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February 2021

[A Special Supplement]

Life After Trump

by , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
[Letter from Washington]

Hard Times

Will America recover under Biden?

by ,
[Annotation]

Signs of the Covenant

The old media of the ultra-Orthodox

by , ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount spent on 2020 campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and White House : $14,000,000,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which this exceeds the previous record for an election year : 2

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount of global tax revenue lost each year to companies that incorporate in tax havens : $245,000,000,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

To individuals who store their assets in tax havens : $182,000,000,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American travelers who do not support opening their own communities to visitors : 37

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the smoke plumes from those fires decreased the amount of sunlight reaching Australia : 90

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Area, in square kilometers, of the hole in the ozone layer produced by the Australian wildfires last year : 800,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of greenhouse-gas emissions that were covered by a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system last year : 22

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who plan to use them less often : 10

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who plan to use their cars more often after the pandemic ends than they did before it began : 41

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who hesitate to travel for fear that they would not be welcome at their destinations : 25

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum percentage by which the U.S. birth rate is expected to fall this year : 8

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American knew someone who died of COVID-19 last year : 1 in 2

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of countries where activists have reported police violence as a component of the pandemic response : 59

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of countries that have placed restrictions on news organizations during the pandemic : 91

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated total value of federal COVID-19 loans that were paid out to fraudulent or ineligible applicants : $71,400,000,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Average amount of money those Americans keep secret : $2,006

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans in a relationship who keep some of their money secret from their partner : 37

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount of carbon, in metric tons, produced each year by the sending and receiving of emails : 12,000,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By the sending and receiving of text messages : 7,000,000

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of greenhouse-gas emissions that are caused by the health care industry : 4.6

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of those emissions for which the United States is responsible : 1/4

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. health care facilities that regularly test their employees for COVID-19 : 1/2

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of U.S. companies overall that do : 1/6

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which U.S. health care workers have requested leave more often since the onset of the pandemic : 4

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. doctors who have closed their practices since then : 8

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. doctors and nurse clinicians who have retired early or plan to do so because of the pandemic : 1/5

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. workers over 55 who plan to delay their retirement because of the pandemic : 13

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of senior White House jobs that turned over during the Trump presidency : 91

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of those jobs that did so more than once : 39

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an outgoing senior White House employee was fired or pressured into resigning : 1 in 4

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. remote employees who say they have been working harder than ever : 7/10

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who say they have not felt as appreciated by their employer since they began working remotely : 1/2

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease, in the first half of 2020, in direct foreign investment in the United States : 61

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

In China : 4

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the American economy is expected to contract this year : 4.3

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By which the Chinese economy is expected to expand : 1.9

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of documentaries that the Chinese government has produced about Wuhan’s response to the coronavirus : 21

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of animated shorts : 1

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of operas : 1

February 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the number of Amazon employees worldwide exceeds the population of Wyoming : 2

February 2021

Readings

[Essay]

The Left Behind
by ,
[Harassment]

My Scummy Valentine
[Screenplay]

The Rival
by ,
[Press Release]

Grand Slam
[Poem]

Red Wall
by ,Translated by , ,
[Personal Ads]

American Dreamers
[Letter]

A Unified Theory
by ,
[Negotiation]

MAGA Carta
[Memoir]

An Honest Living
by ,Edited by ,Translated by ,
[Responses]

Immodest Proposal
[Methodology]

Head Over Heels
[Author’s Note]

The Double Role
by , ,
[Fiction]

Last Cigarette
by ,Translated by ,
[Rules]

New World Orders
[Evaluation]

Infertility Clinic
by ,
Pharaoh’s Dance, a painting by Sanam Khatibi, whose work was on view last month at Rodolphe Janssen, in Brussels.
Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels
Photograph by Carolyn Drake from her monograph Knit Club, which was published last year by TBW Books.
© The artist/Magnum Photos. Courtesy TBW Books
Photograph by Carolyn Drake from her monograph Knit Club, which was published last year by TBW Books.
© The Artist/Magnum Photos. Courtesy TBW Books
La Casa del Mar Menor, a mixed-media artwork by Mar Hernández, whose work was on view in September at White Noise, in Rome.
© The artist. Courtesy private collection and White Noise, Rome
Tom, His Family, and His Friends, a painting by Liu Xiaodong, whose work is on view through May at Dallas Contemporary.
© The artist. Courtesy Massimo de Carlo, Hong Kong, London, and Milan
“A New Life,” a photograph by Diana Markosian from her monograph Santa Barbara, which was published last year by Aperture. Markosian’s work is on view through June at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
© The artist. Courtesy Aperture Foundation, New York City
Departure (After El Lissitzky), a mixed-media artwork by Mernet Larsen, whose work was on view last month at James Cohan, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy James Cohan, New York City
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Shades of Blue
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Letter from Washington]

Hard Times

Will America recover under Biden?

by ,
[From the Archive]

The Adversary
by ,
[A Special Supplement]

Life After Trump
by , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
[Letter from Antananarivo]

Stowaways

Madagascar reckons with an invasive crayfish

by ,
[Annotation]

Signs of the Covenant

The old media of the ultra-Orthodox

by , ,
[Poetry]

Detail of the Rice Chest
by ,
[Story]

The Very Beneficial Changeling Society
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Parable of the Butler

A science-fiction pioneer finds posthumous fame

by ,
[Reviews]

The Artist Disappears

Helen Frankenthaler’s earthbound genius

by ,
[Puzzle]

Split Personalities
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.

Photograph of Donald Trump, 2019 (detail) © Dan Kitwood/Getty Images. Typography by Tina Smith Microfiche

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