March 2020 Issue | Harper's Magazine

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March 2020

[Essay]

The Old Normal

Why we can’t beat our addiction to war

By ,
[Letter from Saluda]

Waiting for the End of the World

Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction

By ,
[Story]

The Fifth Step

By ,
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of sexually active Americans who say that their “skills in the bedroom” have improved over the past year : 57

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that 2019 was their “best year of sex” : 44

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of years by which the average age of a North or South American nation’s leader has increased since 1950 : 10.5

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

By which the average age of a European nation’s leader has decreased since then : 2.5

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of European nations whose leader is 45 years old or younger : 15

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. Protestants who have “a lot” of confidence in their clergy’s ability to provide useful parenting advice : 49

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the median length of U.S. black Protestant sermons exceeds that of U.S. Catholic homilies : 286

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which evangelical Christian sermons are likelier than those of other Christian traditions to include the phrase “eternal hell” : 3

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of U.S. Catholics who do : 23

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage of their fortunes that the twenty richest Americans gave to charity in 2018 : 0.8

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Median amount owed by U.S. renters evicted between 2014 and 2016 for failing to pay rent : $1,253

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of those evicted who owed less than $500 : 12

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. manufacturing jobs that required a bachelor’s degree in 1983 : 14

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That required one in 2018 : 31

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Projected percentage growth over the next year in the office-chair market : 10

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

In the gaming-chair market : 30

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American aged 19 to 34 is prediabetic : 1 in 4

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage by which an obese person contributes more carbon emissions than someone in the “normal-weight” range : 20

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of SUVs among contributors to the increase in carbon emissions over the past decade : 2

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of the power industry : 1

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of total retail sales made in 2018 that were returned : 10.6

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount, in tons, of annual carbon emissions that can be attributed to retail returns : 16,500,000

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American travelers who say they cut back on flying in 2019 for environmental reasons : 38

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of the world’s cities with populations over 500,000 that experience periodic water shortages : 47

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of people injured in a volcanic eruption in New Zealand in December : 13

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount of human skin, in square footage, subsequently ordered by New Zealand from the United States : 516

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the portion of Americans dying at home has increased since 1972 : 2

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. school districts in which the portion of Latino teachers equals or exceeds that of Latino students : 0.1

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Year in which the NFL first required teams to interview candidates of color for every available head coaching job : 2003

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of head coaches of color employed by the NFL at the time : 3

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number who are today : 4

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which men are more likely than women to frame research findings in top scientific journals with positive adjectives : 21

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

By which the use of a positive adjective in a paper title or abstract increases subsequent citations in those journals : 13

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who think that the Chinese government is sometimes or very often a source of disinformation : 36

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Who think that CNN is : 36

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of fact-checking organizations that were active in 2014 : 103

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That are active today : 225

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of Donald Trump among the most admired men in America : 1

March 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of Barack Obama : 1

March 2020

Readings

[Essay]

Ring of Fire

By ,
[Patient History]

Mammary Lapse

[Recollection]

Koftaesque

By , Translated by ,
[Account]

At the Mind’s Limits

By ,
[Lyrics]

Mr. Me Too

[Vision]

A Walk to Remember

By ,
[Vocab]

Troys and Girls

By ,
[Profiles]

Nighthawks at the Dunkin’

By ,
[Poem]

Electric

By ,
[Trash]

Moby Sick

The Occult Enthusiast

The Occult Enthusiast, a painting by Hernan Bas, whose work was on view in January at Lehmann Maupin, in New York City.
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong/New York City/Seoul. Photo: Silvia Ros

Untitled

Untitled, pencil and bleach on paper mounted on canvas from the series Les dessouvenus, by Tatiana Trouvé, whose work was on view in January at Gagosian, in Beverly Hills, California.
© The artist. Courtesy Gagosian. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn

“A Little Piece of My Heart”

“A Little Piece of My Heart,” a photograph by Giovanni Ozzola, whose work is on view this month at Galleria Continua, in Boissy-le-Châtel, France.
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, Beijing/Boissy-Le-Châtel, France/Havana/San Gimignano, Italy

Heaven Is a Place

Heaven Is a Place, a painting by Arghavan Khosravi, whose work was on view last month at Stems Gallery, in Brussels.
© The artist. Courtesy Lyles & King, New York City
[Letters]

Letters

[Easy Chair]

Losing My Religion

By ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index

[Essay]

The Old Normal

Why we can’t beat our addiction to war

By ,
[From the Archive]

The Most Hated Nation

By ,
[Annotation]

Out of Africa

The legacy of colonialism threatens the future of genetic research

By ,
[Letter from Saluda]

Waiting for the End of the World

Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction

By ,
[Letter from Ecatepec]

In Harm’s Way

A plague of unsolved femicides haunts Mexico

By ,
[Story]

The Fifth Step

By ,
[Reviews]

New Books

By ,
[Reviews]

Fun with Problems

The life of Robert Stone

By ,
[Reviews]

A View to a Krill

The first history of the most remote ocean

By ,
[Puzzle]

Mail Call

By ,
[Findings]

Findings

By ,
[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.

[Findings]

In Maine, a loon stabbed a bald eagle through the heart.

[Findings]

Six new coronaviruses were discovered in bats.

[Findings]

Falling levels of tourist trash during pandemic lockdowns was found to have caused rat infighting, and macaques were reported to have attacked a lab assistant in Delhi and stolen vials of COVID-­19-­infected blood, which at least one monkey then tried to eat.

[Findings]

Vampire bats who are strangers will groom one another before sharing blood via regurgitation.

[Findings]

Skin swabs are three times as accurate as fecal samples at predicting a person’s age.

[Findings]

Young burglars are driven first by thrills, then by skills.

[Findings]

Half of the flights taken by British men aged twenty to forty-five are for stag parties.

[Findings]

Drivers of fancy cars yield to pedestrians less often than drivers of humble cars, and still less if the pedestrians are non-white men.

[Findings]

Los Angeles scientists found that the city’s road network could be more efficiently designed by P. polycephalum, a slime mold.

[Findings]

Stinging water was blamed on jellyfish mucus.

[Findings]

Engineers reported success in deploying “ultra-­gentle” robotic “linguine fingers” to grab deep-sea jellyfish.

[Findings]

Children, unlike adults, are resilient against the Pinocchio Illusion when their fingers are pulled upward in sync with a tone ascending from 700 to 1200 Hz.

[Findings]

Fingertip injuries can indicate child abuse.

[Findings]

Damage to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes that spares the anterior hypothalamus was linked to the emergence of acquired pedophilia.

[Findings]

Five primate electrophysiologists agreed that, upon 50 Hz stimulation of the central lateral thalamus, anesthetized Wisconsin monkeys become wakeful.

[Findings]

The high contrast provided by humans’ white scleras enhances our awareness of one another’s gazes.

[Findings]

It remained unknown whether Shanidar Z received a Neanderthal flower burial.

[Findings]

An extinction-­risk model was found to work well for bumblebees.

[Findings]

An interdisciplinary team suggested that climate-­driven societal collapse may stabilize once humans start accepting years with many disasters as the new normal.

[Findings]

The formation of pre–Silk Road Eurasian empires was driven partly by the spread of northern Chinese broomcorn millet; nano­diamonds and meltglass at Abu Hureyra point to a cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas; the collapse of Harappan society coincided with the loss of the Ghaggar River’s perenniality and the onset of the Meghalayan Stage; the breakdown of Easter Island society and the cessation of megalithic statue-building postdated European contact; and epigraphic evidence suggested a descent into total war during the Terminal Classic era of Mayan civilization.

[Findings]

A 46,000-year-old bird recovered from the Siberian permafrost was determined to be a female horned lark.

[Findings]

The tail of an unidentified herbivorous dinosaur in Alberta was found to contain a type of histiocytic tumor that primarily affects young children.

[Findings]

The exoplanet NGTS-10b was found to have a year lasting eighteen Earth hours and to be at risk of falling into its star.

[Findings]

Astronomers recorded, in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, the largest known post–Big Bang explosion, which lasted several hundred million years and created a void of fifteen galactic widths in the plasma around the cluster’s central black hole. “People were skeptical because of the size of the outburst,” said one of the scientists. “We don’t know why it’s so big.”

[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.

Cover: Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006 (detail) © Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos Microfiche

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