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July 2024

[Essay]

The Gods of Logic

Before and after artificial intelligence

by ,
[Essay]

Metal Machine Music

Can AI think creatively? Can we?

by ,
[Letter from Cologne]

The Dead Admonish

Facing the ghosts of resistance and exile

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which U.S. adults are more likely to say their mother was a greater moral influence on them than their father was : 86

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

By which they are more likely to say their father was a greater political influence on them than their mother was : 130

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease since 2018 in the portion of Americans who say there are too few women in high political offices : 10

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say their federal income taxes were too high this year : 60

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Year in which Americans were last this critical of federal income-tax rates : 2001

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of hiring managers who say they knowingly ask illegal questions during job interviews : 1/3

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. CEOs who say they get enough sleep : 77

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. board chairs who say so : 100

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of stadiums in U.S. men’s major sports leagues that were named for a corporate sponsor in the first half of the 1990s : 7

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

That are today : 87

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated value of U.S. coins lost in the garbage each year : $67,000,000

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Hours of minimum-wage labor that it would take to afford a Christmas greeting card from a Virginia prison commissary : 2.96

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

To afford a Ramadan greeting card : 8.63

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of people executed by lethal injection in Georgia since 1977 who were black : 30

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of botched lethal injections in Georgia since 1977 in which the person being executed was black : 86

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of cases in which U.S. police officers were charged with selling, dealing, or trafficking drugs since 2005 : 628

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

In which U.S. police officers were charged with sex-related crimes : 3,663

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of these sex-related offenses that were perpetrated by officers who had previously faced criminal charges : 41

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Most common age of victims of sexual abuse by U.S. police officers : 15

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in the portion of chronically absent U.S. public school students since 2015 : 73

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. public school teachers who say their school had at least one gun-related lockdown last year : 1/4

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage who believe that arming teachers would be effective in preventing shootings : 13

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage who believe that improved mental-health screening and treatment would be effective : 69

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. teenagers who say they feel anxious without their phones : 44

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who say they feel peaceful : 72

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease over the past year in the portion of Americans aged 18 to 34 who have a favorable opinion of Israel : 41

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Number of confirmed killings of Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7 : 92

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Number of other confirmed killings of journalists and media workers around the world during that period : 9

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Number of reported killings of aid workers in Gaza during that period : 244

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of aid workers killed worldwide each year in the past decade : 123

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of land previously used for agriculture in Gaza that was destroyed between October 7 and March 2024 : 2/5

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of common fruits and vegetables sold in the United States that contain dangerous levels of pesticides : 1/5

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of hot dogs eaten per second in the United States between Memorial Day and Labor Day each year : 818

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. voters who believe Trump would perform better than Biden in a hot-dog-eating contest : 58

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who believe Trump would be better than Biden at changing a diaper : 24

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of likely Trump voters who say that a conviction in his New York criminal trial would not affect their vote for him : 62

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that it would make them even more likely to vote for him : 26

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say they would support their state’s secession from the Union : 1/4

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase over the past fifty years in the number of Americans who say they would like to move to another country : 240

July 2024
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in fireworks sales in the United States since 2000 : 203

July 2024

Readings

[Essay]

Art and Artifice
by ,
[Objections]

Body of Crisp
[Geography]

These Little Worlds
by ,
[Apologies]

Hot Mess
[Story]

Thicket
by ,
[Philosophy]

Mathopotamia
by ,
[Probability]

Odd Odds
[Fiction]

The Approach of a Dangerous Fate
by ,
[Poem]

The Best I Can Do Is to Be Concrete
by ,
[Messages]

Tears and Pain

Rain in the city, a painting by Louis Fratino, whose monograph Louis Fratino was published in May by Magic Hour Press. Fratino’s work is on view through November at the Venice Biennale, in Italy.

© The artist. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York City

“1365-03 Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture,” a photograph by Yoko Ikeda, whose book Contrepoint was published by IBASHO and the(M) éditions. Ikeda’s work was on view last month as part of the exhibition All That’s Fit, at The Fulcrum, in Los Angeles.

© The Artist. Courtesy IBASHO

“East MLK Blvd., Austin, Texas, 2021” and “Praying Cowboy, Gladewater, Texas, 2021,” photographs by Rahim Fortune from his book Hardtack, which was published in April by Loose Joints.

© The artist. Courtesy Loose Joints

Meridian, a mixed-media artwork (oil, acrylic, acrylic polymer, archival paper, ink, aluminum, Dibond, and wood) by Sarah Sze, whose work was on view last month at Victoria Miro, in Venice, Italy.

© The artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Be Here Now
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Essay]

The Gods of Logic

Before and after artificial intelligence

by ,
[Essay]

Metal Machine Music

Can AI think creatively? Can we?

by ,
[From the Archive]

A Jangling Noise of Words
by ,
[Letter from Syria]

There Was and There Was Not

Among the ruins of Aleppo

by ,
[Annotation]

Signs of the Times

The political history of the Olympic pictogram

by ,
[Letter from Cologne]

The Dead Admonish

Facing the ghosts of resistance and exile

by ,
[Story]

Liquid Papers
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

Yesterday’s Men

The death of the mythical method

by ,
[Puzzle]

Don’t Go There

See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[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.

[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.

Cover design by Fausta Kingué Microfiche

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