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]

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.

[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.

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

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

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

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

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