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December 2023

[Experiment]

The Hofmann Wobble

Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory

by ,
[Letter from Bonnyrigg]

Risky Disco

A sensory workshop bridges the gap

by ,
[Letter from Newark]

Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything

Letting go of Philip Roth

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who are considering opting out of family gatherings in order to save money this holiday season : 1/3

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who are considering going into credit card debt to purchase holiday gifts : 1/3

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Republicans who say that their families are worse off than they were a year ago : 60

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Of Democrats who say so : 24

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which Republicans report hearing more negative than positive economic news : 10

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who believe that the country is in a recession : 44

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change in the use of cash since 2017 : –43

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In the use of digital mobile payments : +200

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who wish they had paid more attention to math in school : 2/5

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who wish they had paid less attention to math in school : 1/5

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease since 2019 in the number of U.S. accountants : 16

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who view their jobs as a spiritual calling : 1/5

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which black Americans are more likely than white ones to do so : 72

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who identify as “spiritual” but not “religious” : 1/3

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Chances an American between 26 and 54 has not been to the doctor in the past five years : 2 in 5

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase this year in the number of Americans concerned about affording medical treatment : 47

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Year in which the youngest baby boomer will become eligible for Medicare : 2030

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Republicans who believe that one ethnic group can only become wealthier at the expense of others : 22

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Of Democrats who believe this : 40

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider New York City safe : 191

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

By which Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider large U.S. cities safe in general : 29

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

By which this was the case in 2006 : 2

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change in the divorce rate between 2008 and 2020 : –31

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In the divorce rate between 2020 and 2022 : +2

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of millennials who are not planning to get married : 21

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Of adult Gen Z-ers who are not : 7

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Gen Z-ers who use their phones to share their location with friends : 38

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

With their romantic partners : 41

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. college students whose parents track their location : 1/3

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. college students who support “speech codes” on campus : 51

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which this support has increased over the past year : 22

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. college students who believe that violence can be a justified response to hate speech : 45

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. adults who say the political system is working “very” or “extremely” well : 4

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who express little confidence in the future of the political system : 63

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Who say there is too little attention paid to the important issues facing the country : 78

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease over the past two years in social-media referrals to the top one hundred news sites : 40

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease over the past decade in the number of Americans who trust the tech industry : 31

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Gen Z-ers who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in science : 36

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In the criminal justice system : 5

December 2023
[Harper’s Index]

In the news : 3

December 2023

Readings

[Essay]

Novel Gazing
by ,
[Inquest]

CRISPR Kringle
[Memoir]

Love Bite
by ,
[Words of Wisdom]

Artificial Intelligence
[Rorschach Test]

Offensive Driving
[Skaz]

Émigré Matter
by ,
[Fiction]

A Place in the System
by ,
[Criticism]

Blue My Mind
[Town Hall]

West Point Blank
[Poem]

Privilege
by ,
A photograph by Hudson Hayden, from his monograph Notwithstanding, which was published in September by Loose Joints.
© The artist. Courtesy Loose Joints
“View of the Barents Sea, with oranges that were given out every Sunday in the ship’s canteen and treasured by everyone on board,” a photograph by Evgenia Arbugaeva, from her monograph Hyperborea, which was published in October by Thames & Hudson.
© The artist
Borrowing Money, a painting by Liu Xiaodong, whose work was on view in June at Lisson Gallery, in New York City.
© Liu Xiaodong Studio. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

“Continuum” (detail), an artwork by B. Ingrid Olson, whose work was on view in October as part of the exhibition The Rose at the lumber room, in Portland, Oregon.

Courtesy the artist and Miller Meigs collection
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Famous Strangers
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Experiment]

The Hofmann Wobble

Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory

by ,
[From the Archive]

A Galaxy of Authority
by ,
[Letter from Bonnyrigg]

Risky Disco

A sensory workshop bridges the gap

by ,
[Letter from Newark]

Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything

Letting go of Philip Roth

by ,
[Memoir]

Trapdoor

Where the past overtakes you

by ,
[Story]

Mount Archer

 

by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

The Discreet Eminence

On the enduring legacy of Marshal Pétain

by ,
[Puzzle]

Duets

See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

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.

Cover design by Fausta Kingué Microfiche

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