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January 2025

[Report]

The Ghosts in the Machine

Spotify’s plot against musicians

by ,
[Letter from Kansas]

The Forever Cure

Is civil commitment rehabilitating sex offenders—or punishing them?

by ,
[Essay]

Voices from the Dead Letter Office

On the epistolary life

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say that the election was one of the most stressful events of 2024 : 3/5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that they didn’t care who won and “just wanted it to be over” : 3/10

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the average wait for the Senate to confirm a political appointee has increased since 1981 : 4

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of positions requiring Senate confirmation that were vacant as of March 2024 : 1/5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Of such positions at the Department of Homeland Security : 1/3

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of corporate spending in the 2024 election that came from the cryptocurrency industry : 44

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who own cryptocurrency : 7

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 1982 in the portion of profits that U.S. corporations spend on philanthropy : −37

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2021 in the portion of Americans with a favorable opinion of Elon Musk : +25

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage change since 2022 in preorders of new iPhones : −27

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In sales of flip phones : +76

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans aged 18–30 on social media who describe themselves as influencers : 1/4

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of self-described influencers who have never been paid for this work : 1/2

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Israelis who say that social-media posts criticizing their government should be censored : 50

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who say that expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza should be : 59

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Jewish U.S. college students who say that accusing Israel of human-rights violations is anti-Semitic : 45

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which enrollment in the largest Jewish conversion program in the United States increased in the past year : 3

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of scientists who stop publishing research within five years of their first paper : 1/3

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Within ten years : 1/2

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of academic articles on mathematics published last year that were partially written by AI : 5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Of academic articles on computer science : 18

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated amount of energy, in kilowatt-hours, that was used to discover a new prime number last year : 3,100,000

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of U.S. households this amount of energy could power for a year : 287,000

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of FEMA’s 2025 disaster-relief budget that was spent in the first eight days of the fiscal year : 48

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the rise in the average cost of day care in the United States outpaced the rate of inflation last year : 160

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of American men who are interested in taking birth control : 4/5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who would be willing to try birth control this year if it went on the market today : 1/2

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who would be willing to try it if it involved an invasive procedure : 1/10

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated portion of global steel demand that the Saudi megacity Neom will account for by 2045 : 1/5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of workers who have died since 2016 constructing Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 megaprojects : 21,000

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change over the past year in the portion of Americans who see Saudi Arabia as a U.S. ally : +73

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Number of people executed in the United States between September 20 and 26 last year : 5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Most recent year in which this many Americans were executed in a single week : 2003

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of mental illness among the strongest demographic predictors of an American plotting an act of terrorism : 2

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of serving in the military : 1

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say they go to great lengths to avoid conflict : 7/10

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who believe that World War III is imminent : 4/5

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2013 in U.S. box-office revenue for comedy movies : −31

January 2025
[Harper’s Index]

For horror movies : +70

January 2025

Readings

[Essay]

Energy of Delusion
by ,
[Cache]

Works of Scale
by ,
[Emergency]

Fur and Trembling
[Suggestions]

Second Opinions
[Breakthroughs]

Trivial Pursuits
[Story]

A Three-Hour Tour
by ,
[Adaptation]

Auto-da-fé
by ,
[Defense]

Forest for the Trees
[Fiction]

The Cold Stone
by ,
[Poem]

My Only Synesthesia
by ,
[Stricture]

Signature Move
by ,
[Poem]

What I Lost; What I Gather
by ,
I wish this night will never end, a painting by Ileana Magoda, whose work is on view this month at Bernheim, in Zurich. Courtesy the artist and Bernheim, London and Zurich
Photographs by Maja Daniels from her book Gertrud, which was published in September by Void. © The artist. Courtesy Void
A photograph by Christian Patterson from his book Gong Co., which was co-published last month by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey. Courtesy the artist and TBW Books
Red Tail Lights, a painting by Jane Dickson, whose work was on view in November at Karma, in Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Karma  
Clockwise from top left: #9, #14, #20, and #24, selections from Play from Memory, an audiovisual series by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, whose work is on view as part of the exhibition SOUND MACHINES, curated by MoMA, at Feral File. Courtesy the artists, MoMA, and Feral File
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

An Ornament of Our Dingy Office
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Report]

The Ghosts in the Machine

Spotify’s plot against musicians

by ,
[From the Archive]

Copy Rites
by ,
[Letter from Kansas]

The Forever Cure

Is civil commitment rehabilitating sex offenders—or punishing them?

by ,
[Letter from Lebanon]

Heliopolis

Searching for home in the city of the sun

by ,
[Essay]

Voices from the Dead Letter Office

On the epistolary life

by ,
[Story]

Mother-Daughter Story
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

A Man Out of Time

Dino Buzzati’s accidental realism

by ,
[Puzzle]

Crackers

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.

Cover design by Tina Smith Microfiche

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