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January 2020

[Report]

Click Here to Kill

The dark world of online murder markets

By
[Essay]

Vicious Cycles

By
[Letter from the Comoro Islands]

Oceans Apart

By

Readings

[Essay]

Minor Threats

By ,
[Abuses]

Kindergarten Cops

[Interview]

Deadly Poets Society

By
[Notes]

Paperback to the Future

By
[Results]

Powers for Algernon

[Census]

Leftovers

By
[Fiction]

The Country in the Woman

By
[Poem]

An Instant of Nowhere

By

Nurses with Wine

Nurses with Wine, a painting by Alex Kanevsky, whose work was on view in September at Hollis Taggart, in New York City.

Dantor a Anais and Sanité Bélair

Dantor a Anais and Sanité Bélair, mixed-media artworks by Didier William, whose work is on view this month at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in Hartford, Connecticut.
Courtesy the artist; James Fuentes, New York City; and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York City

La Güera

La Güera, a mixed-media artwork by Hugo Crosthwaite, whose work was on view in December at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Courtesy the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

“Untitled (Forest 2)”

“Untitled (Forest 2),” a photograph by Sandra Kantanen, whose work was on view in November at Elizabeth Houston Gallery, in New York City. Kantanen’s monograph, More Landscapes, was published last year by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Courtesy the artist
[Letters]

Letters

[Easy Chair]

On Courage

By
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index

[Report]

Click Here to Kill

The dark world of online murder markets

By
[From the Archive]

Criminal Minds

By
[Essay]

Vicious Cycles

Theses on a philosophy of news

By
[Letter from the Comoro Islands]

Oceans Apart

A neglected migration crisis off the African coast

By
[Letter from SoHo]

The Forty-Year Rehearsal

The Wooster Group’s endless work in progress

By
[Letter from Washington]

Election Bias

The new playbook for voter suppression

By
[Story]

The Whale Mother

By
[Reviews]

New Books

By
[Reviews]

Salka the Salonnière

On the queen of old Hollywood’s émigrés

By
[Reviews]

Existential Noir

On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti

By
[Puzzle]

Theme and Vari-Variations

By
[Findings]

Findings

By
[Findings]

A spineless hedgehog in Fishcross regrew its spines and was released into the wild, and officials blamed the deaths of British black bees at Wisbech Castle on “morons.” 

[Findings]

A soggy Suffolk owl found in a ditch was diagnosed as too fat to fly.

[Findings]

Mount Vesuvius turned a Herculaneum man’s brain to glass, according to archaeologists, who also revived the voice of a priest from the reign of Ramesses XI and determined that a mummy in the Ulster Museum had been stabbed in the back.

[Findings]

Crystallized mud-wasp nests were used to revise the age of Aboriginal rock art, and a sheep hunters’ encampment was discovered in Nachcharini Cave.

[Findings]

India’s Supreme Court approved the importation of Namibian cheetahs.

[Findings]

Researchers who wear orange catch more anoles, and Australia began culling thousands of camels with helicopter snipers.

[Findings]

Sheep compensate well for lameness.

[Findings]

Southern white rhinos are threatened by inbreeding.

[Findings]

Veterinarians developed an ultrasound schedule for pregnant dolphins, and marine biologists discovered four new species of walking sharks and found that gray seals clap at each other to communicate underwater.

[Findings]

Cetaceans are least likely among mammals to dream profoundly.

[Findings]

African penguins were found to be the first non-primates whose speech exhibits both the Menzerath–­Altmann Law and Zipf’s Law of Brevity.

[Findings]

The asteroid strike at Yarrabubba may have ended Snowball Earth.

[Findings]

Ocean currents are speeding up.

[Findings]

Scientists looked forward to studying the flow of Antarctic bottom water from the Weddell Sea into the Scotia Sea.

[Findings]

Climate change will not encourage sugar maples to move northward, but it will drive Americans from the coasts toward Las Vegas.

[Findings]

Rising climate skepticism among Republicans in recent decades was attributed to backlash against Democratic elites.

[Findings]

Automation of the labor force may lead humans to overcome their differences, and researchers seeking to use personal voice-assistance to detect dementia among their users were awarded a $12 million grant.

[Findings]

Sugar ants will mine dried urine from sand.

[Findings]

The axolotl’s unusually large genome may be useful for something.

[Findings]

The world’s oldest bamboo fossil turned out to be a conifer.

[Findings]

Rumors seem more truthful when sourced to a friend of a friend.

[Findings]

Adolescent Dutch boys who instrumentalize sex are highly likely to nonconsensually forward sexts they receive from strangers.

[Findings]

A review of 250,000 pieces of erotica published between 2000 and 2016 found no significant increase in “transgressive” content, Saudi Arabians do not linger on porn websites, and neuroscientists reported that forceful, prosaic self-squeezing of the penile shaft more closely evokes the neurological signature of erotic touch than does gentle, prosaic self-squeezing of the glans.

[Findings]

Heterosexual women and men rated the erogeneity and appropriateness of having digital avatars of themselves touched by virtual men or women.

[Findings]

Straight women who can see and those who are blind care equally about dating good-looking men, though blind women place more importance on their partners having pleasant voices and odors.

[Findings]

Taiwanese men increase their odds of getting married in a given year by 3.92 percent for every 10 percent increase in the value of their real estate.

[Findings]

Red-haired or freckled women in high-UV latitudes have lower mortality risks, light-skinned sex workers in Mexico command higher rates, Brazilian men who self-identify as black are slightly happier with their penis size than those who self-identify as white, and a survey of forty countries found Colombian women to be more than five times as happy with their breast size as Japanese women.

[Findings]

Japanese macaques were recolonizing the abandoned zone around Fukushima.

[Findings]

Mantled howler monkeys howl for longer in the resource-rich interiors of forests than in areas impacted by human activity.

[Findings]

Baboons’ clear articulation of proto-vowels led scientists to conclude that speech could have begun developing twenty million years earlier than was previously thought.

[Findings]

Female Chinese university students who shift their vocal pitch up are perceived as more attractive, whereas male counterparts who shift their pitch down become less attractive.

[Findings]

Women, but not men, experience better orgasms with worse socioeconomic circumstances.

[Findings]

Sexually exploitable men are less attractive to straight women than sexually exploitable women are to straight men.

[Findings]

A study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes reported the stress-relieving effects of “enjoyed flirtation” in the workplace.

[Findings]

Patients from the McLean Hospital Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute who each had one of their real hands and a rubber hand stroked synchronously by Harvard doctors who then dabbed fake feces on the rubber hand before returning to stroking both hands displayed nearly twice as much facial disgust as patients whose real and rubber hands were stroked asynchronously.

[Findings]

Liberals are likelier than conservatives to experience caring emotions in their chests, whereas conservatives are likelier to experience them in their faces.

[Findings]

Italic fonts were rated more liberal than boldface ones, and a feeling of vulnerability to disease was found to predict political conservatism.

[Findings]

Military interrogators at the end of Word War II were found to have improperly disregarded Nazis’ claims of having invented a form of DDT much safer for mammals.

[Findings]

European zoologists urged the preservation of tree cavities to accommodate honeybees, and a reward remained on offer for information leading to the poisoner of seven million Florida bees.

[Findings]

Illuminating bat caves disturbs bats.

[Findings]

The sounds of underwater pile-driving elicit signs of both alarm and habituation in longfin squid, and the medium-term stress level of fish can be determined by plucking their scales and testing for cortisol.

[Findings]

In Australia, hypersaline effluent at the Sydney Desalination Plant was found to have increased the local population of one-spot puller.

[Findings]

Fish farmers freed a bald eagle from an octopus.

[Findings]

Established brands are resilient against fake news, which was also found to implant false memories.

[Findings]

In the past two hundred years, American men have cooled by a temperature of 1º F.

[Findings]

The last remaining Pacific glaciers between the Himalayas and the Andes were expected to melt in the coming decade.

[Findings]

Megadroughts encouraged farmers to clear and cultivate Andean cloud forests.

[Findings]

Runologists determined that the nine riddles of the Rök stone bespeak Vikings’ fear of another Fimbulwinter, and a star-shaped magnetic anomaly resulting from an ancient lightning strike was discovered at the Calanais Standing Stones’ Airigh na Beinne Bige.

[Findings]

In a gold-lined tomb next to that of the Griffin Warrior, archaeologists found a gold pendant of the Egyptian goddess Hathor.

[Findings]

The earliest known use of lead-tin-yellow pigment predating 1300 ad was found in sixth-century bc limestone reliefs, which also contain Egyptian blue, from the Palace of Apries.

[Findings]

Eighty-five-hundred-year-old human tooth pendants were found at Catalhöyük.

[Findings]

The collapse of Norse colonies in Greenland was blamed on walrus depletion that in turn arose from falling wholesale prices for walrus ivory.

[Findings]

Jimi Hendrix was cleared of responsibility for the proliferation of London’s non-native parakeet population, whereas humans were found solely responsible for the extinction of the United States’ only native parrot.

[Findings]

Cocaine is ubiquitous, and ketamine widespread, among Suffolk river shrimp.

[Findings]

Astronomers reported a Marsquake and a Great Dark Spot moving westward across Neptune.

[Findings]

Changes in human and animal urine at As?kl? Höyük track the transition from hunting to herding eleven millennia ago.

[Findings]

The Yukon is the warmest it has been in fourteen millennia.

[Findings]

The Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries intercepted a trained beluga whale suspected of working for the Russian military. After the whale retrieved an iPhone that fell from a woman’s pocket into the sea, officials proposed sending it to a sanctuary in Iceland.

[Findings]

An Australian study of 400 years of coral records found that El Niños have been getting stronger, a study of 3,000 years of shell deposits at the bottom of Lake Nakaumi revealed a history of monsoon failures, and archaeologists identified the species of shellfish foraged by ancient children on St. Thomas.

[Findings]

A new NASA satellite, made with leftover parts from an old NASA satellite, will map Earth’s carbon sinks.

[Findings]

Carbon remediation will require the restoration of natural forests rather than the expansion of tree plantations.

[Findings]

Building materials are being manufactured from Londoners’ feces.

[Findings]

Oxford researchers attempted to determine how long it will take for the dead to outnumber the living on Facebook.

[Findings]

Among a million species now threatened with extinction, marine species are disappearing at twice the rate of terrestrial species, and British hedgehogs are in decline, possibly owing to a loss of hedges.

[Findings]

High levels of bomb carbon from nuclear testing were found in the tissues of amphipods living in the hadal zone.

[Findings]

Crusader DNA has mostly vanished from Lebanon.

[Findings]

Quebecois data provides evidence of a broader trend in human evolution toward lower fertility in the two centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution.

[Findings]

A physically stressed juvenile macaque who died 4,500 years ago was unearthed in an Iranian grave of a type usually used for human infants; earrings adorn guinea pigs sacrificed during the construction of Incan buildings; and gold, turquoise, and a baby llama found in Lake Titicaca were interpreted to be ritual emblems expressing the Tiwanaku Empire’s desire to consolidate influence in the late tenth century.

[Findings]

The Brazilian state of Acre was experimenting with the distribution of carbon-offset assets through labor rights rather than land rights.

[Findings]

The first Scot in space returned to the Highlands.

[Findings]

An international team of scientists proposed that China could switch to carbon-negative electricity production through the use of coal; the United Kingdom, where 70 percent of asthma inhalers produce high levels of CO2 emissions, could achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of its GDP; and India could make significant progress toward its air-quality targets if households stopped burning dung.

[Findings]

Defaunation from hunting significantly reduces the carbon-storage capacity of forests, while de­forestation and poor land management are depleting the carbon-storage capacity of soil.

[Findings]

Bacteria may produce additional CO2 as a result of ocean warming, which may itself contribute to blindness among octopuses, and a warming atmosphere may cause widespread damage to both insect and mammal sperm.

[Findings]

The melt rate of old permafrost can be measured by radiocarbon dating the waters of Arctic rivers, and permafrost thaw was found to be not only releasing CO2 and methane but also damaging infrastructure and altering landscapes.

[Findings]

Despair was rising among the youngest cohort of Generation X, and baby boomers were being blinded by shingles. 

[Findings]

Declassified U-2 spy imagery revealeda the Middle East’s ancient irrigation canals and hunting traps, as well as the villages of Marsh Arabs destroyed by the proliferation of hydroelectric dams.

[Findings]

The discovery of new fossils, of comma shrimp species and of the long-extinct Callichimaera perplexa, forced evolutionary biologists to redefine the crab.

[Findings]

A billion years ago and a billion light-years away in the galaxy ­PG211+143, matter was observed falling into a black hole at 30 percent the speed of light.

[Findings]

Astrophysicists pointed out that many advanced alien civilizations may have been killed off by climate change.

[Findings]

Warming seas were making coral reefs larger but more porous, and were making farmerfish more aggressive in defending their reefs from corallivores.

[Findings]

Neurobiologists were researching why octopus mothers whose optic glands are removed do not follow the regular behavioral pattern of brooding, wasting away, and self-harming to accelerate death, but rather abandon their eggs and resume eating.

[Findings]

Octopuses submerged in an ­MDMA bath for ten minutes will, when subsequently given the chance to enter a tank with a caged octopus, spend more time with the other octopus and will put their tentacles and mouth on the cage.

[Findings]

Mountain goats were airlifted out of Olympic National Park after attacking and harassing human visitors in an attempt to access the salt in their sweat and urine.

[Findings]

An interdisciplinary team described a history of European animal trials by secular and ecclesiastical courts, including a sixteenth-century case against French rats, whose public defender, upon the rats’ failure to appear, remonstrated with the court: “What can be more unjust than these general proscriptions, which overwhelm whole families in one common ruin, which visit the crime of parents on the children, which destroy indiscriminately those whom tender years or infirmity render equally incapable of offending?”

[Findings]

All-male legislative bodies are generally considered a less legitimate form of government.

[Findings]

In Sweden, an eight-year-old girl named Saga pulled a pre-Viking sword from a lake.

[Findings]

High-status consumers consume low-status goods ironically to signal their difference from middle-status consumers.

[Findings]

People who are made to feel poorer desire more meat.

[Findings]

Schadenfreude is more intense in real life than in lab simulations.

[Findings]

Psychopaths and Machiavellians are more likely to think that artificial intelligence poses a malevolent threat.

[Findings]

Norwegians, despite having a more sexually egalitarian culture and being less inclined to accept misogynistic rape myths than Americans, are more pessimistic about the benefits of ­#MeToo.

[Findings]

A study of twelve diverse populations from the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and North America found that men with greater upper-body strength are less likely to support economic egalitarianism.

[Findings]

Marriage in the United States is becoming less common and more stable, and the divorce rate is expected to further decline.

[Findings]

A study of 980 million tweets determined the Deep South to be the birthplace of the word “baeless.”

[Findings]

Sexually Transmitted Diseases published the article “Anal Sex Is More Common Than Having a Twitter Account in the United States.”

[Findings]

Hate-speech filters on social media platforms can easily be fooled by removing spaces between words or by adding the word “love.”

[Findings]

Prior exposure makes fake news appear more accurate.

[Findings]

A new analysis described how P. T. Barnum launched his career by arranging for public dissection of an old female slave who died while under contract to him, and then planting false newspaper stories about the event.

[Findings]

Political scientists concluded that the sharing of hostile political rumors is not motivated by partisanship and is typically practiced by status-hungry, socially marginalized groups who rank high in a “Need for Chaos” metric and who wish to “burn down the entire established democratic cosmos.”

[Findings]

Donald Trump claimed that the sound of wind-harvesting turbines causes cancer.

Microfiche Illustration by John W. Tomac

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Past Issues

April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
April 2020