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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]

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.

[Findings]

Half of the flights taken by British men aged twenty to forty-five are for stag parties.

[Findings]

Drivers of fancy cars yield to pedestrians less often than drivers of humble cars, and still less if the pedestrians are non-white men.

[Findings]

Los Angeles scientists found that the city’s road network could be more efficiently designed by P. polycephalum, a slime mold.

[Findings]

Stinging water was blamed on jellyfish mucus.

[Findings]

Engineers reported success in deploying “ultra-­gentle” robotic “linguine fingers” to grab deep-sea jellyfish.

[Findings]

Children, unlike adults, are resilient against the Pinocchio Illusion when their fingers are pulled upward in sync with a tone ascending from 700 to 1200 Hz.

[Findings]

Fingertip injuries can indicate child abuse.

[Findings]

Damage to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes that spares the anterior hypothalamus was linked to the emergence of acquired pedophilia.

[Findings]

Five primate electrophysiologists agreed that, upon 50 Hz stimulation of the central lateral thalamus, anesthetized Wisconsin monkeys become wakeful.

[Findings]

The high contrast provided by humans’ white scleras enhances our awareness of one another’s gazes.

[Findings]

It remained unknown whether Shanidar Z received a Neanderthal flower burial.

[Findings]

An extinction-­risk model was found to work well for bumblebees.

[Findings]

An interdisciplinary team suggested that climate-­driven societal collapse may stabilize once humans start accepting years with many disasters as the new normal.

[Findings]

The formation of pre–Silk Road Eurasian empires was driven partly by the spread of northern Chinese broomcorn millet; nano­diamonds and meltglass at Abu Hureyra point to a cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas; the collapse of Harappan society coincided with the loss of the Ghaggar River’s perenniality and the onset of the Meghalayan Stage; the breakdown of Easter Island society and the cessation of megalithic statue-building postdated European contact; and epigraphic evidence suggested a descent into total war during the Terminal Classic era of Mayan civilization.

[Findings]

A 46,000-year-old bird recovered from the Siberian permafrost was determined to be a female horned lark.

[Findings]

The tail of an unidentified herbivorous dinosaur in Alberta was found to contain a type of histiocytic tumor that primarily affects young children.

[Findings]

The exoplanet NGTS-10b was found to have a year lasting eighteen Earth hours and to be at risk of falling into its star.

[Findings]

Astronomers recorded, in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, the largest known post–Big Bang explosion, which lasted several hundred million years and created a void of fifteen galactic widths in the plasma around the cluster’s central black hole. “People were skeptical because of the size of the outburst,” said one of the scientists. “We don’t know why it’s so big.”

[Findings]

A spineless hedgehog in Fishcross regrew its spines and was released into the wild, and officials blamed the deaths of British black bees at Wisbech Castle on “morons.” 

[Findings]

A soggy Suffolk owl found in a ditch was diagnosed as too fat to fly.

[Findings]

Mount Vesuvius turned a Herculaneum man’s brain to glass, according to archaeologists, who also revived the voice of a priest from the reign of Ramesses XI and determined that a mummy in the Ulster Museum had been stabbed in the back.

[Findings]

Crystallized mud-wasp nests were used to revise the age of Aboriginal rock art, and a sheep hunters’ encampment was discovered in Nachcharini Cave.

[Findings]

India’s Supreme Court approved the importation of Namibian cheetahs.

[Findings]

Researchers who wear orange catch more anoles, and Australia began culling thousands of camels with helicopter snipers.

[Findings]

Sheep compensate well for lameness.

[Findings]

Southern white rhinos are threatened by inbreeding.

[Findings]

Veterinarians developed an ultrasound schedule for pregnant dolphins, and marine biologists discovered four new species of walking sharks and found that gray seals clap at each other to communicate underwater.

[Findings]

Cetaceans are least likely among mammals to dream profoundly.

[Findings]

African penguins were found to be the first non-primates whose speech exhibits both the Menzerath–­Altmann Law and Zipf’s Law of Brevity.

Illustration by Fausta Kingué Microfiche

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