In Memoriam
We at Harper’s Magazine are saddened by the death of our former contributing editor Thomas de Zengotita (1943–2024), who wrote many essays for the magazine, including “The Numbing of the American Mind” (April 2002) and “The Romance of Empire” (July 2003). He will be deeply missed.
Major Feelings
It is only natural that Asian Americans hold different political views. No one thinks that the Irish, Italians, or Germans who came before us should vote as one bloc; Asian Americans, who come from many different countries, have the same freedom of thought as everyone else. The emergence of conservative Asian Americans, as observed by Matthew Shen Goodman [“Demographics vs. Destiny,” Report, October], discredits the tired liberal stereotype that all minorities think the same way and share the same traits. We have seen this expectation buckle over the past decade, as the support of minority groups for Democratic presidential candidates has declined.
Asian Americans vote conservative for the same reasons that many Americans do. They fear rampant crime on the streets, in buses and subways, and in schools. They see shuttered stores, locked display cases, and open drug use in their cities. They have been both beset by rising prices and taxes and stuck with stagnant paychecks. Like all Americans, Asian Americans are seeing opportunities shrink as the United States loses its economic edge. Their children’s public schools fail to teach basic reading, mathematics, and history. For diversity, equity, and inclusion’s sake, they face racial-balancing programs at magnet schools that aim for equal outcomes rather than equal rights. Political parties should address the issues that Asian Americans care about not because Asian Americans care about them, but because all Americans do.
John Yoo
Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, Calif.
Wai Wah Chin
Charter President, Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York
New York City
Humanum Est Errare
The late Gary Indiana once told me, “Some people are better than other people, as far as virtue goes, and some people are just conniving, self-interested bastards.” This was a lesson he learned from reading Mary McCarthy, and it is this breadth of human character that Yiyun Li [“The Seventy Percent,” Essay, November] seeks to convey to her students by teaching them Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, representative of an “outdated canon” though they may be.
I’ve heard similar objections from students, parents, and administrators in response to the inclusion of Franz Kafka in my tenth-grade World Literature syllabus: What place does a self-loathing white philanderer have in high school curricula a century after his death? Of what relevance is an absurdist fable, written in German, about a sad man who transforms into an insect, to an American teenager in the twenty-first century?
A teacher’s job is to break down students’ resistance to critical thinking in a milieu where “thoughts are no more than slogans.” The meaning of the “humanities” thus may be that we become human by recognizing our flaws—or, as Li puts it, by learning to tolerate “ambiguity, both in literature and in life.” This is a truth that Kafka understood, and that used to be called “empathy.”
Andrew Marzoni
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Risk Aversion
In his article on the plight of the “environmental-illness refugee” [“The Fever Called Living,” Miscellany, October], Evan Malmgren ultimately dismisses his own body’s reactions to routers and transceivers as “magical thinking,” thereby undermining the activism and advocacy of the 5G critics he profiles. But in a world where, in Malmgren’s words, “cancer-linked chemicals permeate common consumer goods” and “microplastics swarm our bodies,” is it really so inconceivable that network technologies—novel and pervasive as they are—could do us harm? By brushing off the possibility as mere myth born of paranoia, Malmgren tells Harper’s readers exactly what Big Telecom wants them to hear.
Kate McCahill
Santa Fe, N.M.
Taking on Trust
As a journalist who covers the impact of technology on our political system, I thought Barry C. Lynn’s article on tech monopolies [“The Antitrust Revolution,” Report, October] was excellent and on-target. As we see democratic principles erode in Western nations, the fact that big tech companies are beginning to rival nation-states in their geopolitical influence is deeply concerning. These corporations are now richer and more powerful than most countries. The best response to these developments is to face the contours of this brave new technocratic world head-on. Given the astonishingly unfettered power of the tech sector, it’s crucial to realize that simply regulating these systems while allowing them to continue to siphon off the power of traditional governments will not be enough to preserve our quality of life going forward.
Thomas S. Valovic
Lawrence, Mass.
Tricks of the Trade
While I found Matthew Karp’s adoption of Michael Mann’s framework of social power [“Power Lines,” Easy Chair, October] useful for analyzing U.S. politics, one detail in the article is misleading: to state that the Democrats retain a base in organized labor is to gloss over the party’s long-standing assault on labor ever since Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, thereby failing that particular base over the past three decades.
Colin Green
Portland, Ore.
Even Flow
Hari Kunzru’s column on music as a path to the “flow state” [“Lo-fi Beats for Work or Study,” Easy Chair, November] struck a fortissimo chord for me. Indeed, ambient music is meant to “induce calm and a space to think” by accommodating “many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular” and being “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as Brian Eno wrote. The listener is simultaneously hearing and not hearing, unawarely aware. For me, the best music to write by consists of Haydn’s 104 symphonies played in order. This way, even his Surprise symphony has none.
John W. Crowley
Marcellus, N.Y.
