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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 ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Number of different forms of torture the Syrian government is suspected of having used during the country’s civil war : 72

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which women are more likely than men to develop P.T.S.D. over the course of their lives : 2.5

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Average penalty, in lost vacation days, for N.Y.P.D. officers the department finds to have committed domestic violence : 30

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

For officers the department finds to have been discourteous to a supervisor : 60

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of 2018 among the deadliest years since 1990 for cyclists in the United States : 1

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

For pedestrians : 1

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Uber riders who never tip : 60

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Who always tip : 1

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which male riders give higher tips to female drivers than to male drivers : 12

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Value of the personal possessions that the average American lost while drinking alcohol last year : $192

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

That the average North Dakotan lost : $380

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which new plastic was more expensive than recycled plastic in 2018 : 20

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

By which recycled plastic is now more expensive : 19

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Number of grams of plastic that the average person ingests per week : 5

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. gamers who say they have skipped a meal to continue playing video games : 38

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Who say they have skipped a shower : 25

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of minutes that teens in households making $100,000 or more per year spend on screens for leisure each day : 409

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

That teens in households making $35,000 or less per year do : 512

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a millennial has voluntarily left a job for mental-health reasons : 1 in 3

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

That a Gen Z-er has : 1 in 2

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. schools that have at least one police officer stationed inside a school building : 40

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which U.S. public school districts’ spending on email-monitoring services has increased since 2013 : 2

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of U.S. colleges and universities that track prospective students’ web activity : 33

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of states that use artificial intelligence to grade student essays : 21

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of people who could go unaccounted for in the 2020 census because of an “increased climate of fear” : 4,000,000

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of polling places that states in the South have closed since 2012 : 1,327

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of those that were in Texas : 1/2

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Republicans who regard the Democratic party as “too extreme” : 76

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Of Democrats who regard the Republican party as such : 76

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Average effective tax rate, as a percentage of income, paid by the richest 400 households in the United States in 2018 : 23

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

By the poorest half of American households : 24

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of all public tweets from U.S. adults that come from people 50 and older : 29

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of public political tweets that do : 73

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of white Americans who say they follow local news very closely : 28

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Of black Americans : 46

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of new digital New York Times subscriptions in 2018 that were for its cooking or crossword app : 1/3

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which owning a dog lowers one’s risk of death : 24

January 2020 • Source: Array
[Harper’s Index]

Number of states expected to lose the majority of their summer state-bird populations by 2050 : 7

January 2020 • Source: Array

Readings

[Essay]

Minor Threats
by ,Translated 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, 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, 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, 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),” 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
[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]

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.

Illustration by John W. Tomac Microfiche

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