Sections

Radioactive Man

On (maybe) unraveling a government cover-up

The Secret of Who She Was

How my mother learned to be invisible

Impossible Island

The Social Turn

Psychoanalysis at an inflection point

Ganny

Truer words at a funeral

Going Soft

Future-proofing the American worker

The Last Detail

On patrol with the Guardian Angels

New World Symphonies

Listening for the future of music

Rage Against the Machine

Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy

Range Life

A heated history of public lands

High and Dry

Sobriety and transcendence at Bonnaroo

A Good Company

Searching for my publisher’s radioactive oil waste

The Ghosts in the Machine

Spotify’s plot against musicians

Voices from the Dead Letter Office

On the epistolary life

The Painted Protest

How politics destroyed contemporary art

Sleepless in Sofia

For the first and very likely the last time in my life, I’m appearing on a prime-time talk show. In Bulgaria. I’m in the capital, Sofia, for a festival, and…

“This Time Is Different”

“This time is different.” With Donald Trump’s second term off to a roaring, snorting start—a furious dust cloud of ICE raids and ICE-raid photo ops, tariffs announced and then paused,…

The Mask of Imperialism

They make a wilderness, and they call it peace. —Tacitus, Agricola Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump’s return to office has only put a…

Expect More Bulldozings

An Ornament of Our Dingy Office

William Dean Howells called it his “Uneasy Chair.” Lewis H. Lapham thought it “a column always grotesquely misnamed.” Bernard DeVoto simply wanted to do something else—a books section—and tried to fob…

The First Punch

How does History move? A generation ago, in the Nineties, it seemed to have forgotten how: perhaps, as Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, History was on a journey, or…

Lo-fi Beats for Work or Study

I’ve written in many places, some wonderful, others makeshift or uncomfortable. I’ve written on trains and in hotel rooms, at ergonomically perfect desks and on laptops balanced on my knees.…

Power Lines

“The American political scene,” wrote Perry Anderson in 2013, “is conventionally depicted in high colour.” According to conventional—that is, liberal—observers in the Bush and Obama years, America “cartwheeled from brutish…

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 Tsadik, the Roshe, and the Ugly

From an essay that appears for the first time in English in Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: A Spiritual Reappraisal, 1946–1955, a collection of his pseudonymous essays for the Yiddish…

Little White Lies

From a Department of Justice report on the Tulsa race massacre that was published in January, before President Biden left office, and conducted by its Cold Case Unit, Civil Rights…

Word Search

From Speaking in Tongues, by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, which will be published this month by Liveright. j. m. coetzee: I was writing something yesterday, concentrating intensely on getting into words…

Role Models

From What Is Wrong with Men, a study of how portrayals of the American man have changed in films starring Michael Douglas, which will be published next month by Pantheon.…

Doge with a Bone

From posts shared in February on the subreddit r/fednews, a “platform for U.S. Federal employees to discuss work-related topics, share perspectives, and stay informed.” I work in grants and since…

Like the Circles Under Your Eyes

From The Essential C. D. Wright, which will be published this month by Copper Canyon Press. clouds jammed into the foreground     big toe in the suckhole with all our know-how…

This Garment Called Life

By Hélène Bessette, from Lili Is Crying, which will be published next month by New Directions. Translated from the French by Kate Briggs. It’s like this, says Lili. I left…

Answering Machine

From a press conference given in March by Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario. reporter: As you have acknowledged, a trade war is going to hurt. Food-bank use was already…

Birds to Song

From Runagate, a collection of poems that draw on archival records of chattel slavery. The book will be published this month by Duke University Press. jack (and paul) Escaped by…

Mortal Coils

From Earthly Materials, which will be published this month by Mariner Books. Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around…

Heavens? No

From Issue 11 of Deadlines and Divine Distractions, which was published in December. Dearest (If I may): Do (and here I’m charitably speculating that my previous letters have for some…

Home Front

From interviews given to a researcher by six Ukrainian women in May and June of last year and provided to Harper’s Magazine. The researcher’s identity has been withheld to protect…

Poetic License

From “Notes on Baudelaire’s Parisian Tableaux,” which was published for the first time in English in the Fall 2024 issue of October. Translated from the French by Michael Krimper. Baudelaire…

Eye of Death

From The Rose, which will be published this month by Graywolf Press. Me & Amanda went to see David Blaine the night of the Scorpio Eclipse. He held his breath…

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

A Manner of Squeaking

The Dangerous Problem

The century-long struggle to prove the Collatz conjecture

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

Beautiful Partygoer

Collages by Joanna Neborsky We’d been in Maine six months, but for the first three our kids had continued to Zoom with their Brooklyn school and then summer had come.…

The Keys to Veracruz

From the unfinished novel The Woman from Nowhere

Why Trees

Paintings by Dror Cohen for Harper’s Magazine A ten-minute coffee break was called on set, time Laura used to continue her keen, proprietary staking out of those lives she might…

Half-Believers

Mother-Daughter Story

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After…

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

The Sameness of Different Things

Reading a new translation of Capital

New Books

The corpse flower, when it opens every few years, attracts admirers by the tens of thousands. It is only in bloom for two or three days, and for those days…

When the Battle’s Lost and Won

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy

New Books

I first encountered Robert Crumb at my local Blockbuster, in the mid-Nineties, when Crumb became available for rental. I wasn’t more than ten at the time, so I didn’t understand…

The Passive Trickster

Katie Kitamura’s anti-expressive fiction

New Books

An Unstoppable March

The story of 2 Tone

New Books

Such a Schemozzle

The beauty of John McGahern’s prose

New Books

Julian the Apostate, by Julien Nguyen © Julien Nguyen. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Shia LaBeouf and I were born six days apart in June 1986. I see him as the…

A Man Out of Time

Dino Buzzati’s accidental realism

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

Mix ’n’ Match

Facetious Friends

Crackers

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

Findings

Mating Season, a painting by Sophie Milner © The artist California ground squirrels are carnivorous. Monkeys are faster at spotting a snake among salamanders than a salamander among snakes. Dogs…

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,…