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January 2022

[Essay]

Routine Maintenance

Embracing habit in an automated world

by ,
[Letter from Washington]

Spent Fuel

The risky resurgence of nuclear power

by ,
[Memoir]

The Old Imperium

Learning to live with my aging mind

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of adults who think COVID-19 will change the United States for the better : 1/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who say it’s acceptable to fake one’s vaccination status to keep a job : 1/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

To eat at a restaurant : 1/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of restaurant workers who say the past year has taken a toll on their mental health : 78

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a small restaurant was unable to pay rent in September : 1 in 2

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. households that say they have faced serious financial difficulties in recent months : 2/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

That say they have depleted all of their savings since the pandemic started : 1/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who think that not having the newest iPhone is a sign of financial struggle : 15

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans willing to go into debt for a new iPhone : 1/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in the number of yachts sold last year : 14

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Amount by which the price of a seat on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight increased last year : $200,000

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in the wealth of U.S. billionaires since the start of the pandemic : 70

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2020 in the number of Americans who view the existence of billionaires as bad for the country : 26

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of adults who believe that U.S. crime has increased in the past year : 3/5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Of regular Fox News viewers who believe so : 3/4

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change in the number of major crimes in the United States in the past year : –5

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which yakuza membership has declined in the past decade : 63

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of people killed by police between 1980 and 2018 whose death certificates list a different cause of death : 55

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which more men died from police encounters than from testicular cancer in 2019 : 135

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the Chicago Police Department’s advertising budget is projected to increase this year : 96

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of times Chevron has aired TV ads since June 2020 promoting itself as green or sustainable : 26,400

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Maximum percentage of Chevron’s budget spent on green technologies in the past decade : 1

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of U.S. oil spills reported in the Gulf of Mexico each month : 25

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase last year in the amount of U.S. electricity generated by coal-fired plants : 22

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of people worldwide who are “not too concerned” about climate change : 27

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who are unwilling to make significant changes to their lives to reduce its effects : 19

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which someone born in 2020 will likely experience more river floods and droughts than someone born in 1960 : 3

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

By which they will likely experience more heat waves : 7

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2005 in the number of teenagers who say it is a bad time to be growing up : +65

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of teenagers who say they have a good or excellent relationship with their parents : 96

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of single American men who live in a parent’s home : 3/10

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Amount per month the prime minister of Spain has proposed paying adults to move out of their parents’ homes : $292

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which single U.S. adults are less likely than those in relationships to have at least a bachelor’s degree : 41

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

By which they are less likely to be employed : 9

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which men are more likely to panic-sell their stock portfolios than women : 15

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

By which those who rate their investment knowledge as “excellent” are more likely to do so than those who claim none : 70

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of fake businesses removed from Google Maps in 2020 : 3,000,000

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of fake reviews on Google : 107,000,000

January 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of “Google” among the most searched terms on the search engine Bing : 1

January 2022

Readings

[Essay]

Some Deaths Before Dying
by ,
[Horoscopes]

Zodiac Killers
[Tactics]

Mop Boss
by ,
[Legal Work]

Soul Proprietor
by ,
[Dress Code]

All Hat, No Cattle
by ,
[Assessment]

Swarm Enemies
[Solicitations]

INBOX ($0)
[Genetics]

Flying Colors
by ,Art by ,
[Who’s Who]

Chronicle of a Death Foreteller
by ,
[Self-help]

Supposedly Fun Things I’ll Never Do Again
[Adaptation]

A Loose Fish
by ,
[Fiction]

Like a Thief in the Night
by ,
[Poem]

Sixth Elegy
by ,
“The Vapor of Melancholy,” a photograph by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose film Memoria was screened in November at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
Satellite Stars, a painting by Danielle Roberts, whose work was on view in August at Fredericks & Freiser, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Fredericks & Freiser, New York City
Photograph by Rose Marie Cromwell, from her book A More Fluid Atmosphere, which was published in November by Pomegranate Press.
© The artist. Courtesy Pomegranate Press
Photograph by Rose Marie Cromwell, from her book A More Fluid Atmosphere, which was published in November by Pomegranate Press.
© The artist. Courtesy Pomegranate Press
“The Woman in the Light, Harlem, NY,” a photograph by Dawoud Bey, whose work is on view through May at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, in Michigan.
© The artist. Courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
The Pillowman (detail), a triptych painting by Paula Rego, whose work is on view at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, in the Netherlands, and at Victoria Miro, in London.
© The artist
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Dangling Man
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Essay]

Routine Maintenance

Embracing habit in an automated world

by ,
[From the Archive]

Life Is a Box of Chocolates
by ,
[Letter from Washington]

Spent Fuel

The risky resurgence of nuclear power

by ,
[Annotation]

A Firm Hand

McKinsey goes to Rikers Island

by ,
[Memoir]

The Old Imperium

Learning to live with my aging mind

by ,
[Poetry]

Pippi Longstocking
by ,
[Story]

An Errand
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

The Mosaicist

On Evan S. Connell

by ,
[Reviews]

Ad Nauseam

Hanya Yanagihara and the pandemic novel

by ,
[Puzzle]

Over and Back
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.

Illustration by Fausta Kingué Microfiche

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