Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i Harper's Magazine

My parents inculcated in me and my two siblings a particular sense of racial kinship: in our dealings with the white world, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as ambassadors of blackness. Our achievements would advance the race, and our failures would hinder it. The fulfillment of our racial obligations required that we speak well, dress suitably, and mind our manners. In our household we felt tremendous pride in the attainments of blacks, and we took personally their disgrace. My father and mother loved to regale us with stories about the accomplishments of Jackie Robinson and Wilma Rudolph, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Drew, Paul Robeson and Mary McLeod Bethune. At the same time, when scandal ensnared a prominent black person, we all felt ashamed, diminished. We were also embarrassed…

At the climax of Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 homage to World War II genre movies, a German war hero who’s attending the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film based on his exploits (Pride of the Nation) is appalled to see the way in which his life has been transformed into bombastic “art.” While hard-boiled clichés that the soldier never uttered in real life hail down from the screen (“You cowardly American pig . . . you’re gonna pay for this!”), the camera keeps cutting to his face, on which the pleasure he initially felt at the prospect of becoming a cinematic star yields to mortification at having his deeds so patently inflated and falsified. Eventually he storms off in disgust, but it’s clear that his qualms aren’t shared by…

Discussed in this essay: Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser. Little, Brown and Company. 472 pages. $28. littlebrown.com. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough. Penguin Press. 608 pages. $29.95. thepenguinpress.com. The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century, by D. W. Gibson. The Overlook Press. 320 pages. $27.95. overlookpress.com. For years I lived in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which was shared by the students and faculty of Columbia University and impoverished Hispanic and black people. When winter turned to spring and the days grew less cold, the sad, timeless division between the poor and the materially well-off made…

In 1895 the veterinary surgeon W.E.A. Wyman gave a young dog a breakfast of raw beef followed by a gelatin capsule containing one grain (64.7 mg) of methylene blue, a histology stain. By lunchtime the dog had produced a stream of green urine; the next day it vomited the beef, which came out blue, and suffered diarrhea, the mass of which was also blue. Wyman was hoping to learn something about the urinary pain he had experienced during his own ingestion of methylene blue, which had recently achieved widespread yet problematic use as an antimalarial. In 1893 one physician had summarized difficulties associated with the drug as follows: “All patients took methylene blue with disgust. The blue urine alarmed them.” Treatment turned patients’ sweat and sclerae blue; in pregnant women…

(with acknowledgments to Trochos of The Listener) Answers to all clues are six letters long. They are to be entered radially, that is, from the circumference to the center of the diagram—but with the letters in mixed order. When the diagram is complete, the first (i.e., outer) circle will contain a quotation, reading from 1 to 48. Heavy lines indicate the separation of words. The twenty-four letters in the second circle may be rearranged to spell A CIRCLET’S RADIANS DID IT—SAD! The third circle will contain the source of the quotation. The letters in the fourth circle are all different, as are the letters in the fifth circle. The letter in the center circle belongs to all answers. Answers include three proper nouns. 15, 25, and 30 are uncommon words.…

[Query] LIVES BY OMISSION By J. M. Coetzee, from The Good Story, out last month from Viking. The book collects a series of exchanges between Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, on the correspondences between fiction and psychotherapy. Let me ask a question that has nagged at me for some time. Are all autobiographies, all life narratives, not fictions, at least in the sense that they are constructions? “When I was eight my father hit me with a tennis racket,” says a subject. “Not true,” says his father. “I was swinging the racket and accidentally hit him.” Is the boy’s or the father’s memory of the event correct? I call it a memory, but that is an oversimplification: it is a memory-trace that has been subjected to a certain interpretation.…

This is how you get a cow to stand still: round up the herd, then urge them into a chute. Some chutes begin as wood, but all end as metal, with what is called a headgate. Today’s chute, in north-central Iowa, is inside a large barn, which protects against the November chill. In single file, the cattle pass through the chute, whose far end faces open doors. As each cow nears daylight and seeming freedom, the farmer pulls a lever to close the headgate, leaving the cow’s head poking out the end of the chute and her body immobilized inside. A veterinarian named Renee Bertram administers injections in the muscle around the left shoulder. Her boss, Zach Vosburg, meanwhile steps into the chute behind the cow, his right arm encased…

In the year since Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature, translations of his works have glutted the shelves. Part of this influx has to do with the general unwillingness of American presses to publish an international writer before he’s been awarded an international prize; part of it has to do with the number of books that Modiano has written. More than thirty have appeared in French; a dozen are now available in English, with more forthcoming and Modiano continuing to produce at age seventy. Faced with this surfeit, the reader will ask a version of the question that the novelist is always asking himself: Where to begin? The answer, in Modiano’s case, might be: anywhere. All his books are the same, he’s said, though in French the statement…

Stem-cell researchers achieved totipotency. Officials denied that dildos hanging from the power lines of Portland, Oregon, presented an imminent threat. Men whose masculinity was threatened by scientists claimed nearly twice as many lifetime sexual partners. An Ohio man was sentenced to two days in jail for petting cougars, and an interdisciplinary team unveiled the Equine Facial Action Coding System, which codes seventeen discrete facial movements in horses. A study of female Finnish twins found that relative preference for masculine faces is largely heritable. A study of German men found that 3.2 percent reported sexual behavior involving prepubescent children but only 0.1 percent reported pedophilia. The more attractive a female statutory rapist, the more leniently she is judged. A study of the soft tissues of Chinese men’s faces found that greater…