Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Harper's Magazine

Habit for Humanity Meghan O’Gieblyn’s article [“Routine Maintenance,” Essay, January] captures what is unnerving and infuriating about Silicon Valley’s automation boosterism. Turtlenecked executives bloviate about the need to be “flexible” and “creative” in order to compete with machines, while hiring workers on temporary or limited contracts out of which people can hardly make stable lives. For Karl Marx, and the other thinkers O’Gieblyn cites, the independence that comes with financial security is what makes it possible for people to live ethical lives, to mold their habits in accord with an inner purpose. By contrast, existential insecurity—the defining feature of the freelancer or the gig worker’s life—short-circuits that experience. Lives of routine and repetition are lived as lives of dull compulsion. Our insecurity creates a scarcity mentality. When we have less…

It was a mild May evening in South Carolina’s Congaree National Park, and Raphael Sarfati stood on a trail beneath a loblolly pine he’d chosen as a landmark. The horizon to his left glimmered with light from the nearby city of Columbia, while the tree marked the border of a dark and wild wood. Slanted rays of twilight burnished the trunk, which stretched for perhaps eighty feet before dissolving into an oval of green. The pine, with its fire-blackened base, was probably not yet fifty years old, a juvenile in a bottomlands ecosystem with thousand-year-old bald cypresses. It was the sort of tree Sarfati could recognize in the night, and so it served now as a cue to plunge into the undergrowth toward his field site. Sarfati is in his…

At the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, Tim Goebel stood by the ice just before his long program. At the time, people called him the Quad King. In figure skating, competitors gather speed along the ice, leap into the air, spin quickly, and land on a thin blade of steel so sharp it can slice open a skull. Done well, a jump is sublime: a crisp, impossible suspension aloft. Goebel was among the first men to complete four spins before landing, and the first to do so from three different takeoff positions. He had won bronze at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics with a sweet, nonchalant rendition of “An American in Paris” that included three diamond-sharp quads. To pull off such feats, an athlete needs a coach to catch…

I’m particularly fond of my forged Sisley, which an art restorer told me is only half bad. My grandfather purchased it—along with a sweet fake Renoir and an execrable Modigliani—while living in Buenos Aires in the early Sixties. Only recently did another friend, an art historian, explain that Argentina in the Sixties was an exhilarating hotbed of art forgers. In what felt like an instance of harmonic convergence, I then read María Gainza’s clever and captivating novel POR-TRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN LADY (Catapult, $24), elegantly translated by Thomas Bunstead. Gainza, author of the acclaimed 2019 novel Optic Nerve and herself an art critic, has taken the world of Argentinian art forgery as her subject, and wrought from it a richly layered fiction that often limns history. The narrator, referred to…

Six unclued entries are elements in a 1 Across, or said to be. Clue answers include five proper nouns and two foreign words. The entries at 17A and 29A are not in all dictionaries, and 5D is uncommon. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 83. ACROSS 1. (See instructions) (11) 10. Melody that opens The Me Nobody Knows? (5) 11. Adventurer’s car stops short—put gas in first (8) 13. Helped bad idea to get developed initially (5) 14. How a Roman says “let’s go in a truck?” (It is in reverse) (6) 15. Artistic element in 1A (5, 6) 16. Lift back muscle as the heart of exercise (5) 17. One receiving money for…

Once upon a time in a galaxy not far from London, a group called the Association of Autonomous Astronauts was born. The AAA announced a bold “Five Year Plan for establishing a worldwide network of local, community-based groups dedicated to building their own space ships.” It wasn’t an organization, with members or rules or any money to speak of, coming as it did out of an anarchist tradition that abhorred all forms of top-down control. Depending on whom you asked, it was either an emancipatory political project, an elaborate prank, or an artistic avant-garde. No one was in charge—and that was the point. The AAA was an identity. If you wanted to go to space, it was yours to use. A lot of people wanted to go to space. In…

In the early days of the pandemic, I turned thirty and it occurred to me that I didn’t have a retirement account. I had never put any serious thought into investing, or had any real money to invest. I was financially illiterate—I had gotten my first credit card only a year earlier to pay for a flight to a friend’s wedding. I didn’t really own anything, beyond the clothes and books I dragged from one apartment to the next. I had begun to feel pathetic, with no prospects for accruing the kind of wealth that would allow someone to one day buy a house or start a family. What little money I had managed to save sat languishing in a savings account, where it earned an annual percentage yield so…

The apocalyptic reports have come true, dilute in our arterial solventthe atrocities saturate our latent notebooks we stay awake lambentthere are iridium rectangles under our tableswe meet languid, nauseous Transfused presently for a few decades, chronic, venous, insufficientthe intervals of talk speed to nothing and we’ve become scientists of withoutunder force, out of water, across loadingwith bearings, of us Nothing will come from our innocence you know that, after all, nodiscoveries in old texts, no modern symmetries no revelations, no wisdoms to be admiredmessages to be deciphered, smuggled to each generationor so prescient they require philosophers These were not clandestine works there are no secret hallways waiting forthe transcriber of great portents; it’s simple the wars they recorded were the wars they wonlet me be plain with youthese portraitures are…

Minimum portion of U.S. movie budgets last year spent on pandemic-related expenses : 1/10 Portion of moviegoers who say they are unlikely to return to theaters after the pandemic : 1/10 Percentage decrease between 2019 and 2020 in the value of the wellness industry : 11 Portion of U.S. adults who say their physical health is “excellent” : 1/4 Average amount of soda, in gallons, that an American drinks each year : 36 Average increase in U.S. blood pressure, in millimeters of mercury, since the start of the pandemic : 2 Portion of Americans who have recently skipped medical care because they couldn’t afford it : 3/10 Percentage by which Republicans are less likely to trust a doctor’s advice than they were a decade ago : 18 Percentage increase since…

The entrance to Castle Garden was blocked up with vehicles, peddlers of cheap cigars, apple stands, and runners from the boarding houses and intelligence offices that abound in the neighborhood near the Battery. However, I succeeded in getting through after encountering an outpouring stream of new arrivals. I presented my passport to the officer on guard and was ushered inside, amidst a crowd of passengers, children, and baggage of all kinds. Into this yard open the different offices connected with the Garden. The desks of the exchange brokers are at present occupied by four firms, each working in its own interest. A blackboard announces the current rates at which foreign and domestic coin are exchanged—a rate that is but a trifle below the Wall Street quotation. Whenever a change takes…

During the worst romance of my life, I often fantasized about holding a funeral for the relationship. Over time, I worked the fantasy out in detail: I had picked a location and imagined congregating with my loved ones, digging a hole in which I would bury everything he had ever given me—mostly books and letters—saving one volume I still had not read to use as the headstone. I would deliver a eulogy, magnanimously acknowledging the pros alongside the cons of our affair. I got as far as discussing the plan with my friends, who were willing to play along if it meant this hell would end: “Whatever you want, just break up with him already!” And I did, over and over again. I couldn’t stop breaking up with him. We…

Discussed in this essay: The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 800 pages. $45. Thom Gunn wrote in an early notebook that “a good poem is simultaneously a tentative and risky cruising, a complete possession and orgasm, and a huge leather orgy. (Whether its subject is related to sex or not.)” His poems indulge in these pleasures (if not always “simultaneously”), and his correspondence also moves suggestively, to put it mildly, between different rhythms. In a letter to Douglas Chambers, one paragraph starts: “I had an extraordinary three-way with two guys I met in a bar one Saturday afternoon.” The next begins: “You ask difficult questions about scansion.” Another letter from the same year quickens the pace in a…