May 2016

April 2016 June 2016

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

[Translations]

by Tim Lomas,

[Photography]

[Travelogue]

by Wolfgang Bauer, Sarah Pybus,

[Illustration]

by Thomas Bernhard, James Reidel,

(Untitled)

Letters

The Habits of Highly Cynical People

Harper‘s Index

Unhackable

American Imperium

Fighting Chance

Wilt Thou not Walk

Front Runner

In Hayange

by Valérie Igounet, Vincent Jarousseau,

A Shrinking World, An Opening Sky

New Books

New Movies

Note To Self

Metaphysics In a Teacup

War of The Roses

Four-Play

Findings

May 2016

Red Light Therapy

Joy to The World

(Untitled)

Con Voyage

Has It

Rallying Tries

In The Tower

Two Martyrs

(Untitled)

Letters

The Habits of Highly Cynical People

Harper‘s Index

Unhackable

The quest for an email the government can’t read

American Imperium

Untangling truth and fiction in an age of perpetual war

Fighting Chance

Photographs from the English Premier League

Wilt Thou not Walk

Front Runner

Marine Le Pen’s campaign to make France great again

In Hayange

A Shrinking World, An Opening Sky

New Books

New Movies

Note To Self

The lyric essay’s convenient fictions

Metaphysics In a Teacup

Annie Dillard gets pickled

War of The Roses

Piecing together the GN’R story

Four-Play

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.