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April 2020

[Report]

Good Guys with Guns

Why the left should arm itself

by ,
[Essay]

Bright Stars

The unfulfilled promise of American citizenship

by ,
[Photo Essay]

Arrested Development

Among the child police of Chhattisgarh

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who said in 1995 that immigration should be reduced : 65

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Who say so today : 35

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of pregnant women jailed in the United States for immigration violations in 2018 : 2,098

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of new U.S. military recruits who have a parent who served : 1/4

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Who have a relative who served : 3/4

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount that the United States has spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001 : $137,000,000,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount, adjusted for inflation, that it spent on reconstruction in Europe after World War II : $135,000,000,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. Protestant churches with security protocols that involve armed church members : 45

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of pets owned by the average American who attends religious services once a week or more : 1.35

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

By the average American who never attends religious services : 1.95

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the number of cosmetic surgeries performed on U.S. men has increased in the past two decades : 35

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of American men who have undergone such surgeries : 2

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of male tech workers in Silicon Valley who have : 7

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of 401(k) plans that have at least one fund committed to environmental, social, or governmental responsibility : 2.9

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage by which a U.S. hedge fund run by a woman or person of color outperforms one run by a white man : 72

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. adults in households earning less than $35,000 who express dissatisfaction with their lives : 18

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of U.S. adults in households earning at least $500,000 who do

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of people worldwide who believe capitalism “does more harm than good in the world” : 56

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of lobbyists that Amazon employed in 2010 : 8

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That it employs today : 104

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount that Amazon has spent on lobbying since 2010 : $80,000,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding generated for the British economy : $1,300,000,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2011 in funding for the official duties and property of Queen Elizabeth II : 67

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount the U.K. spends annually on “legal costs to maintain royal secrecy” : $250,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of employees in the Northern Ireland Civil Service : 23,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of U.K. civil servants working on Brexit : 27,500

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 1992 in the share of Taiwan residents who identify as Taiwanese : +223

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

In the share who identify as Chinese : -86

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated minimum amount China spends each year on international propaganda and influence operations : $10,000,000,000

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which spending on the distribution of China Daily in the United States has increased over the past decade : 7

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Nigerians who get their news from Chinese state television : 8

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Who get their news from Nigeria’s national broadcasting agency : 7

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage by which the number of U.S. podcast listeners increased between 2015 and 2019 : 88

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

By which podcast advertising revenue increased : 542

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of items reported missing last year from the New York City subway system that were headphones : 1/4

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. entry-level employees who sometimes or always feel that “no one really knows them well” : 65

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of U.S. senior executives who feel so : 70

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans aged 18 to 24 who believe in soul mates : 54

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of Americans over 55 who do : 55

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of the United States among countries with the highest rates of immigrant children in detention : 1

April 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount per hour that the company People Walker charges for an “on-demand walking partner” : $14

April 2020

Readings

Download PDF
[Essay]

Color Theory
by ,
[Inquiries]

Sorry to Bother You
[History]

Becoming Human
by ,Translated by ,
[Consideration]

On Forgetting
by ,
[Memoir]

Lost and Found
by ,
[Poem]

After I Turn Sixty-Nine
by ,
[Word Association]

Terms of Art
by ,Translated by ,
[Interview]

Daydream Believer
by ,Translated by ,
[Definitions]

Lost Boys
[Fiction]

Ride or Die
by ,
Kosar, a heat-transfer print on khaddar with gota patti and zardozi embroidery, by Spandita Malik, whose work was on view in September at the Parsons School of Design, in New York City.
The artist. Courtesy Kunstwerk Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen, Germany, and Sarah Hasted
“Illinois,” a photographic collage by Kenneth Josephson, whose work was on view last month at Gitterman Gallery, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York City
Photographs from the series The Mouth of Krishna by Ángel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera, whose work is on view this month at Paris Photo New York, in New York City.
© The artists. Courtesy Editorial RM and Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York City
“Facing North, Looking West,” a photograph by Guanyu Xu, whose work is on view this month at Yancey Richardson Gallery, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York City
“Ivins, Utah, #5,” a photograph by Steven B. Smith from Your Mountain Is Waiting, a monograph published last year by Radius Books.
© The artist. Courtesy Radius Books
Night Gazers, a painting by Keita Morimoto, whose work was on view in February at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, in Toronto.
© The artist. Courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

The Wanderer’s Port
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Report]

Good Guys with Guns

Why the left should arm itself

by ,
[From the Archive]

Who Has the Guns?
by ,
[Essay]

Bright Stars

The unfulfilled promise of American citizenship

by ,
[Photo Essay]

Arrested Development

Among the child police of Chhattisgarh

by ,
[Revision]

The Money Question

Is Trump right about the Fed?

by ,
[Letter from Lalibela]

Dreams of Stone

Searching for paradise in Ethiopia’s rock churches

by ,
[Story]

Padua, 1966
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

To Rebel Is Justified

On the long shadow of Maoism

by ,
[Reviews]

Through Clenched Teeth

The cold, frenzied genius of Kleist

by ,
[Puzzle]

Foursomes
by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[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.

[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.

A member of the Socialist Rifle Association. Photograph by Balazs Gardi for Harper’s Magazine. © The artist Microfiche

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