Sections

The Painted Protest

How politics destroyed contemporary art

Completely Hazardous Experiments

My father’s mercury

In the Rockets’ Red Glare

The past and future of hot-rodding in America

Revenge Plot

The GOP’s identity crisis

Ithaca

Rewriting my mother's diaries

The Seventy Percent

On minor characters and human possibility

The Island King

A fugitive monarch dreams of fortune and freedom

Demographics
vs. Destiny

The dawn of the Asian-American conservative

The Antitrust Revolution

Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech

The Fever Called Living

On the plight of environmental-­illness refugees

The Hindutva Lobby

How Hindu nationalism spreads in America

What Are You Going to Do With That?

The future of college in the asset economy

The Thin Purple Line

The dubious rise of the private-security industry

The New Age Bible

On the origins of A Course in Miracles

My Mother’s Oysters

Recollections of Breton summers

Above Politics

For all those involved in the publication and dissemination of ideas, freedom of expression is the foundation on which our work depends. Like many writers, I have campaigned to defend…

Blank Ballot

On a damp, gray afternoon in April, I took my daughter with me to vote in the New York Democratic primary. After a long Tuesday, she was keen to get…

Be Here Now

On March 14, 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic sat down at a small table in the center of a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Visitors were invited…

“As If You Was a Insect”

“How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them,” lamented Marian Evans in 1856. She had reason to feel she knew better. The…

Ruin-Haunted

In bookstores in Rome, you can buy a poster headed, in English, i have a dream. It has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr. or the civil-rights struggle, instead…

Dance Factory

On the Friday night before New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend and I were in line for the toilets at the techno club Berghain, in Berlin, discussing Buddhism. I’m usually skeptical…

Leggete Tolkien, Stolti!

If you had asked ten-year-old me about my favorite author, I would have replied unhesitatingly that it was J.R.R. Tolkien. The experience of reading The Lord of the Rings had been…

The Palm at the End of the Mind

A French activist I know, a person with a flair for assailing the idiocies of modern life, someone who pines, though not romantically, for a trapdoor to a better world,…

Digging in the Crates

For some months I’ve been living in Rome, up on the hill called the Gianicolo, which slopes down to the western bank of the Tiber. In antiquity it was the…

Famous Strangers

Al Gore once leaned in close, in a kitchen, late at night, at a party at a film festival, as someone snapped a photo of us. I never circulated it;…

Disclosure

Some years ago, before I became an American citizen, I held a visa that prompted immigration officials to quiz me about my work. These exchanges often went badly. If you…

Learning to Wait

The original Anthology Film Archives, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, was designed with high black partitions between each seat, so that viewers could wall themselves in to the screen like…

The Thing Itself

First Raccoon

From Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, which will be published this month by Doubleday. Rebecca was an unusual White House inhabitant for two reasons. The first was…

Family Portrait

From letters exchanged by John Berger and his son Yves, collected in Over to You, which will be published this month by Pantheon Books. Yves, I send two “postcards.” One…

The Specter at the Feast

From Mourning a Breast, which was published in July by New York Review Books. Translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley. Every fall, my friends and I get together to…

Race Against Death

From the introduction to a new edition of By Night in Chile, a novella by Roberto Bolaño that was published in 2000 by Editorial Anagrama. The book was translated from…

Crime and Punishment

Can American policing be fixed?

Is Liberalism Worth Saving?

The future of an ideal

What’s in a Vote?

Electoral politics in an ailing democracy

Constitution in Crisis

Has America’s founding document become the nation’s undoing?

Stonewall at Fifty

Early in the morning on June 28, 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street, the city’s most popular gay bar. The police had raided Stonewall…

Combat High

America’s addiction to war

Permanent Spots

An encounter with early New York graffiti

Signs of the Times

The political history of the Olympic pictogram

Heir Mail

Decrypting the correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots

City in a Forest

The fight over Atlanta’s new police academy

We Started the Fire

The risks of prescribed burns in a warming climate

Lone on the Range

Prairie madness on the Great Plains

Knights-Errant

Online chess reshapes the game of kings

Come and Get It

A risky invitation to extraterrestrials

No Pain, No Gain

Pandemic bonds and the privatization of public health

Lost Cause

How police violence disappears from death certificates

The Hothouse

Tracking the past and future spread of ragweed allergies

Your Own Devices

The Right to Repair movement gains ground

A Firm Hand

McKinsey goes to Rikers Island

Divine Logic

Kurt Gödel’s last proof

Mare’s Milk

Discourse to Self

Day 121

Collages by Catie O’Leary for Harper’s Magazine There is someone in the house. Heard as he moves around the room upstairs. When he gets out of bed or when he…

Four Stories

Paintings by Yann Kebbi for Harper’s Magazine i did trip over a very small boy I did trip over a small boy who fell down and cried, and I feared…

Lovefool

Illustration by Leonie Bos The night before my brother’s second wedding, he held a rehearsal dinner that was, per contemporary tradition, a rehearsal only for the pained social interactions that…

Liquid Papers

The Pleasure of a Working Life

Illustrations by Miguel Manich At the time of the adman’s death, Gary Minihan had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years. He spent the first thirty as a letter…

New Material

Fortune’s Prime

Years later, my grandmother would still tell people that I learned to swim in a movie star’s pool, though she always said this with the same slanted tone and pinched…

The Egg

Bell the Cat

Basha Boosha

You never realize how accustomed your eye grows to a familiar variety of human species in a particular place, including that place’s indigenous freaks and weirdos, until a bizarre specimen…

Mount Archer

I Remember

Collages by Jim Goldberg, from Coming and Going, which was published in September by MACK © Jim Goldberg/Magnum. Courtesy the artist and MACK In recollection it seems less memory than…

The Year of the Rabbit

I’m going to take a minute now to see if I can get my dates straight. Peter and I were married in June 1962. In early December, Peter told me…

New Books

A Sudden, Revealing Searchlight

On Jean Strouse and the art of biography

New Books

The AARP stands for nothing. In 1999, the group announced that its four-letter initialism, which for more than forty years had denoted the American Association of Retired Persons, would thenceforth…

Dying Is a Form of Education

On Elden Ring

New Books

Hare (Blue Eyes), by Valerie Hammond © The artist. Courtesy Planthouse, New York City Had I known that Aesop’s fables were so unhinged, I would’ve turned to them long ago.…

Nuance and Nuisance

On the Village Voice

New Books

A photograph by Steven Ahlgren from his book The Office, which was published by Hoxton Mini Press © The artist I’ve never visited the office of this magazine. Oh, sure,…

Glimmers of Totality

Fredric Jameson at ninety

New Books

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony in Miami, 1922 © Bettmann/Getty Images One of the most jarring things about the Ku Klux Klan is the silliness of their rituals and…

Music and Mystery

Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

New Books

Something about poetry—writing it, reading it, writing about reading it—begs to be postponed indefinitely. I don’t mean that I dread it, only that it calls for conditions that never quite…

Yesterday’s Men

The death of the mythical method

The Scavenger of History

On Eliot Weinberger

New Books

I’m a father now. Please, hold your applause. As I write this, my son is fifteen days old, and I’m staring into the soft hurricane whorl of his hair, thinking…

Fast Food

Joke

Down and Out

The Count of Monte Cristo

Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)

Don’t Go There

Matched Sets

Abecedarian Jigsaw

April Foolishness

Phraseography

Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)

Surprise! Surprise!

Duets

Gamekeepers

Theme and Variations

Findings

Untangling Yarn (Bedimmed Boundaries), by Wangari Mathenge, whose work was on view last month at Nicola Vassell Gallery, in New York City © Wangari Mathenge. Courtesy the artist and Nicola…

Findings

Photographs from the series Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, 1996–98, by John Divola, whose work was on view in May as part of the exhibition Hard Copy, at…

Findings

“Yellow Towels #2, 1979” and “Amy, Phil, and Brian, 1980,” photographs by Tina Barney, from her book Tina Barney: The Beginning, which was published last year by Radius Books ©…

Findings

“Effusion,” “Fluxitecture,” “Haven,” and “Heart(h),” photographs by David Garland, whose work is on view this month at Headstone Gallery, in Kingston, New York © The artist. Courtesy Headstone Gallery, Kingston,…

Findings

Sparkling City with Egg Monuments #2, by Lari Pittman © The artist. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin In 2023, the hottest year on record, the number of unprovoked shark attacks remained level,…

Findings

Photograms by Shao-Feng Hsu, from the series Night Swimming, in which he captures his breathing patterns while swimming under the new moon © The artist Off the Five Finger Islands,…

Findings

Astronomers discovered a large planet that orbits an improbably small star every 3.7 days. A hyperbolic meteor from the Oort Cloud that may have undergone gravitational perturbation in its passage…

Findings

The average American girl born in 2019 will take prescription drugs for more than half her life, former members of the U.S. Special Forces with various neuropsychiatric problems experienced positive…

Findings

Temperance in Eden, a painting by Autumn Nelson © The artist. Courtesy Tyger Tyger Gallery, Asheville, North Carolina As the U.S. population ages, old people are committing more crimes. Positive…

Findings

Researchers found that, over the course of an academic year, middle schoolers grew increasingly unpopular and more likely to misuse alcohol if they were considered unattractive and unathletic, and that…

Findings

“Holding, Japanese Cypress, 1,” “Holding, Japanese Cypress, 2,” and “Holding, Japanese Cypress, 3,” photographs by Melanie Schiff © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles   Global…