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October 2020

[Fiction]

Time to Destination

From the novel The Silence

by ,
[Letter from Minneapolis]

The Sanctuary

Life in a cop-free zone

by ,
[Letters]

On Justice and Open Debate

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of registered U.S. voters who said in 2016 they would consider moving to Canada if Donald Trump were elected : 28

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of Americans who have done so since then : 33,965

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change in the win rate of professional soccer teams playing at home when the stadium is empty : -23

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of recording artists who have sent cease-and-desist letters to the Trump campaign for using their music at rallies : 9

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

In the penalty rate : +21

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which white players are more likely than black players to be praised for their hard work on European soccer broadcasts : 1.5

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

By which black players are more likely to be praised for their strength : 6.6

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of Americans who have participated in Black Lives Matter protests this year : 15,000,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the annual number of people killed by U.S. police officers has fallen in rural areas since 2013 : 29

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

By which it has increased in urban areas : 33

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of trademark applications for Black Lives Matter that were filed following George Floyd’s death : 26

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That had been filed over the previous five years : 18

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of white Americans who say the benefits of experimental medical treatments outweigh the risks : 2/3

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of black Americans who say the risks outweigh the benefits : 2/3

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Date on which the FDA approved the first prescription video game, for the treatment of ADHD : 6/15/2020

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the portion of Americans who believe that polygamy is morally acceptable has increased since 2005 : 4

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans aged 20 to 31 who violated stay-at-home orders in April to have sex : 1/4

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of countries whose governments have released contact-tracing apps : 47

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount that Qataris are fined for failing to download their government’s app : $55,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Qataris who have downloaded it : 92

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of Colombians killed by drug cartels or paramilitary groups for failing to observe social distancing : 8

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount Uzbekistan is offering to compensate foreigners who contract COVID-19 while visiting the country : $3,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount the United States has received in coronavirus-related humanitarian aid from Lithuania : $113,690

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the U.S. Mint has increased coin production since June in response to shortages : 65

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Number of additional coins it is producing each month : 650,000,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a packaged food, beverage, or household good is out of stock in a U.S. supermarket : 1 in 10

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Dollar General’s stock price has increased since the start of the pandemic : 23

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a U.S. household missed a rent or mortgage payment in July : 1 in 3

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage decrease in the money that migrant workers from low- and middle-income countries will send home this year : 20

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of fossil-fuel companies that have received COVID-19 relief aid from the U.S. government : 7,283

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum value of stimulus checks sent to deceased Americans this spring : $1,600,000,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Amount of those payments that the federal government has yet to recover : $600,000,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American households that have spent their stimulus checks : 70

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

That have used the money to pay off debt : 16

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. adults who have delayed or are considering delaying retirement because of the pandemic : 2/5

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Of U.S. women aged 18 to 49 who plan to postpone or forgo pregnancy : 1/3

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of British smokers who have quit since the pandemic began : 1,000,000

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which someone with Neanderthal genes is more likely to suffer severe respiratory illness from COVID-19 : 70

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which unprovoked shark attacks on humans outnumbered provoked attacks last year : 56

October 2020
[Harper’s Index]

Maximum number of hours by which the irrational behavior of animals has been observed to predict a major earthquake : 20

October 2020

Readings

[Essay]

No Time But the Present
by ,
[Process]

Save the Whales
by ,
[Classification]

The Trouble with Angels
by ,
[Discussion]

Motherboard Issues
by ,
[Scene]

Not Throwing Away My Yacht
by ,
[Arsenals]

Brute Force
[Investment]

Mortgage-backed Insecurities
by ,
[Poem]

Hawthorne
by ,
[Fiction]

Le Nozze
by ,
[Liner Notes]

B-Sighs
by ,
A photograph of thermal blankets insulating an ice grotto tourist attraction in the Rhône Glacier, in Switzerland, by Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann. Their work is on view this month at BredaPhoto, in Breda, the Netherlands.
© The artists/Project Pressure
Roma, Testaccio, a painting by Los Bravú (the artists Dea Gómez and Diego Omil), whose work was on view in March at Volta New York.
© The artists. Courtesy Galería 6mas1, Madrid, and Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
“Valinda, Los Angeles 7/18/1981,” a photograph by Simone Kappeler, from her monograph Simone Kappeler–America 1981, which was published in August by Scheidegger and Spiess.
© The artist. Courtesy Scheidegger and Spiess
Area code, a painting by Ena Swansea, whose work was on view in January at Robilant + Voena Gallery, in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
© The artist. Courtesy Ben Brown Fine Arts, London
[Editor’s Desk]

The Letter and Its Discontents
by ,
[Letters]

On Justice and Open Debate
by ,
[Easy Chair]

A Game of Chance
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Letter from Minneapolis]

The Sanctuary

Life in a cop-free zone

by ,
[From the Archive]

Life During Wartime
by ,
[Memoir]

On Defense

Twenty-five years of fighting mass incarceration in court

by ,
[Annotation]

If I’m to Go

How to fight a deportation

by ,
[Letter from Saipan]

Perfect Storm

When is it time to abandon a place to climate change?

by ,
[Poetry]

I Imitate You
by ,
[Report]

America’s Game

The reprise and demise of the XFL

by ,
[Miscellany]

Reason Not the Need

Self-storage and the dream of infinite space

by ,
[Fiction]

Time to Destination

From the novel The Silence

by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

The Well-Tempered Synthesizer

Wendy Carlos’s music of the spheres

by ,
[Reviews]

Le Mot Juste

The soothing clarity of Shirley Hazzard

by ,
[Puzzle]

Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)
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.

Design by Tyler Comrie Microfiche

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