Cover illustration by Tony Healey. Cover art direction by Roger Black. Microfiche

November 2010

October 2010 December 2010

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Republican congressional candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin who won their primary races : 60

[Harper’s Index]

Net decrease since then in the amount these companies spent on wages and benefits : ???$171,000,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Net domestic profits earned by U.S. corporations since the fourth quarter of 2008 : $609,000,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Number of British households in which no adult has ever been employed : 352,000

[Harper’s Index]

Average interest rate currently paid by credit-card holders in Mexico : 32

[Harper’s Index]

Net worth of India’s ten richest people, expressed as a percentage of the country’s GDP : 12

[Harper’s Index]

Number of women who served on the boards of major corporations last year in Japan and Kuwait, respectively : 15, 30

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of 18- to 26-year-old women who do : 27

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of 27- to 45-year-old women who have at least four sexual fantasies per week : 35

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage who would while having sex : 11

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans under age 25 who say they would read a text message while “on the john” : 24

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American teenager in an August survey was considering “un-friending” his or her parents on Facebook : 1 in 3

[Harper’s Index]

Average amount that U.S. parents spend to raise a child to age 18 : $286,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of babies born in Hong Kong last year whose mothers were visitors from mainland China : 36

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of children born in the United States in 2008 with at least one parent in the country illegally : 8

[Harper’s Index]

Date that the Tea Party Bookshop in Salem, Oregon, changed its name to Tigress Books : 8/24/10

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a viewer of Fox News’s prime-time broadcast is African-American : 1 in 100

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Ebonics speakers the DEA requested this year to interpret wiretapped conversations of African-American suspects : 9

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say they do not know a Muslim : 62

[Harper’s Index]

Days after the U.S. military relinquished control of its last prison in Iraq that four prisoners escaped : 5

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of city-dwelling Iraqis who lived in slums in 2003, according to the United Nations : 20

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage who do today : 53

[Harper’s Index]

Number of active-duty U.S. soldiers who have sought “behavioral health counseling” so far this year : 32,994

[Harper’s Index]

Number of musicians currently serving in U.S. military bands : 7,007

[Harper’s Index]

Number of English-language schools operated by the Walt Disney Company in China : 15

[Harper’s Index]

Number of years a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman had been overdue : 45

[Harper’s Index]

Number of overdue books returned last year to the San Francisco Public Library during a two-week “fine amnesty” : 29,228

[Harper’s Index]

Number of countries in which gay sex is currently illegal : 76

[Harper’s Index]

Amount the German environment ministry paid hunters last year for their radioactive wild-boar meat : $590,000

[Harper’s Index]

Number of people trampled to death in July during a stampede at the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany : 21

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American couple who met since 2007 first met online : 1 in 4

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of women who say they do : 10

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of British men who say they share “all secrets” with their teddy bears : 15

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of British businessmen who travel with their teddy bears : 25

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of these people who opted to apply early in exchange for reduced benefits : 73

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Americans who were awarded Social Security retirement benefits last year : 2,740,000

[Harper’s Index]

Number of U.S. state and local government jobs that have been lost so far this year : 135,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American corporations whose stock is currently rated as a “buy,” according to Bloomberg : 29

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 1960 in the average weight of a farm-raised U.S. turkey : 72

[Harper’s Index]

Average value of the 2009 salary and benefits paid to private-sector and federal workers, respectively : $61,050, $115,182

Readings

[Memoir]

The Julius Campe Prize

by Thomas Bernhard,Translated by Carol Brown Janeway,

[Photography]

Urlaub in Saig

by Marc Grümmert,

[Request]

Triumph of the Wheel

by Adolf Hitler,Translated by Natascha Hoffmeyer,

[History]

Revision Accomplished

by James Bridle,

[Painting]

Colony

Art by Justin Mortimer,

[Tips]

Stumped Speech

by Chris Haire,

[Article]

School of hard knocks

by Harper’s Staff,

[Provocations]

Straight Outta Berkeley

by Tyrone Hayes,

[Article]

The way they are

by Ian Rivers,

[Sanitation]

Cloacadoodledoo

[Painting]

Rooster and Turkey (after Hondecoeter)

Art by Shelley Reed,

[Fiction]

Five Stories from Flaubert

by Lydia Davis,

[Poems]

Were I a Periwinkle

by Uljana Wolf,Translated by Susan Bernofsky, Timothy Donnelly, Ute Schwartz, Matthea Harvey,

[Photography]

Suez Canal, Egypt

by David Burdeny,

[Illustration]

Untitled

Art by Tony Healey,

[Letters]

Letters

by Harper’s Staff,

[Notebook]

Figures of Speech

by Lewis H. Lapham,

[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s index

by Harper’s Staff,

[Criticism]

Murdoch Triumphant

How we could have stopped him—twice

by Marvin Kitman,

[Article]

A Good Death

Exit strategies

by William T. Vollmann,

[Photo Essay]

As We This Garden

by Beth Dow,

[Letter from the Balkans]

Twilight of the Vampires

Hunting the real-life undead

by Téa Obreht,

[Fiction]

Rangoon Green

by Barry Hannah,

[Reviews]

New Books

by Benjamin Moser,

[Reviews]

Heartache and the Thousand Natural Shocks

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

by Christine Smallwood,

[Reviews]

Next Year in Cleveland

Soviet Jewry's exodus and diaspora

by David Bezmozgis,

[Puzzle]

Crazy Quilt

by Richard E. Maltby Jr.,

[Findings]

Findings

by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

[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]

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 2010

Percentage of Republican congressional candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin who won their primary races : 60

Net decrease since then in the amount these companies spent on wages and benefits : ???$171,000,000,000

Net domestic profits earned by U.S. corporations since the fourth quarter of 2008 : $609,000,000,000

Number of British households in which no adult has ever been employed : 352,000

Average interest rate currently paid by credit-card holders in Mexico : 32

Net worth of India’s ten richest people, expressed as a percentage of the country’s GDP : 12

Number of women who served on the boards of major corporations last year in Japan and Kuwait, respectively : 15, 30

Percentage of 18- to 26-year-old women who do : 27

Percentage of 27- to 45-year-old women who have at least four sexual fantasies per week : 35

Percentage who would while having sex : 11

Percentage of Americans under age 25 who say they would read a text message while “on the john” : 24

Chance that an American teenager in an August survey was considering “un-friending” his or her parents on Facebook : 1 in 3

Average amount that U.S. parents spend to raise a child to age 18 : $286,000

Percentage of babies born in Hong Kong last year whose mothers were visitors from mainland China : 36

Percentage of children born in the United States in 2008 with at least one parent in the country illegally : 8

Date that the Tea Party Bookshop in Salem, Oregon, changed its name to Tigress Books : 8/24/10

Chance that a viewer of Fox News’s prime-time broadcast is African-American : 1 in 100

Number of Ebonics speakers the DEA requested this year to interpret wiretapped conversations of African-American suspects : 9

Percentage of Americans who say they do not know a Muslim : 62

Days after the U.S. military relinquished control of its last prison in Iraq that four prisoners escaped : 5

Percentage of city-dwelling Iraqis who lived in slums in 2003, according to the United Nations : 20

Percentage who do today : 53

Number of active-duty U.S. soldiers who have sought “behavioral health counseling” so far this year : 32,994

Number of musicians currently serving in U.S. military bands : 7,007

Number of English-language schools operated by the Walt Disney Company in China : 15

Number of years a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman had been overdue : 45

Number of overdue books returned last year to the San Francisco Public Library during a two-week “fine amnesty” : 29,228

Number of countries in which gay sex is currently illegal : 76

Amount the German environment ministry paid hunters last year for their radioactive wild-boar meat : $590,000

Number of people trampled to death in July during a stampede at the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany : 21

Chance that an American couple who met since 2007 first met online : 1 in 4

Percentage of women who say they do : 10

Percentage of British men who say they share “all secrets” with their teddy bears : 15

Percentage of British businessmen who travel with their teddy bears : 25

Percentage of these people who opted to apply early in exchange for reduced benefits : 73

Number of Americans who were awarded Social Security retirement benefits last year : 2,740,000

Number of U.S. state and local government jobs that have been lost so far this year : 135,000

Percentage of American corporations whose stock is currently rated as a “buy,” according to Bloomberg : 29

Percentage increase since 1960 in the average weight of a farm-raised U.S. turkey : 72

Average value of the 2009 salary and benefits paid to private-sector and federal workers, respectively : $61,050, $115,182

Readings

The Julius Campe Prize

Urlaub in Saig

Triumph of the Wheel

Revision Accomplished

Colony

Stumped Speech

School of hard knocks

Straight Outta Berkeley

The way they are

Cloacadoodledoo

Rooster and Turkey (after Hondecoeter)

Five Stories from Flaubert

Were I a Periwinkle

Suez Canal, Egypt

Untitled

Letters

Figures of Speech

Harper’s index

Murdoch Triumphant

How we could have stopped him—twice

A Good Death

Exit strategies

As We This Garden

Twilight of the Vampires

Hunting the real-life undead

Rangoon Green

New Books

Heartache and the Thousand Natural Shocks

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

Next Year in Cleveland

Soviet Jewry's exodus and diaspora

Crazy Quilt

Findings

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.

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

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.