Technological innovations

To Infinity and Beyond

By Maël Renouard, Translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty

From Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, a memoir, which will be published in November by New York Review Books. Translated from the French by Peter…

From research topics funded by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency between 2007 and 2012. The list was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists. BiomaterialsMetamaterialsFusion propulsion Read More

Destroyer of Worlds

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

In February 1947, Harper’s Magazine published Henry L. Stimson’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” As secretary of war, Stimson had served as the chief military adviser to President…

Face the Nation

From news reports in the past year of facial-recognition technologies that have been implemented in China. Read More

An Energy-Generating Beaver Dam

By Jacques Leslie,

Crossing the Valley

By Walter Kirn,

Like campaigning politicians, pornographers — who are also in the business of galvanizing tired nervous systems — face one problem that never goes away: cutting through the numbness caused by…

Packing Heat

By Tomas van Houtryve,

A Radioactive Money Pit

By Sajan Saini, M.V. Ramana,

Correction: Because of a production error, a portion of the third paragraph on page 64 was deleted. The complete paragraph should read: Vendors like BWXT are unlikely to admit it, but these…

The Digital Revolution That Wasn’t

By Jeff Madrick,

For as long as there have been machines, there have been worries about their power to destroy jobs. The Luddites — early-nineteenth-century artisans who bitterly resisted the new textile machinery…

The Future Progressive

By Jeff Madrick,

In his classic book On Liberty, the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill urged that man strive to become “a progressive being.” Mill defined progressivism as the cultivation of individuality;…

Publisher’s Letter

By John R. MacArthur,

When I began my tenure as publisher of Harper’s Magazine nearly thirty years ago, my biggest challenge—?or so I thought at the time—?was to get advertising agencies to pay more…

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