March 2014

February 2014 April 2014

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

[Photography]

[Malingering]

[Investigation]

[Innovation]

[Illustration]

[Confession]

by Norman Rush,

[illustration]

by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Rhett McNeil,

[Photography]

by Kim Thue,

[Photography]

by Lieko Shiga,

Untitled

by Tim Bower,

Letters

Dodge the Draft!

Harper’s Index

Harper’s Index

Nothing Left

Sochi’s Troubled Neighbor

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Monte Reel,

Portrait of a Township

Waiting State

The Toast

New Books

Mostpeople’s Poet

Here There Is No Why

by J. Hoberman,

What Is Literature?

Gremlins

Findings

March 2014

Percentage of Syrian child refugees who are not attending school : 68

Chance that a pregnant U.S. woman says she is a virgin : 1 in 125

The Trees Step Out of the Forest

Hot Air Balloon Wedding Ceremony, Taos, New Mexico

Good Cop, Sad Cop

Greek Tragedy

Nuclear Meltdown

Hustle and Flow

Pie Fight Interior 2

On Nudity

Oedipus in Mississippi

Shoreham

The Academies of Siam

Devil’s Advocate

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Letters

Dodge the Draft!

Harper’s Index

Harper’s Index

Nothing Left

The long, slow surrender of American liberals

Sochi’s Troubled Neighbor

A journey through a Russian client state on the Black Sea

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Predicting murder on Chicago’s South Side

Portrait of a Township

Former militants take on the post-apartheid struggle

Waiting State

The Toast

New Books

Mostpeople’s Poet

Is E. E. Cummings a serious writer?

Here There Is No Why

The trial of 12 Years a Slave

What Is Literature?

In defense of the canon

Gremlins

Findings

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Women bond more closely with therapy bulls than men do.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Humans are losing their ability to digest cellulose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Electric eel discharge transforms the DNA of zebrafish larvae.

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.

Onshore wind turbines severely deter German bats from foraging.

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.

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.