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February 2022

[Letter from Texas]

Free Country

Permitless carry and the new gun-rights extremism

by ,
[Miscellany]

Another Green World

Can the planet’s ecosystems be replicated?

by ,
[Report]

The Great Wall of Steel

Xi Jinping remakes Chinese nationalism

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who got a flu shot in the 2019–20 flu season : 53, 56

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who say they have gotten or are very likely to get a flu shot this season : 44, 68

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in U.S. sales of cigarettes in 2020 : 0.4

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Year in which U.S. cigarette sales last increased : 2000

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans aged 18 to 25 who say their alcohol use has increased during the pandemic : 1/5

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who say their drug use has increased : 1/5

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say that drug use has been a source of trouble for their family : 1/3

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of times people switch between screens or tabs per day : 566

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of minutes it takes to get back on task after checking a cell phone notification : 25

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in U.S. workers who have been involved in a workplace relationship since the start of the pandemic : 26

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of adults with shared finances who have lied to their partners about money : 39

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which fewer Americans planned to celebrate Valentine’s Day last year than the year before : 5

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2017 in the number of married Americans who say their spouse makes life meaningful : –58

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of U.S. households that acquired a cat or dog during the pandemic : 23,000,000

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the number of dog training services offered via Zoom increased during the pandemic : 2

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which more working women than men report experiencing burnout often or almost always : 20

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Number of years by which the average retirement age is lower in China than in the United States : 3

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of U.S. employee walkouts since the start of the pandemic : 1,670

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since August in Google searches for “how to send a resignation email” : 3,450

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which bonuses for U.S. investment bankers and traders were projected to increase last year : 20

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of active-duty U.S. military families that face food insecurity : 1/6

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of federal prison workers who have been arrested or sentenced for crimes since 2019 : 100

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of mistreatment and neglect reports filed with New York City child-welfare caseworkers per week : 1,054

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of eviction cases filed in New York City since the start of the pandemic : 77,346

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in rat sightings in New York City last year : 52

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of birds killed each year in New York City by collisions with glass windows : 90,000

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of whales killed by collisions with ships each year : 750

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the weight of whales killed in the twentieth century exceeds that of all wild mammals today : 2

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum amount, in tons, of pandemic-associated plastic waste that has been deposited in the ocean : 25,000

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of material received by U.S. recycling centers that is nonrecyclable : 22

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which U.S. online grocery sales have increased since the start of the pandemic : 6

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of New York City food delivery workers who have had their bikes stolen : 54

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of college graduates projected to need at least twenty years to recoup their tuition costs : 1/4

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of those graduates who will likely never recoup the total : 3/5

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which philosophy majors are more likely than psychology majors to describe themselves as “brilliant” : 9

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. adults who say they have questioned the meaning of life in the past year : 1/4

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that suffering is mostly a consequence of one’s own actions : 7/10

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who believe in heaven : 3/4

February 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans with graduate degrees who believe in ghosts : 1/3

February 2022

Readings

[Essay]

Separate and Unequal
by ,
[Merchandise]

Cutting Lines
[Justification]

Campaign Fowl
by ,
[Conservation Guide]

Yacht to Know Better
[Public Comments]

Uncool Whip
[Research]

Bond Market
by , , ,
[Tactical Gear]

Blast Rites
[Direct Deposit]

Wildlife Fund
by ,
[Devaluations]

Everyone’s a Critic
[Poem]

Feast of the First Morning of the First Day
by ,
[Correspondence]

Artless Response
[Fiction]

The Bathers
by ,Translated by ,
“Zion Looking Through a Pair of My Binoculars in Her Grandfather Mr. Smiley’s Living Room, Newton, Mississippi,” a photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier. Her monograph Flint Is Family in Three Acts will be published next month by Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation.
© The artist
“Quarantine Home Collection,” a photograph by Leonard Suryajaya from the series Quarantine Blues. Suryajaya’s work will be on view in June at Fotomuseum Winterthur, in Switzerland.
© The artist
“Orangutans,” a photograph by Jim Naughten, whose work was on view in November at Grove Square Galleries, in London.
© The artist. Courtesy Grove Square Galleries, London
wherewelieawakedreamingyouarehere,amongtheruinsofadowncastheart, a painting by David Antonio Cruz, whose work was on view in December at Monique Meloche Gallery, in Chicago.
© The artist. Courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
Give a signal, a Nihonga painting by Toko Izumi, whose work was on view in November at Micheko Galerie, in Munich.
© The artist. Courtesy Micheko Galerie, Munich
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Sample Truths
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Letter from Texas]

Free Country

Permitless carry and the new gun-rights extremism

by ,
[From the Archive]

The Good Citizen
by ,
[Miscellany]

Another Green World

Can the planet’s ecosystems be replicated?

by ,
[Report]

The Great Wall of Steel

Xi Jinping remakes Chinese nationalism

by ,
[Poetry]

Two Poems
by ,
[Story]

Late at Night
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

National Treasure

The ecstatic cult of Nicolas Cage

by ,
[Reviews]

Every Child an Emperor

On Maria Montessori

by ,
[Puzzle]

Old Friends
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.

Illustration by Timo Lenzen Microfiche

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