Page 17 | Harper's Magazine

History

Laundry and Candidates, Cairo, November 2011

by Rebecca Bird,

Segmented Sleep

At first I dreaded having to investigate the history of sleep. Human slumber appeared impervious to time and place, stubbornly immune to the element of change animating most works of…

Bed-wetting

by Christine Smallwood,

Whereas child bed wetters in sixteenth-century England had been directed for their malady to consume the testicles of a hedgehog or the windpipe of a cock, Enlightenment science, which rejected…

Gaboxadol

by Hamilton Morris,

In 1755 the naturalist Stepan Krasheninnikov observed the Amanita muscaria mushroom’s effects on Russian soldiers in Siberia ingesting it for the first time. Claiming to have been seized by an…

A Brief History of Scent

by Beau Friedlander,

The smell of life and death — and everything in between

Trio Grande

by Thomas Frank,

The lady who changed the world,” was how The Economist described Margaret Thatcher in its obituary. Whether or not we believe that individuals ever wield such power over history, it…

The Scarlet Debtor

by Jeff Madrick,

Debt forgiveness is one of the most important innovations of modern capitalism, but it is a fairly recent one. Though the Constitution gives Congress explicit authority to enact “uniform Laws…