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August 2021

[Miscellany]

The Undiscovered Country

Can suicide be predicted?

by ,
[Letter from Washington]

The Enemy Within

Why the Democrats don’t need Joe Manchin

by ,
[Letter from the United States]

Home Country

What does it mean to be Latino?

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which a U.S. conservative is more likely to want to travel to the past than to the future : 7

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By which a U.S. liberal is more likely to want to travel to the future : 70

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say their personality has changed over the course of the pandemic : 86

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who think they have become smarter : 70

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of new words that Larousse is adding to its French dictionary this year : 170

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of these words that are related to COVID-19 : 50

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage by which the COVID-19 death toll in the United States exceeds the reported figures : 55

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

By which the worldwide death toll does : 122

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American has a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the CDC : 1 in 2

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of individuals responsible for three quarters of the anti-vaccine content on Facebook : 12

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. employers requiring that their workers get the COVID-19 vaccine : 4

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of countries in which China’s image has improved since the beginning of the pandemic : 56

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of adults worldwide who believe the United States is a “threat to democracy” in their country : 44

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who believe China is : 38

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the frequency of power failures in the United States has increased since 2015 : 146

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount of stimulus money that went to fossil-fuel companies under the CARES Act : $8,240,000,000

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Projected rank of 2021 among the years with the largest spikes in U.S. carbon emissions : 1

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated area, in square miles, of lost natural forest that has been regrown around the world since 2000 : 227,414

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of permanent tree-cover loss over that same period : 583,014

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the Brazilian Amazon rainforest released more carbon than it trapped between 2010 and 2019 : 18

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of the 100 cities most vulnerable to climate change worldwide that are in Asia : 99

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of cities worldwide that report lacking the financial resources to adapt to climate change : 1/4

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of major cities that have appointed chief heat officers to address rising temperatures : 3

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change in the number of divorces in China after it imposed a mandatory thirty-day “cooling-off period” : –72

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of fathers working from home who say that doing so improved their mental health : 71

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of mothers : 41

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of charter schools that have opened up in vacant retail properties this year : 200

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of new chain stores in the United States that are either a Dollar General, Family Dollar, or Dollar Tree : 39

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change last year in the employment rate for new college graduates : –12

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. gig workers who say that the money they earn is an “essential” or “important” part of their finances : 56

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who have performed work for which they did not receive payment : 29

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum amount spent by U.S. businesses on corporate swag last year : $18,630,000,000

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of registered cryptocurrency lobbyists : 264

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount U.S. consumers reported losing in cryptocurrency scams between October 2020 and March 2021 : $80,000,000

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

In scams that involved people impersonating Elon Musk : $2,000,000

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of people of Asian descent in British Columbia who were the victim of a hate crime in the past year : 43

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who cannot name a single prominent Asian American : 42

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of top-grossing films released between 2007 and 2019 that featured an Asian or Pacific Islander in a leading role : 3

August 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of those roles filled by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson : 1/3

August 2021

Readings

[Essay]

State of the Art
by ,
[Study]

Show Ponies
by ,
[Audiobook]

Murder, He Spoke
[Oral History]

Which Side Are You On?
by ,
[Lineup]

Consider the Mobster
[Memoir]

The White Stuff
by ,
[Texts]

Tanked
[Poem]

Another Round
by ,
[Ritual]

Black Communion
by ,
[Theatrics]

Jeopardy!
[Fiction]

Numero Uno
by ,
[Odds]

Fight or Flight
Invisible Hand, a mixed-media artwork by Souleimane Barry, whose work was on view in March at the Also Known As Africa (AKAA) art and design fair, in Paris.
© The artist. Courtesy Anne de Villepoix, Paris
“Goalkeeper No. 4, 2014,” a photograph by Rodrigo Valenzuela, whose work was on view last month at Galería Patricia Ready, in Santiago, Chile. Valenzuela’s monograph Journeyman was published in March by Mousse Publishing.
© The artist. Courtesy Assembly
A Passing Dance, a painting by Brittney Leeanne Williams, whose work was on view in April at Alexander Berggruen, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Alexander Berggruen, New York City
Untitled (Dreams Deferred), a mixed-media artwork by Paul Anthony Smith, whose work was on view in April at Jack Shainman Gallery, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City
Photograph by Supranav Dash from the Lockdown series, Kolkata, India, 2020 and 2021.
© The artist
Photograph by Supranav Dash from the Lockdown series, Kolkata, India, 2020 and 2021.
© The artist
Photograph by Supranav Dash from the Lockdown series
© The artist
Photograph by Supranav Dash from the Lockdown series
© The artist
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Unending Struggle
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Miscellany]

The Undiscovered Country

Can suicide be predicted?

by ,
[From the Archive]

The Dying Industry
by ,
[Essay]

Men in Dark Times

How Hannah Arendt’s fans misread the post-truth presidency

by ,
[Letter from Washington]

The Enemy Within

Why the Democrats don’t need Joe Manchin

by ,
[Letter from the United States]

Home Country

What does it mean to be Latino?

by ,
[Story]

Place of Safety
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Writ in Water

On Roger Deakin’s indelible swims

by ,
[Reviews]

Seven Steps to Heaven

Jon Fosse makes the novel new

by ,
[Puzzle]

Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)

See the solution to last month’s puzzle here

by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[Findings]

Hot water circulating in the pants improves older adults’ cardiovascular health.

[Findings]

Among Israeli irritable bowel syndrome sufferers, Jews have more diarrhea, whereas Arabs have more constipation.

[Findings]

Life expectancy in Gaza fell by 34.9 years between October 2023 and September 2024, and the probability of death in childhood increased sixfold from 2022 to 2023.

[Findings]

Macaque mothers who lose an infant exhibit a period of protest but, unlike human mothers, do not subsequently exhibit despair.

[Findings]

The Antarctic midge, the continent’s sole native insect, was found to be the only organism to undergo both quiescence and obligate diapause.

[Findings]

A helicopter crash in South Africa was determined to have been caused by an unsecured penguin from Bird Island falling onto the cyclic-­pitch controller.

[Findings]

An Egyptologist who examined depictions of the sky goddess Nut bending over her brother and father, drawn from 555 ancient coffins, theorized that the version on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a chantress to Amun­-Re, represents the Great Rift that runs through the Milky Way as a dark line running through Nut’s starry body.

[Findings]

The universe may rotate at a rate of two turns every trillion years.

[Findings]

Danish scientists suggested that adults abstaining from all other meat can eat nine tenths of two chicken breasts a week without exceeding planetary boundaries.

[Findings]

Robot elephants are becoming increasingly popular at Indian temples.

[Findings]

Early Bronze Age burials in the Upper Tigris may have accorded special favor to dead adolescents, whereas after the emergence of social hierarchy burial privilege shifted to dead elites.

[Findings]

The dismembered skeletons in a pit at Bayanbulak, possibly the site Emperor Wu of Han’s chief historian termed the Fortification for Receiving Surrender, were likely farmers from northern China conscripted during the Han–Xiongnu Wars.

[Findings]

The first antique instance of cinnabar-stained teeth was documented in a Subeshi woman in Grave M11 at Shengjindian Cemetery.

[Findings]

Greco-Roman sculpture was perfumed.

[Findings]

Dogs act more jealous when their owners interact with robots than when they read magazines.

[Findings]

The foreheads of teddy bears grew significantly taller between 1900 and 1980, though the bears did not become appreciably cuter over the same period.

[Findings]

Across racial categories women’s eyelash length is perceived as increasingly healthy up to one third of the width of the eye, past which further elongation becomes perceived as less healthy but increasingly indicative of sexual receptivity.

[Findings]

Male fruit flies seek out alcohol because it makes them more attractive to female flies and more successful at mating, not, as was previously theorized, because they are depressed about not yet having mated.

[Findings]

Male bluelined octopuses inject poison into the aortas of their female partners at the start of copulation, likely to avoid being eaten afterward.

[Findings]

Chemists grew gold in total darkness.

[Findings]

Five zebra fish per liter of tank water can be collectively euthanized by electric shock.

[Findings]

Rats can distinguish between Riesling and sauvignon blanc.

[Findings]

A literature review enumerated cases of envenomation by dead snakes, including those of a Chinese chef killed by the severed head of a spitting cobra, a child in Minnesota injured by a freeze-dried prairie-rattlesnake head worn as a tie tack, and two drunk Indians hospitalized after they chewed on the head of a dead krait.

[Findings]

Americans with open personalities are less likely to express end-of-life regret about how much they spent on food, whereas agreeable people are disposed to regret spending money on food, clothing, leisure, and financial help to others.

[Findings]

Polish doctors urged further investigation into compulsive frotteurs.

[Findings]

Scottish hen parties were deemed to contain ritualistic profanation.

[Findings]

The mummy of the Mysterious Lady was not pregnant.

[Findings]

A skull previously thought to belong to Cleopatra’s sister was found to be that of an Italian boy with a deformed jaw.

[Findings]

Fifty-two experts were consulted to produce a six-criteria test for predicting vasectomy regret.

[Findings]

French archaeologists discovered a Gaulish curse tablet tucked between a skeleton’s legs.

[Findings]

A Viking grave in Norway appeared to contain a vulva stone.

[Findings]

Chinese scientists successfully raised to adulthood, then dissected, mice born of two fathers.

[Findings]

Rabbits are capable of digesting their teeth as they wear down and reusing the calcium to grow new ones.

[Findings]

It is possible that songbirds who migrate at night socialize with one another in flight and speak to other species.

[Findings]

A survey of 1,328 urinary events found that, unlike contagious yawning, the contagious urination of chimpanzees appears to be correlated to social rank rather than social closeness.

[Findings]

Coyotes in dense areas of Chicago die younger if the average human income is high.

[Findings]

Physicists detected negative time.

[Findings]

Excessive tearfulness in the right eye of a fifty-five-year-old Japanese woman was traced to a supernumerary punctum.

[Findings]

Six dead dolphins who washed up in Texas were found to have fentanyl in their blubber.

[Findings]

Archaeologists speculated that, in the largest known Bronze Age massacre in Britain, attackers killed, butchered, and ate men, women, and children as a political statement.

[Findings]

Scientists urged the abandonment of attempts to create mirror life, against which existing life-forms may possess no defenses.

[Findings]

Monkeys are faster at spotting a snake among salamanders than a salamander among snakes.

[Findings]

Medication may treat those who suffer from disorders that make them smooth-brained.

[Findings]

Brain scans corroborated the unpleasant psychoacoustic effects of Aztec death whistles.

[Findings]

Assamese tribesmen were found to identify with elephants through a sense of mutual loss, poverty, and uncertainty.

[Findings]

Scientists suggested that human culture is superior to that of other animals because it can integrate limitless sequences of subgoals.

[Findings]

In Europe, conservatives are outbreeding progressives.

[Findings]

Researchers noted the positive effects of ecstatic epilepsy and synthesized fifty-three theoretical models of delusion.

[Findings]

Witnessing cringeworthy moments improves the observer’s self-perception.

[Findings]

In Japan, erectile function among young men was determined to be low by the first nationwide survey employing the internationally validated Erection Hardness Score.

[Findings]

Pentoxifylline can mitigate the damage caused by subjecting stallions to scrotal heat stress.

[Findings]

Bay Area researchers debuted a Narcissism Interview Scale for Employment.

[Findings]

More than half of U.S. civilians tasked with evaluating a bombing target endorsed killing unidentified bystanders.

[Findings]

Solitary chicks emit fewer anxious peeps if given a mirror for company.

[Findings]

Marine biologists described the Red Sea’s grumpy dwarfgoby.

[Findings]

Bottlenose dolphins, who were found to inhale and exhale microplastics, respond to a smile with a smile one third of the time.

[Findings]

Archaeologists identified the skeleton recovered from the Sverresborg Castle’s well in 1938 as the man described in the Sverris Saga as having been thrown into the well in 1197.

[Findings]

A primatologist, a mammalogist, and a linguist concluded that the jerky, rhythmic dance of sexually mature female black crested gibbons is innate rather than culturally transmitted.

[Findings]

Parmesan researchers found that “benevolently sexist” adults are less likely to own “clit-oriented” sex toys.

[Findings]

Germans under thirty experience more climate distress and have more rough sex.

[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.

Photograph © HKPNC/iStock Microfiche

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