May 2020 Issue | Harper's Magazine

By Thomas Frank,

[Letter from Hong Kong]

Dream State

The radical imagination of the Hong Kong protest movement

By Yi-Ling Liu,

[Letter from Washington]

The Malaysian Job

How Wall Street enabled a global financial scandal

By Andrew Cockburn,

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who operate doors and sinks in public restrooms with paper towels to avoid germs : 65

[Harper’s Index]

Number of times that the price of an average U.S. domestic flight changes in a week : 59

[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage by which the price fluctuates with each change : 25

[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of motor vehicles that crashed into non-residential buildings in the United States last year : 20,000

[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of people inside those buildings who were killed : 500

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of time that ride-hailing vehicles on Manhattan streets lack passengers : 40

[Harper’s Index]

That taxis on Manhattan streets do : 35

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of Americans who spend at least three hours commuting each day : 4,300,000

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American commuters who “typically” use their commuting time to work : 14

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who believe that enjoying one’s career is essential to a fulfilling life for a man : 57

[Harper’s Index]

For a woman : 46

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Democrats who believe that their personal finances will improve over the next year : 60

[Harper’s Index]

Of Republicans who do : 83

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say they are better off now than when President Trump took office : 61

[Harper’s Index]

Who said they were better off during President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign than they were when he took office : 45

[Harper’s Index]

Number of current members of the Trump Administration who have worked as Fox News contributors : 7

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Trump’s 2019 tweets that were live responses to Fox News or Fox Business programs : 1/10

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American has received a government document in the mail that he or she didn’t understand : 1 in 4

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans aged 65 and over who say it’s unlikely that they will fill out a census form : 6

[Harper’s Index]

Of Americans aged 18 to 34 who say so : 13

[Harper’s Index]

Rank of African Americans among demographic groups most likely to fear that census information will be used against them : 2

[Harper’s Index]

Rank of Asian Americans : 1

[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the number of physical records in the National Archives has increased since 1991 : 3

[Harper’s Index]

By which the number of electronic records has increased since then : 1,654

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of years the National Archives will spend reviewing materials for George W. Bush’s presidential library : 250

[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which Americans go to the library more often than they go to the movies : 2

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease from 2008 to 2017 in the number of full-time U.S. public school librarian positions : 26

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase between 2014 and 2018 in health care costs for Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance : 18

[Harper’s Index]

In the average retail price of prescription medicine : 21

[Harper’s Index]

Average U.S. retail price for a vial of prescription insulin : $400

[Harper’s Index]

Average Craigslist price for one : $30

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount that Utah spent last year sending public employees to Mexico to buy cheaper medicine : $250,000

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of dead-end streets in the world : 17,680,000

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of those dead ends that are in the United States : 1/4

Readings

[Essay]

To Infinity and Beyond

By Maël Renouard, Translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty

[Charges]

Killing Time

By Jean Giono, Translated by Jody Gladding

[Ballots]

“Twilight Dusk” and “Delicate Nests”

“Twilight Dusk” and “Delicate Nests,” photographs by KangHee Kim, whose work was on view in March at Benrubi Gallery, in New York City.

Courtesy the artist and Benrubi Gallery, New York City

The Frick Museum as “Nature”

The Frick Museum as “Nature,” a painting by Gretchen Scherer, whose work is on view this month at Monya Rowe Gallery, in New York City.

“View of Catskill Mountains from Cole’s House, Catskill, August 12, 2019”

“View of Catskill Mountains from Cole’s House, Catskill, August 12, 2019,” a camera-obscura photograph by Shi Guorui, whose work is on view this month at the Museum of Photographic Arts, in San Diego.

Sarah and Lea

Sarah and Lea, a painting by Doron Langberg, whose work was on view in October at Yossi Milo Gallery, in New York City.

[Letters]

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.

Microfiche Illustration by Dan Bejar

May 2020

The Pessimistic Style in American Politics

And its eternal war on reform

Dream State

The radical imagination of the Hong Kong protest movement

The Malaysian Job

How Wall Street enabled a global financial scandal

Percentage of Americans who operate doors and sinks in public restrooms with paper towels to avoid germs : 65

Who flush with their feet : 44

Who hover over the toilet seat : 29

Portion of global ocean currents that have sped up since 1990 : 3/4

Average percentage by which those currents have accelerated : 10

Number of hurricane names that have been officially retired : 89

Number of countries that are carbon-negative : 2

Number of times that the price of an average U.S. domestic flight changes in a week : 59

Average percentage by which the price fluctuates with each change : 25

Minimum number of motor vehicles that crashed into non-residential buildings in the United States last year : 20,000

Minimum number of people inside those buildings who were killed : 500

Percentage of time that ride-hailing vehicles on Manhattan streets lack passengers : 40

That taxis on Manhattan streets do : 35

Estimated number of Americans who spend at least three hours commuting each day : 4,300,000

Percentage of American commuters who “typically” use their commuting time to work : 14

Percentage of Americans who believe that enjoying one’s career is essential to a fulfilling life for a man : 57

For a woman : 46

Percentage of Democrats who believe that their personal finances will improve over the next year : 60

Of Republicans who do : 83

Percentage of Americans who say they are better off now than when President Trump took office : 61

Who said they were better off during President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign than they were when he took office : 45

Number of current members of the Trump Administration who have worked as Fox News contributors : 7

Portion of Trump’s 2019 tweets that were live responses to Fox News or Fox Business programs : 1/10

Chance that an American has received a government document in the mail that he or she didn’t understand : 1 in 4

Percentage of Americans aged 65 and over who say it’s unlikely that they will fill out a census form : 6

Of Americans aged 18 to 34 who say so : 13

Rank of African Americans among demographic groups most likely to fear that census information will be used against them : 2

Rank of Asian Americans : 1

Factor by which the number of physical records in the National Archives has increased since 1991 : 3

By which the number of electronic records has increased since then : 1,654

Estimated number of years the National Archives will spend reviewing materials for George W. Bush’s presidential library : 250

Factor by which Americans go to the library more often than they go to the movies : 2

Percentage decrease from 2008 to 2017 in the number of full-time U.S. public school librarian positions : 26

Percentage increase between 2014 and 2018 in health care costs for Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance : 18

In the average retail price of prescription medicine : 21

Average U.S. retail price for a vial of prescription insulin : $400

Average Craigslist price for one : $30

Estimated amount that Utah spent last year sending public employees to Mexico to buy cheaper medicine : $250,000

Estimated number of dead-end streets in the world : 17,680,000

Portion of those dead ends that are in the United States : 1/4

Readings

To Infinity and Beyond

Permanent Record

Killing Time

Politics as Usual

White Light/White Heat

Cat Burglar

Lana Del Rey

Bedside Planner

Freegrets III

“Twilight Dusk” and “Delicate Nests”

The Frick Museum as “Nature”

“View of Catskill Mountains from Cole’s House, Catskill, August 12, 2019”

Sarah and Lea

Letters

The Striking Gesture

Harper’s Index

The Pessimistic Style in American Politics

And its eternal war on reform

Fifty-One Percent

Dream State

The radical imagination of the Hong Kong protest movement

Common Enemy

The emerging resistance to Chinese Empire

Carrying On

My first years in America

The Malaysian Job

How Wall Street enabled a global financial scandal

I Incriminate Myself So No One Else Can

New Books

Difficulties Everywhere

Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live?

Constant Delighted Astonishment

Recent toilet-paper hoarding was more prevalent among Americans than Europeans and more prevalent among the old than the young.

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.

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-metal chelator.

The mating calls of male Panama cross-banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

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.

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.

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.

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