December 2019

by Wes Enzinna,

[Letter from Belleville]

Body Language

by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Number of new Christmas films that will debut on Hallmark channels this year : 40

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of the world’s internet traffic that is attributable to Netflix : 12

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 1996 in the average price of a movie ticket in the United States : 106

[Harper’s Index]

In the average price of a concert ticket : 256

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated annual amount that U.S. book publishers lose to piracy : $315,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of people downloading pirated e-books who make $100,000 or more a year : 29

[Harper’s Index]

Number of requests Google has received since 2014 to delete search results based on the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” law : 3,300,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of those requests Google has granted : 45

[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the U.S. public trusts law enforcement more than advertisers to use facial-recognition technology “responsibly” : 3

[Harper’s Index]

Amount that the Florida D.M.V. earned selling personal data in 2017 : $77,865,737

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American women aged 30 and older who receive financial help from their parents : 49

[Harper’s Index]

Of American men aged 30 and older : 62

[Harper’s Index]

Median percentage of student-loan debt owed by white borrowers twenty years after enrolling in college : 6

[Harper’s Index]

Of student-loan debt owed by black borrowers : 95

[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of laws in San Francisco penalizing homelessness : 24

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change in calls to 9-1-1 about homeless people in San Francisco from 2013 to 2017 : +78

[Harper’s Index]

Number of months for which Japanese men are legally guaranteed paid paternity leave : 12

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of images in U.S. online media that feature people aged 50 or older : 15

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who are older than 50 : 46

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which people who nap once or twice a week are less likely than non-nappers to face serious heart illnesses : 48

[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which non-white Americans are more likely than white Americans to be vegetarians : 3

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which U.S. sales of plant-based meat substitutes increased this year : 10

[Harper’s Index]

Number of states with laws prohibiting the use of the words “meat,” “burger,” or “steak” on labels for non-animal products : 7

[Harper’s Index]

Rank of “well done” among the ways that Americans prefer their steaks to be cooked : 1

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American avoids drinking tap water at home because of safety concerns : 1 in 3

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of bottled water sold in the United States that is filtered tap water : 64

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount that Americans spent on bottled water last year : $31,000,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of the U.S. automobile market that is composed of S.U.V.s and pickup trucks : 66

[Harper’s Index]

Of sedans : 22

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who believe electric cars require gasoline to run : 42

[Harper’s Index]

Number of Nobel laureates in physics who have been named John : 8

[Harper’s Index]

Who have been named Wolfgang : 3

[Harper’s Index]

Who have been women : 3

[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which a public restroom floor hosts more bacteria than a toilet seat : 40,000

[Harper’s Index]

By which a kitchen sponge hosts more bacteria than a toilet seat : 17,700,000,000

[Harper’s Index]

Rank of kitchen cleaning among Americans’ least favorite chores : 1

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say they’d give up sex for life if they never had to do any more chores : 1/5

Readings

[Essay]

I Follow the Sunlight Around the Lawn

by Alli Warren,

[Reflection]

Single Blood

by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro,Translated by Cole Heinowitz,

[Fiction]

Protocol or: A Contribution on the Renaissance as Compiled Jointly with My Uncle Josef

by Bohumil Hrabal,Translated by David Short,

[Complaints]

Faulty Towers

“Composition with Painted Cutouts,” a photograph by Nico Krijno, whose work was on view in June at Elizabeth Houston Gallery, in New York City.

Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Houston Gallery, New York City

Our Town, a painting by Amy Bennett, whose work was on view in August at Miles McEnery Gallery, in New York City.

Courtesy the artist and Miles Mcenery Gallery, New York City

The Sleepwalkers and Rope-a-Dope, mixed-media artworks by Deborah Roberts, whose work was on view in July at Stephen Friedman Gallery, in London.

Courtesy the artist and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City

Workbench with Underwood, a painting by Dickon Drury, whose work was on view in August at Koppe Astner, in Glasgow, Scotland.

Courtesy the artist; Koppe Astner, Glasgow, Scotland; and Galerie Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway

Photographs by Stephen Gill from The Pillar, a monograph published this year by Nobody Books. Gill photographed a pillar and the birds it attracted on his property in Skåne, Sweden, from 2015 to 2019.

[Letters]

Letters

[Easy Chair]

Lefty Lingo

by Lionel Shriver,

[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index

[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index

[Letter from California]

Gimme Shelter

The cost of living in the Bay Area

by Wes Enzinna,

[From the Archive]

San Francisco Blues

by Lillian Symes,

[Essay]

Body Language

How to tell a genderqueer story

by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich,

[Letter from Belleville]

Trash, Rock, Destroy

Is Virginie Despentes the French writer America needs?

by Lauren Elkin,

[Photo Essay]

Make Way for Tomorrow

Photographs from a city displaced

by Rose Marie Cromwell, Sol Lauría,Translated by Paula Kupfer,

[Story]

The Red Dot

by David Means,

[Reviews]

New Books

by Julian Lucas,

[Reviews]

Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man

Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race

by Emily Bernard,

[Reviews]

Burning Down the House

A gothic life of Frank Lloyd Wright

by Christopher Benfey,

[Puzzle]

Present Tense

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]

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]

A fungal parasite that afflicts the reproductive organs of millipedes was named in honor of Twitter.

Illuminated tents erected by artist-activist Suzi Garner and members of the #WhereDoWeGoBerk movement at a homeless encampment alongside Interstate 80 near Berkeley, California. Photograph by Mark Leong for Harper’s Magazine © The artist Microfiche

December 2019

Gimme Shelter

The cost of living in the Bay Area

Trash, Rock, Destroy

Body Language

Number of new Christmas films that will debut on Hallmark channels this year : 40

Percentage of the world’s internet traffic that is attributable to Netflix : 12

Percentage increase since 1996 in the average price of a movie ticket in the United States : 106

In the average price of a concert ticket : 256

Estimated annual amount that U.S. book publishers lose to piracy : $315,000,000

Percentage of people downloading pirated e-books who make $100,000 or more a year : 29

Number of requests Google has received since 2014 to delete search results based on the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” law : 3,300,000

Percentage of those requests Google has granted : 45

Factor by which the U.S. public trusts law enforcement more than advertisers to use facial-recognition technology “responsibly” : 3

Amount that the Florida D.M.V. earned selling personal data in 2017 : $77,865,737

Percentage of American women aged 30 and older who receive financial help from their parents : 49

Of American men aged 30 and older : 62

Median percentage of student-loan debt owed by white borrowers twenty years after enrolling in college : 6

Of student-loan debt owed by black borrowers : 95

Minimum number of laws in San Francisco penalizing homelessness : 24

Percentage change in calls to 9-1-1 about homeless people in San Francisco from 2013 to 2017 : +78

Number of months for which Japanese men are legally guaranteed paid paternity leave : 12

Percentage of Japanese fathers who take some advantage of the policy : 6

Who take all twelve months : 0.1

Percentage of U.S. adults over 55 who did freelance work this year : 29

Percentage of images in U.S. online media that feature people aged 50 or older : 15

Percentage of Americans who are older than 50 : 46

Percentage by which people who nap once or twice a week are less likely than non-nappers to face serious heart illnesses : 48

Factor by which non-white Americans are more likely than white Americans to be vegetarians : 3

Percentage by which U.S. sales of plant-based meat substitutes increased this year : 10

Number of states with laws prohibiting the use of the words “meat,” “burger,” or “steak” on labels for non-animal products : 7

Rank of “well done” among the ways that Americans prefer their steaks to be cooked : 1

Chance that an American avoids drinking tap water at home because of safety concerns : 1 in 3

Percentage of bottled water sold in the United States that is filtered tap water : 64

Estimated amount that Americans spent on bottled water last year : $31,000,000,000

Percentage of the U.S. automobile market that is composed of S.U.V.s and pickup trucks : 66

Of sedans : 22

Percentage of Americans who believe electric cars require gasoline to run : 42

Number of Nobel laureates in physics who have been named John : 8

Who have been named Wolfgang : 3

Who have been women : 3

Factor by which a public restroom floor hosts more bacteria than a toilet seat : 40,000

By which a kitchen sponge hosts more bacteria than a toilet seat : 17,700,000,000

Rank of kitchen cleaning among Americans’ least favorite chores : 1

Portion of Americans who say they’d give up sex for life if they never had to do any more chores : 1/5

Readings

Being in Nothingness

Clear History

The Beast in Me

I Follow the Sunlight Around the Lawn

Song of My Shelf

Roy Meets World

Single Blood

Protocol or: A Contribution on the Renaissance as Compiled Jointly with My Uncle Josef

Faulty Towers

Letters

Lefty Lingo

Harper’s Index

Harper’s Index

Gimme Shelter

The cost of living in the Bay Area

San Francisco Blues

Body Language

How to tell a genderqueer story

Trash, Rock, Destroy

Is Virginie Des­pentes the French writer America needs?

Make Way for Tomorrow

Photographs from a city displaced

The Red Dot

New Books

Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man

Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race

Burning Down the House

A gothic life of Frank Lloyd Wright

Present Tense

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.

Is Virginie Despentes the French writer America needs?

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.