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January 2021

[Folio]

These Precious Days

Tell me how the story ends

by ,
[Letter from Kyiv]

The Armies of the Right

Inside Ukraine’s extremist militias

by ,
[Story]

The Souvenir Museum

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of single Americans who have had sex since the coronavirus pandemic began : 3/10

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of those single Americans whose sexual partner was a roommate with whom they were not in a relationship : 1/4

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of users on Hinge, a dating app, who would enter an exclusive relationship with someone they had only met virtually : 37

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of weddings planned for a date between March and August last year that were rescheduled : 52

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

That were canceled entirely : 7

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated value of loans taken out by U.S. couples for canceled 2020 weddings : $3,700,000,000

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Amount of money that Singapore is offering couples who have a baby during the pandemic : $2,200

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of pregnant women with COVID-19 whose symptoms last for more than two months : 1/4

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of children the Trump Administration separated from their parents at the border whose parents have yet to be located : 666

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of those parents who have been deported without their children : 2/3

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the word “hate” is said more often on Fox News than on MSNBC : 5.5

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. adults who consume news on YouTube : 1/4

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of YouTube news channels that are oriented around a single person : 44

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

That are oriented around someone who achieved fame through YouTube : 29

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which U.S. international relations scholars are less likely than the public to view terrorism as a major threat : 80

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By which they are less likely to view Russia as a major threat : 43

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By which they are more likely to view climate change as a major threat : 42

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of climate-related disasters worldwide between 1980 and 1999 : 3,656

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Between 2000 and 2019 : 6,681

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of countries to which the International Monetary Fund has granted pandemic loans : 81

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of these loan agreements that strongly encourage austerity measures once the crisis has ended : 84

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of Americans with federal student debt who have made progress repaying their loans during the pandemic : 1/10

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which U.S. lending for home-mortgage refinancing has increased this year : 3

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of celebrities offering to record personalized video messages for a fee on the website Cameo : 40,000

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the number of participating celebrities has increased since March : 2

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of hours that U.S. workers saved each day in commuting time from March to September last year : 60,000,000

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of this saved time that was spent working : 35

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. employers with remote workers who say that productivity has remained the same or improved : 94

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated global losses in lifetime earnings for students as a result of pandemic school closures : $10,000,000,000,000

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of white students who live in U.S. school districts whose reopening plans included in-person learning : 1/2

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of black and Hispanic students who do : 1/4

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American aged 18 to 24 has sought mental-health counseling during the pandemic : 1 in 4

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. teenagers who say the events of 2020 have caused them to reconsider what they want to study in college : 29

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who are now considering a career in health care : 24

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of masks sold on Etsy between January and September last year : 53,000,000

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Etsy’s total sales accounted for by masks during that period : 1/10

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount, in years, of life that has been lost as a result of COVID-19-related deaths in the United States : 2,500,000

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of years a victim is deprived of : 13

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which sales on Minibar, an alcohol e-commerce site, exceeded the average on the day Biden was declared president : 76

January 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By which sales of champagne exceeded the average : 386

January 2021

Readings

Download PDF
[Essay]

A Mutable Feast
by ,Translated by ,
[Priorities]

A Zoom with a View
[Hearing]

Catcher Gone Awry
[Account]

Pour Decisions
by ,
[Q&A]

Prize Fighter
[Fiction]

Feel and Hold
by ,
[Fossils]

Anals of History
[Prix Fixe]

Hell’s Kitchen
by ,
[Self-Improvement]

Inhale, Execute
[Interrogation]

The Puppet Master
[Revelation]

Fresca and Brimstone
by ,
[Poem]

Fr**dom
by ,
[Solutions]

Scorched Earth Policies
[Fiction]

The Fairground
by ,Translated by ,
[Food Criticism]

Sutra Scroll Tie Noodles
by ,Translated by , ,
Infantile War, a painting by Valerie Chua Sai, whose work was on view in August at La Lanta Fine Art, in Bangkok.
© The artist. Courtesy La Lanta Fine Art, Bangkok
Luminograms from the Birdsong series by Mike Jackson, whose work was on view in November at Foley Gallery, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Foley Gallery, New York City
The Mischievous, a painting by Hulda Guzmán, whose work was on view last month at Alexander Berggruen, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy the artist and Alexander Berggruen, New York City
Still Life with Breast Pump, a mixed-media artwork by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, whose work will be on view in September at James Cohan, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy James Cohan, New York City
Photograph by Joseph Rodriguez, taken from his cab while working as a taxi driver in New York City in the Seventies and Eighties. From Taxi, which was published last month by powerHouse Books.
© The artist. Courtesy powerHouse Books
Photograph by Joseph Rodriguez, taken from his cab while working as a taxi driver in New York City in the Seventies and Eighties. From Taxi, which was published last month by powerHouse Books.
© The artist. Courtesy powerHouse Books
[Letters]

Letters
[Editor’s Desk]

A Novel Approach
by ,
[Easy Chair]

Complexity
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Folio]

These Precious Days

Tell me how the story ends

by ,
[From the Archive]

The Injustice Collector
by ,
[Letter from Kyiv]

The Armies of the Right

Inside Ukraine’s extremist militias

by ,
[Poetry]

Little Music
by ,
[Report]

The Gate of Heaven Is Everywhere

Among the contemplatives

by ,
[Story]

The Souvenir Museum
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Slow Burn

The languid pleasures of Nuri Bilge Ceylan

by ,
[Reviews]

Reality Under My Skin

Tove Ditlevsen’s relentless clarity

by ,
[Puzzle]

Fantasyland
by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[Findings]

Mars gained and then lost a second moon in the autumn.

[Findings]

Scientists determined why some aging gray horses turn white faster than others.

[Findings]

The stranger churches of sixteenth-century London extensively spied on their congregants, noting when women accused other women of being “pocked whores.”

[Findings]

Evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Proto­-Indo­-European language was spread by humans on horseback may have overlooked how humans who ride cows, donkeys, and wild asses exhibit the same hip­ -socket deformations, as previously observed in twentieth­-century nuns.

[Findings]

Scientists allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a soft five-limbed robot and a four-wheel vehicle.

[Findings]

Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills.

[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.

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