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Articles

Something Big

The legend of the Watts Towers

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Plexiglass

I sat in a taxi with Emma and her son, Stak, all three bodies muscled into the rear seat, and the boy checked the driver’s I.D. and immediately began to…

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New Books

Halfway through David Means’s brilliant new novel, HYSTOPIA (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) — a careening metafiction that hallucinates a post-Vietnam America governed by a third-term JFK in which gangs…

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New Television

“If we want to know what American normality is — i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal — we can trust television,” David Foster Wallace once wrote. Can we?…

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Disappearing Act

Mark Leyner’s self-consuming fictions

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A Foreign Cause

Why the Spanish Civil War feels so distant

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Findings

Primatologists described an episode among Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) wherein Ekko, a male, sexually inspected Sidony, an old female, then changed his mind and began to mate with Kondor,…

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Letters

Editor’s Note This month we are introducing three changes to the regular format of Harper’s Magazine. In the Readings section, the usual found documents and fine art are accompanied by…

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Bird in a Cage

There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he…

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Harper’s Index

Percentage of refugees resettled in 2014 who were taken in by developing countries : 86 Amount in excess of which the cash assets of refugees will be seized under a proposed Danish…

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Introduction

Last fall, young people gathered in protest at dozens of universities across the country. Students of color spoke about feeling unwelcome or invisible, of being stereotyped, slighted, excluded, harassed. One…

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Weary Oracle

By Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin is the author of four books of poetry, including Good Stock, which will be published by Coffee House Press in 2016. She teaches at the…

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Blanket Security

By Thomas Chatterton Williams. Williams is the author of the memoir Losing My Cool, published by Penguin Press in 2010.

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A Kind of Grace

By Hannah Black. Black is an artist and writer from the U.K. She is the author of Dark Pool Party, which was published last month by Dominica/Arcadia Missa.

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Common Cause

By Alix Rule. Rule is a doctoral student in sociology at Columbia University.

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Political Correction

By Osita Nwanevu. Nwanevu is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago and the editor of the South Side Weekly.

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We Out Here

By Wesley Yang. Yang has written for New York magazine, the New York Times, and n+1. He is at work on his first book.

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Imaginary August

By C. D. Wright (1949–2016), from ShallCross, which will be published next month by Copper Canyon Press. Wright was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. She…

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Signed and Dated

From a relationship contract created by a first-year male undergraduate and signed by him and a girlfriend. The contract is part of ongoing research for Consent Stories, a project by…

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A Child to the State

By Jacqueline Waters, from Commodore, which will be published next year by Ugly Duckling Presse. Waters is the author of two previous volumes of poetry, including, most recently, One Sleeps…

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Parties Foul

From themes of parties that have been held by college students in the United States and the U.K., collected by Laura Bates. Her book Everyday Sexism will be published in…

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Never Never Man

From “Severe Growing-Up Phobia,” a paper that was coauthored by Laurencia Perales Blum and published in Case Reports in Psychiatry, in 2014. The paper discusses a Mexican boy who suffered…

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The Hidden Rivers of Brooklyn

From behind a parapet on the tower of Litchfield Villa, the Italianate mansion that marks the western edge of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I was barely able to make out —…

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April 2016

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