Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Harper's Magazine

Renéssance Men In his review of All Desire Is a Desire for Being, Cynthia Haven’s selection of René Girard’s writings [“Overwhelming and Collective Murder,” Reviews, November], Sam Kriss contrasts Girard’s singular (not to say single-minded) vision of society with today’s scholars, who, he claims, are unable to generate “grand unifying theories.” Girard drew from his early-career studies of literary figures such as Proust the insight that desire is essentially imitative (or mimetic) rather than straightforwardly directed toward its apparent objects. Eve Sedgwick, who made a similar point in Between Men, her foundational work of queer theory, later noted that Girard’s interest in elevating these observations to the status of general psychological truths was essentially religious. Arguing that imitative desires scale up from the triangles of our erotic lives to collective…

Having bedbugs is no laughing matter.No one is safe.Bedbugs do not rest.They run over us in broad daylight.I spent my days searching for them, killing them,trying to make them flee, but it didn’t work.I lifted up my mattress, and they were there.I lifted up my sheet. There was one there.Even in the train there are pureed bedbugs.The state must urgently bring together all thestakeholders concerned in order to deploy anaction plan commensurate with this scourge.Bedbugs are not a right-wing or a left-wing issue.All major cities are concerned.We need a collective mobilization.We must not fall into madness.Everyone is panicking.I’ve had nightmares.I consulted a dermatologist and two GPs.I won’t say that I’ve had PTSD, but it’s not farfrom the truth.I will undoubtedly try hypnosis.There is no threat to the Olympic Games.Bedbugs existed…

MIKE SOLAN: [inaudible] DANIEL AUDERER: Oh, Dave’s good. I said, “Hey, you’re going to have to decide if you wanted to give a statement or not,” but it does not seem like there’s a criminal investigation going on. Otherwise there would be other— SOLAN: [inaudible] AUDERER: What’s that? Otherwise, there might be other people arriving, correct? Yeah, I mean, he’s going fifty. That’s not out of control, that’s not reckless for a trained driver. SOLAN: [inaudible] AUDERER: Yeah, lights and sirens. SOLAN: [inaudible] AUDERER: Yeah. Well, there’s some—initially he said she was in a crosswalk. There’s a witness who says, no, she wasn’t, but that witness could be different because I don’t think she was thrown forty feet. I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then…

Just turned to History Channel. No history. I used to get history. Why do we have such a channel when it doesn’t do history? I like history. There is never any history unless you are an antique dealer. Change name! “Mud Cats.” When will they put history back on? Ax Men, Big Timber. Nothing historical. Back to FOX. Sigh. Wondering if No History Channel would be interested in covering my axe and chainsaw work. If you want history you won’t get it on the History Channel right now. So turn to Iowa public TV and you can get history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. You won’t believe this. While History Channel has Ancient Aliens on, CNN has real history right now. FLIP CHANNEL QUICKLY. If you don’t like history now is…

Let us follow a Cossack seigneur who is going by way of the Volga to his domains in the steppe of the Don. We are seeking picturesque representations of national life, and in order to find them we shall do best to follow in the footsteps of a great landed proprietor who has been staying in Moscow, performing his devotions in the cathedrals of the Kremlin. It is a joy to the heart of a good Russian to contemplate the town of the sixteen hundred churches, with its ocean of green roofs, its lacework of spires, its domes rising against the sky. He has visited St. Michael the Archangel, where the tsars since Ivan I have slept side by side in their coffins, and he has kissed the reliquaries beneath…

“It would be a grain hopper,” Robert said, our bodies twisted to take in the view out the driver’sside window of his wife’s Toyota RAV4. I thought he might pull over there, on the stretch of beige gravel road where several of the train tracks that pass through Revelstoke, British Columbia, converge. I hoped for another of the smoke breaks that had punctuated our winding tour of the thumbprint town, pressed between the Selkirk and Monashee mountain ranges, where Robert lived.1 It was August 2022, and the heat, which I found mild, agitated him. He’d taken the day off to ferry me around; the tour had thus far included a view of an upscale ski resort that, since its opening in 2007, had helped to widen the town’s already sizable…

The average American girl born in 2019 will take prescription drugs for more than half her life, former members of the U.S. Special Forces with various neuropsychiatric problems experienced positive effects after taking ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT at a clinic in Mexico, and depressed patients given either ketamine or a placebo during a routine surgery reported significant improvements. Researchers using the Defeat Scale confirmed that internal migrant workers in Shenzhen felt defeated. Autistic people are less susceptible to the bystander effect, and ADHD trebles the chances of an Israeli adult developing dementia. Excessive fluoride in the well water of rural Ethiopian communities causes cognitive impairment in children. Homozygosity among the Namibian Himba people decreases female fertility. Primatologists conclusively established the occurrence of menopause among adult female chimpanzees of the Ngogo community,…

For some months I’ve been living in Rome, up on the hill called the Gianicolo, which slopes down to the western bank of the Tiber. In antiquity it was the site of several water mills, used to grind grain that would be distributed to citizens—the bread in the “bread and circuses” of Juvenal’s famous formulation. A minute or two from our apartment is the Acqua Paola, a massive Baroque fountain erected at the beginning of the seventeenth century to glorify Pope Paul V. From there one has a panoramic view of the towers and domes of the old city, and tourists are taken up to admire it in various picturesque vehicles—Vespas and sidecars, vintage Fiat 500s, golf-cart-like contraptions that seat six and look like they could easily tip over. Every…

Lucent transitions, the heatAnd draft of four stories, how didI get here so quickly? My attentionAlways wavering, as my eye wanders In and out of apprehension. GiveMe one reason I shouldn’t be scared?I tell you this: that down comforterIs a tent by the waters of Babylon, And I do what I do without complaintNow. The beautiful minimum by theDrunken window, something for justMyself for a little while. Throat held Up to the moonlight, the silver ofSpring evenings, they’re flowers, they know.…

The Wa State is an autonomous zone nestled in the highlands of Myanmar bordering China and Thailand. You won’t find it on United Nations maps, but it’s about the size of Belgium, with its own army, schools, and tax collectors. The Wa’s self-sufficiency derives from one of their top exports, methamphetamine, which they produce with such knee-weakening efficiency that, frankly, they make me want to try some. Their ya-ba, or “insanity pills,” sell for anything from one to three bucks a pop; they’re dyed a cheery Benadryl pink, infused with an imitation vanilla scent, and stamped with wy, a logo that’s “as recognizable to Asian drug users as Nike’s swoosh,” Patrick Winn writes in NARCOTOPIA: IN SEARCH OF THE ASIAN DRUG CARTEL THAT SURVIVED THE CIA (PublicAffairs, $30). “Per annual…

That Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and from the destruction of their shelters. That Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan, are illegal. That all measures and actions taken by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory are in violation of the Geneva Convention. That Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, its diversion of water resources, its depletion of the natural and economic resources of the occupied territories, and its displacement and deportation of the population of those territories, are without legal validity. That the Israeli occupation is contradictory to the basic requirements for the social and economic development of the Palestinian people. That the global community increase their…

We have noticed Major getting more aggressiveBe careful around that dogThat stupid dogFreaking clownHe bit me twiceNow I’m pissedI was working an evening shiftMajor came around the cornerI looked up and saw himMajor running at full strideHe locked eyesSomething serious was about to go downI proceeded to walkMajor barked loudlyI immediately stopped and put my hands upMajor advancedHe came charging at me“Major, stop!”The dog jumps and bitesI lift my arm upThe dog was still attachedThe First Lady was attempting to pull the dog offThe First Lady couldn’t regain controlThe dog bit a second time on the right buttockSMH …I could not avoid this unusual circumstanceLooks like the dog was being playfulBut playful can go wrong quicklyMy leg and arm still hurtFeels like I was in a dog fight lol…

Russia has become, to observers in the West, a distant, mysterious, and hostile land once again. It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become another planet, it is largely because its regime has also waged war on foreign journalists, preventing them from straying beyond established perimeters. Over the summer, hoping to do precisely that, I…

In the summer of 1968, I moved from Boston to San Francisco to start a medical internship at Mount Zion Hospital, exchanging the comfortable familiarity of the East Coast for the turmoil and tumult of the West. The Bay Area was the epicenter of the country’s social upheaval—the previous year’s Summer of Love, which had drawn thousands of flower children to the Haight-Ashbury district, was already a memory. Speed freaks and panhandlers now outnumbered the hippies, and amphetamines had displaced LSD. There was an ambient anger in the air. For the first two months, I house-sat a Victorian home on Divisadero, a few blocks down from Haight Street and a fifteen-minute walk from the hospital. In addition to my duties as an intern, I volunteered at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical…