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April 2022

[Report]

Night Shifts

Can technology shape our dreams?

by ,
[Letter from Istanbul]

The Spies Next Door

China’s covert campaign to intimidate Uighur exiles

by ,
[Letter from Shasta County]

Notes on the State of Jefferson

A secessionist movement brews in northern California

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which U.S. military spending has increased since the withdrawal from Afghanistan : 5

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Afghans who are expected to be living in poverty in August : 97

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of U.S. immigration history requests held up because of pandemic rules on records storage : 350,000

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2017 in the number of Republicans who say military officers have “high standards of ethics” : –21

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of people who reported relatives to the FBI for participating in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot : 15

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. representatives facing ethics investigations last year who refused to cooperate : 1/2

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who have favorable views of both capitalism and socialism : 1/5

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who have unfavorable views of both capitalism and socialism : 1/5

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who approve of labor unions : 68

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2019 in U.S. labor union membership : –4

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who have considered committing suicide in response to political developments : 5

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who think Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is no longer relevant : 1/4

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Republicans are more likely than Democrats to think so : 94

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which more white men than black men died of drug overdoses in 2015 : 51

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

By which more black men than white men died of drug overdoses in 2020 : 22

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of overdose deaths in the first half of 2021 that involved fentanyl : 2/3

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Number of U.S. states in which it is illegal to possess fentanyl test strips : 30

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage decrease in U.S. condom sales since the start of the pandemic : 8

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans earning less than $50,000 who cite wedding costs as a reason for not marrying : 3/10

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of married Americans who have considered divorce in the past six months : 1/4

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Number of the one hundred most-watched TV broadcasts last year that were NFL games : 92

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which Americans spent more time listening to the radio last year than to podcasts : 6

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Amount of time, in years, viewers spent watching livestreams of Grand Theft Auto V on Twitch last year : 214,309

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of total views for TikTok videos tagged with #MentalHealth : 25,100,000,000

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. adults who have struggled with basic decisions like what to eat or wear since the start of the pandemic : 1/3

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Of U.S. millennials : 1/2

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. adults who say their closets contain many things they will never wear again : 3/4

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease in spending on dental care since the start of the pandemic : 9.5

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. pet owners who say they take their pet’s health more seriously than their own : 7/10

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who have sought acupuncture for their pet : 4/10

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Who have purchased CBD products for their pet : 3/10

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of dogs in the United States on anti-anxiety medication : 10,350,000

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Of cats : 1,800,000

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of passengers on private jets who fly with a pet : 1/4

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Average cost of cloning a dog : $50,000

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of Instagram influencers who have cloned a pet : 12

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Number of dogs cloned for law enforcement purposes in Iowa : 52

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of COVID-19 outbreaks recorded among animal populations : 645

April 2022
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of hamsters executed by the Hong Kong government because of COVID-19 exposure : 2,229

April 2022

Readings

[Essay]

White Rapture
by ,
[How-to]

Make It a Double
[Interrogation]

A Man of All Reasons
by ,
[Cargo]

In the Air Tonight
[Assessment]

We Need to Talk About Kitty
[Memoir]

Another Land
by ,
[Guide]

Pearls of Wisdom
by ,
[Sentencing]

Lawn & Order
[Feuilleton]

No News Is Bad News
by ,
[Diary]

End Notes
by ,Translated by ,
[Fiction]

Remains of the Day
by ,
[Poem]

Family Story
by ,
Untitled, 1982, a painting by June Edmonds, whose work was on view last month at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery, in Los Angeles.
The artist. Collection of Dr. Lucia Edmonds. Courtesy Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and Laband Art Gallery, Los Angeles
Drawing for The Head & The Load (Landscape with Waterfall), by William Kentridge, whose work was on view last month at Alexander Berggruen, in New York City.
The artist. Courtesy Alexander Berggruen, New York City
Limestone Wall, a painting by Hurvin Anderson, whose work is on view at Tate Britain, in London.
The artist. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London
“White Horse and The Lake, 2021,” an artwork by Anja Niemi, whose work was on view in January at the Ravestijn Gallery, in Amsterdam.
The artist. Courtesy the Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam
Artwork by Miroslav Sekulic-Struja from Petar & Liza, a graphic novel, which was published this year by Actes Sud. Sekulic-Struja’s work was on view in February at Galerie Martel, in Paris.
The artist. Courtesy Galerie Martel, Paris
A photograph by Paul Guilmoth from At Night Gardens Grow, which was published last year by Stanley/Barker.
Courtesy the artist and Stanley/Barker
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Skiing and Nothingness
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Report]

Night Shifts

Can technology shape our dreams?

by ,
[From the Archive]

Dreamland
by ,
[Letter from Istanbul]

The Spies Next Door

China’s covert campaign to intimidate Uighur exiles

by ,
[Annotation]

The Hothouse

Tracking the past and future spread of ragweed allergies

by ,
[Letter from Shasta County]

Notes on the State of Jefferson

A secessionist movement brews in northern California

by ,
[Poetry]

Two Poems
by ,
[Story]

Worms
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Future Nostalgia

Jennifer Egan’s old-world internet novel

by ,
[Reviews]

Who Killed Louis Le Prince?

On the forgotten father of film

by ,
[Puzzle]

Heads or Tails

See the solution to last month’s puzzle

by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[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.

[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.

Le Repos, by Pablo Picasso 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York City. Photo Christie’s Images/Succession Picasso/ DACS, London 2022/Bridgeman Images Microfiche

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