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November 2023

[Report]

The Machine Breaker

Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”

by ,
[Letter from Reno]

Four Men

Keeping company with outdoor people

by ,
[Letter from Cherán]

Forbidden Fruit

The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Increase since 1981 in the median age of first-time U.S. home buyers : 7

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of prospective U.S. home buyers who say they consider climate change when evaluating where to live : 4/5

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage decrease since 2019 in the number of fire lookouts employed in the United States : 18

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of residents who moved to Florida’s high flood-risk counties between 2019 and 2022 : 383,680

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Floridians who have flood insurance : 18

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans earning at least $175,000 per year who consider themselves to be poor or “just getting by” : 1/4

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who have less than $200,000 in retirement savings : 1/4

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. families who have less than $100,000 in retirement savings : 4/5

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who have no retirement savings : 1/2

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2008 in the number of assets held in non-traditional financial institutions : 141

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who are able to remain continuously employed through their fifties : 1/2

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. employees who know what is expected of them at work : 1/2

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which people who say they are lonely are more likely to miss work than those who say they are not : 2

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which married people are more likely than unmarried people to say they are happy : 9,560

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American adults under the age of 25 who describe themselves as lonely : 79

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2020 in the number of U.S. men aged 18 to 29 who are single : –3

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In the number of U.S. women who are single : +18

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which single men are more interested in dating than single women : 31

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

By which single women are more likely than men to say they can’t find someone who meets their expectations : 65

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which U.S. women are more likely than men to have a tattoo : 41

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. adults with tattoos who regret getting at least one of them : 1/4

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2019 in employment assessment scores for job seekers younger than 25 : –10

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum percentage of U.S. school districts that do not employ librarians : 35

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. adults who believe parents are not “tough enough” when disciplining their children : 64

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2018 in the number of Americans who believe moderate drinking is bad for one’s health : 39

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In the number of adults aged 18 to 34 who believe this : 53

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which non-religious adults are more likely than Christians to believe this : 34

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change this year in sales of Bud Light : –16

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In sales of Modelo Especial : +11

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which beer imports from Mexico have increased since 2013 : 2

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which beer imports from other countries have decreased : 29

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in the value of the non-alcoholic beer industry since 2021 : 43

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. alcohol consumption for which one fifth of the population is responsible : 53

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Of injuries requiring medical attention for which one fifth of the population is responsible : 78

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of pet owners who, given the choice between saving the life of one person or one dog, would choose the dog : 21

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who, given the choice between saving the lives of one hundred people or one dog, would choose the dog : 18

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say that a dead relative has communicated with them in the past year : 15

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that they have felt a dead relative’s presence : 34

November 2023
[Harper’s Index]

That a dead relative has visited them in a dream : 46

November 2023

Readings

[Essay]

Principia Mathemagica
by ,
[Joke]

Seed Capital
by ,
[War Reporting]

Battle Lines
by ,Translated by ,
[Listings]

House Music
by ,
[Correspondence]

Playing Lard Ball
[Memoir]

blake.doc
by ,
[Fiction]

Here, After
by ,
[Customs Report]

Grapes of Wrath
[Inventory]

Joy Divisions
[Poem]

Stretches
by ,
Armonía (Harmony), 1956, a painting by Remedios Varo, whose work is on view this month at the Art Institute of Chicago.
© 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society, New York/Vegap, Madrid. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago
A video still from “Controlled Burn,” by Julian Charrière, whose work is on view this month at Sean Kelly, in Los Angeles.
© 2023 Julian Charrière/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly
After Haymaking, a painting by Jaclyn Conley, whose work was on view in September with MARUANI MERCIER at the Armory Show, in New York City.
© The artist. Courtesy Maruani Mercier, Belgium
Born in 1934 (1), a collage of hand-embossed photograms, made of imprints of an eighty-three-year-old cedar tree on silver gelatin paper, by Klea McKenna, whose work was on view in October as part of the exhibition Vessel, at EUQINOM Gallery, in San Francisco. Her monograph, Witness Mark, was published in September by Saint Lucy Books.
© The artist. Courtesy Saint Lucy Books
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Disclosure
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Report]

The Machine Breaker

Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”

by ,
[From the Archive]

The Upper Crust
by ,
[Letter from Reno]

Four Men

Keeping company with outdoor people

by ,
[Letter from Cherán]

Forbidden Fruit

The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán

by ,
[Memoir]

Mere Belief

Sliding down the curve of forgetting

by ,
[Fiction]

I Remember
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Overwhelming and Collective Murder

The grand, gruesome theories of René Girard

by ,
[Puzzle]

Gamekeepers

See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

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.

Fausta Kingué. Source image: Newmont Mining TS Power Plant © Ron Wolf Microfiche

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