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April 2024

[Forum]

Crime and Punishment

Can American policing be fixed?

by , , , , , , ,
[Report]

The Eviction Experts

Can a city stop a housing crisis?

by ,
[Letter from Phoenix]

Jacob’s Dream

MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Biden voters are more likely than Trump voters to have read a history book in 2023 : 5

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

By which they are more likely to have read a young-adult novel : 350

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. voters who would be more likely to vote for a 2024 presidential candidate if Taylor Swift endorsed them : 18

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that immigrants illegally entering the United States “poison the blood” of the country : 45

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which cases of children poisoned by marijuana edibles in the United States have increased since 2017 : 13

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of cocaine users worldwide who live in the United States : 1/4

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Americans working in the food-service industry are more likely than average to die of a drug overdose : 180

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

By which Americans who work in construction or mining are more likely to do so : 286

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who have died by medically assisted suicide who attended college : 72

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who were white : 96

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans over the age of 50 who have set aside money for long-term care : 37

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the U.S. centenarian population is expected to increase over the next 30 years : 4

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2019 in the number of plastic-surgery procedures in the United States : 19

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

In Botox and other neuromodulator injections : 73

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of minutes it takes for an American to drive to the nearest emergency room : 17

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who live within a 10-minute drive of a firearms dealer : 88

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Average annual starting salary for a new police officer in San Jose, California : $111,000

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

In New York City : $58,000

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which Americans are more likely to oppose defunding the police than to support doing so : 5

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American adults who say their interactions with police officers in the past year were positive experiences overall : 77

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Of black American adults who say so : 68

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American adults who believe that black people experience a great deal of discrimination today : 34

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of LGBT American men who say that discrimination is a major barrier to their adopting a child from foster care : 1/2

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American women who say getting married and having children makes women’s lives happier and more fulfilling : 32

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American women under 30 who say this : 24

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of women worldwide who experience physical pain on a daily basis : 1/3

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of women worldwide who have been unable to afford shelter at times during the past year : 1/3

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of years until the world’s first trillionaire emerges : 10

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. wealth inequality that is accounted for by inheritances : 61

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which American adults under 35 are more likely to say their parents’ role in their lives is too small than too large : 144

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of American boys and men aged 13–39 who say that sports are interesting only if gambling is involved : 39

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of internet users who believe they are living in a simulation : 1/2

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of American adults under 30 who believe the Holocaust did not happen : 1/5

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who are waiting for an apology from someone in their life : 46

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage by which participants in workplace mental-wellness programs are more likely to report greater well-being : 0

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease since 2019 in the number of Americans who say that psychiatrists have high ethical standards : 16

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the rate of retraction of academic papers has increased in the past decade : 3.5

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who know their blood type : 51

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who know their credit score : 58

April 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who know their zodiac sign : 66

April 2024

Readings

[Essay]

Redeeming Time
by ,
[Coinage]

Ethernal Damnation
[Chitchat]

The Person Who Performs
[Correspondence]

The Same Grave
by ,
[Flânerie]

The Absent Reader
by ,
[Customer Support]

Atlas Shrugged
[Fiction]

Everything Extremely Alive
by ,
[Public Record]

Shuck and Awe
[Poem]

Village of Dolls
by ,
A photograph by Richard Billingham from his book Ray’s a Laugh, which was published last month by MACK.
 

© The artist. Courtesy MACK

To Leave a Place/Memory, a painting by Dominique Fung, whose work was on view in December at Massimo De Carlo, in London.

 

Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo

The Wait of the World, a drawing by Michael Andrew Booker, whose work is on view this month at Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at the University of Texas at Austin. 

 

Courtesy the artist and Morton Fine Art, Washington

“Hounds at the tree, Lochsa River valley, 1992,” by Barbara Bosworth, from her monograph One Star and a Dark Voyage, which was published in 2021 by TIS Books. Bosworth’s work is on view this month at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

 

© The artist. Courtesy TIS Books 

Piscando Espárragos Tres and Piscando Espárragos Uno, mixed-media artworks (acrylic, charcoal, simple leaf, and matte gel on produce box) by Narsiso Martinez, whose work is on view this month at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, in New York, and was on view in February with Charlie James Gallery at Material Art Fair, in Mexico City.

 

© The artist. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles

[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Dance Factory
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Forum]

Crime and Punishment

Can American policing be fixed?

by , , , , , , ,
[From the Archive]

Between Tact and Force
by ,
[Report]

The Eviction Experts

Can a city stop a housing crisis?

by ,
[Letter from Phoenix]

Jacob’s Dream

MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius

by ,
[Annotation]

Heir Mail

Decrypting the correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots

by ,
[Story]

Fortune’s Prime
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Children for Sale

When Guatemalan adoption became big business

by ,
[Puzzle]

April Foolishness

See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[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.

[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.

Police officer © TQS/Alamy Microfiche

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