Page 2 | Harper's Magazine

Nobody Knows

When I was eighteen, I spent several months working as a bus girl at a diner. It was a cheerful-looking place, facing San Francisco Bay. The kitchen was L-shaped: the…

Village People

by Terry Southern,

By Terry Southern (1924–95), from an unpublished manuscript written in 1952. It is included in Making It Hot for Them, a collection of his writings edited by Nile Southern that…

If These Walls Could Talk

by Lauren Markham,

The strange history of our futile border fortifications

The Bodies in The Forest

by Masha Gessen,

By Masha Gessen, from Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia, which will be published next month by Columbia Global Reports. Gessen’s book The Future Is History won…

Public Displays of Affection

From descriptions of objects held by the Museum of Broken Relationships, which is located in Zagreb, Croatia, and exhibits mementos submitted anonymously by people around the world. A catalogue of…

The Minds of Others

by David Bromwich, Garth Greenwell, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kelly Clancy, Laila Lalami, Mychal Denzel Smith, T. M. Luhrmann,

The art of persuasion in the age of Trump

Modern Despots

by Aldous Huxley,

In a democratic state any propagandist will have rivals competing with him for the support of the public. In totalitarian states there is no liberty of expression for writers and…

Lines and Lineage

by Tomas van Houtryve,

We often forget that the boundary between the United States and Mexico was not always where it is today. It used to be seven hundred miles farther north, following what…

On the Corner of Myth and Main

by Walter Kirn,

There was a time when I didn’t know that I lived in Middle America. When I was very young, growing up in eastern Minnesota, I thought I was just an…

Destroyer of Worlds

by Elaine Scarry, Eric Schlosser, Lydia Millet, Mohammed Hanif, Rachel Bronson, Theodore Postol,

Taking stock of our nuclear present

Terms of Surrender

by Henry Lewis Stimson,

It was in the fall of 1941 that the question of atomic energy was first brought directly to my attention. At that time President Roosevelt appointed a committee to advise…

History

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