances that a white male donor, making over $100,000 a year, and who gave over $200 to a 1996 campaign “personally knows‚” a member of Congress : 3 in 4

[Harper’s Index]

Votes cast in an Oklahoma Democratic Senate primary last August for a candidate who had died a month earlier : 56,393

[Harper’s Index]

Number of heart attacks on Wall Street the day the market dropped 513 points last August : 2

[Harper’s Index]

Number of heart attacks there the next day, when the market rose 288 points : 3

[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage by which an American woman’s out-of-pocket medical spending exceeds that of an American man : 68

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a fee-for-service health-insurance plan’s prescription coverage includes oral contraceptives : 1 in 3

[Harper’s Index]

Price a Houston company charges for sending a DNA sample into outer space for possible cloning by aliens : $50

[Harper’s Index]

Years in prison to which a South Carolina woman was sentenced for this in 1992 : 8

[Harper’s Index]

Years in prison to which New Jersey’s Amy Grossberg was sentenced last July for killing her newborn : 2.5

[Harper’s Index]

Average number of Americans under the age of 18 killed by their parents or caretakers each day : 5

[Harper’s Index]

Average number of Americans who turn fifty each day : 10,065

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who believe that President Clinton should see a psychotherapist : 44

[Harper’s Index]

Months after publicly calling the President a “scumbag‚” last April that Rep. Dan Burton admitted his own adultery : 4

[Harper’s Index]

Amount for which a North Dakota town has agreed to rename itself after a brand of schnapps for four years : $100,000

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Moscow’s major newspapers that mentioned last August’s Clinton/Yeltsin summit the day before it began

[Harper’s Index]

Number of U.S. households that chose professional wrestling over the President ‘s televised apology that month : 6,379,000

[Harper’s Index]

Ratio of the number of “cigar‚” references in Kenneth Starr’s report to the number of “Whitewater‚” references : 9:1

[Harper’s Index]

Fine that the report’s Internet posting might have brought if 1996’s Communications Decency Act had become law : $250,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of current members of Congress who voted for both the Communications Decency Act and the report’s release : 72

[Harper’s Index]

Number of pages of the Watergate special prosecutor’s report that have been released to the public

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of the $19.98 price of a video of President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination that goes to the Zapruder family : 1/5

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Abraham Zapruder underreported his initial profits from the film to the Warren Commission in 1964 : 50

[Harper’s Index]

Amount that CBS is paying Rome’s Atlante Star hotel to use its rooftop view of St. Peter’s when the Pope dies : $180,000

[Harper’s Index]

Annual amount that Americans spend on vodka, expressed as a portion of the value of Russia’s publicly traded companies : 1/3

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a character depicted last year in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon is trademarked : 1 in 2

[Harper’s Index]

Cubic feet of gas Macy’s devoted last year to Bumpé, a “capricious Laplandic cow‚” sponsored by a Swedish firm : 14,000

[Harper’s Index]

Number of ornamental figures based on German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Germany’s Garden Gnome Museum : 14

[Harper’s Index]

Number of political parties represented by the 5,065 candidates running for the German legislature last September : 34

[Harper’s Index]

Number of candidates besides Kim Jong Il nominated this year for each of the 687 seats in North Korea’s legislature

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Sudanese factories besides the one the U.S. bombed last August that had U.N. approval to export drugs to Iraq

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Tomahawk cruise missiles the U.S. could launch for the price of the Whitewater investigation : 40

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated ratio of satellites in the path of the last Leonid meteor shower in 1966 to those in its path this November 17 : 1:10

[Harper’s Index]

Number of days that an unauthorized visitor spent at a NASA mission control console during a launch last year : 2

[Article]

Isn’t it romantic?

by Jack Hitt,

[illustration]

Black Rock Desert of the Nevada Great Basin

Art by Jack W. Dykinga,

[Cartoon]

Readings

Drawn by P.S. Mueller,

[Article]

Revising the F-word

by Jesse Sheidlower,

[Photography]

Anti-porn protester

by William Miller,

[Article]

Phone fun in Sarajevo

by Michael Cresswell,

[Article]

Prelude to genocide?

by Harper’s Staff,

[illustration]

Tram Chim #4

Art by Kate Collie,

[illustration]

Readings

Art by John Ellsberry,

[Article]

The spoken weed

by Robert C. Byrd,

[Article]

Mr. T, real-life superhero

by Chris S. Morrill,

[Article]

Your life with my dog

by Daniel Levine,

[Article]

There goes the neighborhood

by Kurt Vonnegut,

[Article]

Grace Slick’s feathered friends

by Grace Slick,

[Article]

The novelist’s super ego

by Francesca Riviere,

[Article]

The survivor’s question

by Peter Stitt,

[Photography]

Flower (#86), Chrysanthemum

by Amanda Means,

[Poetry]

Do please circle

by Joshua Saul Beckman,

[Article]

Blank canvas

by Bernard Cooper,

[Illustration]

Untitled

Art by George Deem,

[Letters]

Letters

by Harper’s Staff,

[Notebook]

Hide-and-go-seek

by Lewis H. Lapham,

[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s index

by Harper’s Staff,

[Article]

Goodbye to all that

Why Americans are not taught history

by Christopher Hitchens,

[Article]

Let them eat nutri-cake

Merriam-Webster thinks our "biosolids" don't stink

by Sheldon Rampton,

[Article]

Foundering father

A 1797 confession of adultery

by Alexander Hamilton,Edited by Lewis H. Lapham,

[Article]

The Radioactive Boy Scout

When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor

by Ken Silverstein,

[Article]

Home after dark

A funeral for three girls in Kentucky

by Jayne Anne Phillips,

[Double acrostic]

No. 190

by Thomas Hazlehurst Middleton,

[Puzzle]

Misprints–III

by Harper’s Staff,

[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.

[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]

November 1998

Estimated number of American women arrested for child abuse since 1977 after using drugs or alcohol while pregnant : 200

Number of “I Slept with Kenneth Starr‚” bumper stickers sold by a Little Rock gift shop since last April : 990

Total amount that individuals have spent since 1994 on legal fees related to Starr’s investigation : $23,000,000

Chances that a 1996 campaign contribution of over $200 came from a white man earning at least $100,000 a year : 2 in 3

Chances that a white male donor, making over $100,000 a year, and who gave over $200 to a 1996 campaign “personally knows‚” a member of Congress : 3 in 4

Votes cast in an Oklahoma Democratic Senate primary last August for a candidate who had died a month earlier : 56,393

Number of heart attacks on Wall Street the day the market dropped 513 points last August : 2

Number of heart attacks there the next day, when the market rose 288 points : 3

Average percentage by which an American woman’s out-of-pocket medical spending exceeds that of an American man : 68

Chance that a fee-for-service health-insurance plan’s prescription coverage includes oral contraceptives : 1 in 3

Price a Houston company charges for sending a DNA sample into outer space for possible cloning by aliens : $50

Years in prison to which a South Carolina woman was sentenced for this in 1992 : 8

Years in prison to which New Jersey’s Amy Grossberg was sentenced last July for killing her newborn : 2.5

Average number of Americans under the age of 18 killed by their parents or caretakers each day : 5

Average number of Americans who turn fifty each day : 10,065

Percentage of Americans who believe that President Clinton should see a psychotherapist : 44

Months after publicly calling the President a “scumbag‚” last April that Rep. Dan Burton admitted his own adultery : 4

Number of wild turkeys in New Hampshire in 1968

Number there today : 10,000

Tons of U.S. chicken feet exported last year to China : 264,000

Amount for which a North Dakota town has agreed to rename itself after a brand of schnapps for four years : $100,000

Number of Moscow’s major newspapers that mentioned last August’s Clinton/Yeltsin summit the day before it began

Number of U.S. households that chose professional wrestling over the President ‘s televised apology that month : 6,379,000

Ratio of the number of “cigar‚” references in Kenneth Starr’s report to the number of “Whitewater‚” references : 9:1

Fine that the report’s Internet posting might have brought if 1996’s Communications Decency Act had become law : $250,000

Percentage of current members of Congress who voted for both the Communications Decency Act and the report’s release : 72

Number of pages of the Watergate special prosecutor’s report that have been released to the public

Portion of the $19.98 price of a video of President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination that goes to the Zapruder family : 1/5

Percentage by which Abraham Zapruder underreported his initial profits from the film to the Warren Commission in 1964 : 50

Amount that CBS is paying Rome’s Atlante Star hotel to use its rooftop view of St. Peter’s when the Pope dies : $180,000

Annual amount that Americans spend on vodka, expressed as a portion of the value of Russia’s publicly traded companies : 1/3

Chance that a character depicted last year in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon is trademarked : 1 in 2

Cubic feet of gas Macy’s devoted last year to Bumpé, a “capricious Laplandic cow‚” sponsored by a Swedish firm : 14,000

Number of ornamental figures based on German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Germany’s Garden Gnome Museum : 14

Number of political parties represented by the 5,065 candidates running for the German legislature last September : 34

Number of candidates besides Kim Jong Il nominated this year for each of the 687 seats in North Korea’s legislature

Number of Sudanese factories besides the one the U.S. bombed last August that had U.N. approval to export drugs to Iraq

Number of Tomahawk cruise missiles the U.S. could launch for the price of the Whitewater investigation : 40

Estimated ratio of satellites in the path of the last Leonid meteor shower in 1966 to those in its path this November 17 : 1:10

Number of days that an unauthorized visitor spent at a NASA mission control console during a launch last year : 2

Isn’t it romantic?

Black Rock Desert of the Nevada Great Basin

Readings

Revising the F-word

Anti-porn protester

Phone fun in Sarajevo

Prelude to genocide?

Tram Chim #4

Readings

The spoken weed

Mr. T, real-life superhero

Your life with my dog

There goes the neighborhood

Grace Slick’s feathered friends

The novelist’s super ego

The survivor’s question

Flower (#86), Chrysanthemum

Do please circle

Blank canvas

Untitled

Letters

Hide-and-go-seek

Harper’s index

Goodbye to all that

Why Americans are not taught history

Let them eat nutri-cake

Merriam-Webster thinks our "biosolids" don't stink

Foundering father

A 1797 confession of adultery

The Radioactive Boy Scout

When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor

Home after dark

A funeral for three girls in Kentucky

No. 190

Misprints–III

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.