Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2016 i Harper's Magazine

The Secret History Randall Kennedy’s claim that respectability politics has “improved the racial situation dramatically” [“Lifting as We Climb,” Essay, October], overstates the centrality of that phenomenon to black freedom struggles. Kennedy believes that he is providing a historical corrective to today’s young activists, who condemn attempts by police and their defenders, and by mass-media outlets, to discredit and criminalize African-American victims of police and vigilante violence. These activists know what Kennedy apparently does not: that respectability ideologies have a deeply problematic history. It is ironic that in his attempt to lecture those critical of respectability politics, Kennedy misreads the history of the civil-rights movement. Whi le Kennedy notes that E. D. Nixon made Rosa Parks the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott because of her “exemplary image and…

Why write at all? The card dated 1953 is in my notebook, where I don’t want to ever forget it or what people are that are gone, names, never come to see, I never met Carmelita Vallejo Sept. 8, ’53 Born Madrid, N.M. Father Frank Vallejo Born Zacatecas, Mex. Address of father or guardian in Socorro hospital Occupation of father or guardian used to be a miner This is all as if it almost never was, the town empty, the school the late afternoon broken in and no window left, and the books the records thrown there in the dirt in circles Carmelita Vallejo, Carlos Peña mi peña almost it all is that o human structures that fall apart all the blood left is these objects as if there were…

From a mathematics textbook for children between six and twelve years old, published by the Islamic State’s ministry of education. The Islamic State distributed copies of the textbook to schools in Mosul, Iraq, in October, along with curricula for history, religious education, and physical education. Translated from the Arabic by Maged Mikhail. A soldier of the Islamic State caliphate patrols for 7 hours per day. How many hours does he patrol in 285 days? On one mission, 87 fighters are distributed equally within 3 zones. How many fighters are in each zone? If a box has 25 pistol rounds, how many rounds are in 100 boxes? In 1,000 boxes? Osman bought a weapon for 256,324 dirhams, and a year later sold it for 196,451 dirhams. How much did he lose?…

From queries submitted by telephone and in person to the New York Public Library’s Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989. Do you have any books on human beings? Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person? Why do eighteenth-century English paintings have so many squirrels in them? Were Tsar Nicholas II and King Gustav of Sweden tattooed? What is the life cycle of an eyebrow hair? In what occupations may one be barefoot? What is the natural enemy of a duck? Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home? What percentage of all the bathtubs in the world are in the United States? Who built the English Channel? Has the gun with which Oswald shot President Kennedy been returned to the family? Where can I…

They got into our car at a stoplight. It was cold. We never lock the doors in back. There were two of them. At the apartment they terrorized us. It took all day, most of the night. There was beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear. Sounds I didn’t know could come out of us. Above all it was boring. In the sense that it was all actions and all bad; there is no life of the mind available amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear, no space at the back of oneself to go to and think anything else. Long stretches of boredom that fill up with something like thinking but there is nothing to think except what it is, what it is to…

I have come to perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings—a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any particular substrate—a “connectome” thinking at fantastic speeds, light, effulgent, deathless. The beings are ourselves a thousand or ten thousand years in the future, networked across galactic distances and accompanied by every human consciousness that has ever existed, resurrected from the abysm of time by quantum recovery techniques that even now can be shown not to violate the laws of physics. And I have come to perceive how we on Earth now must begin the task of bringing this future about. Actually, I don’t perceive all this myself. But I spent a long day recently in the social-activities room of the New York…

From posts by residents of Oakland, California, to NextDoor and Glenfriends, two online social networks for neighbors. Silver Dodge Caravan, two Latino male occupants, not particularly young. When I took a long look at them, they consulted with one another and headed off. This is historically the week people come to take your Christmas presents. One African-American man claiming to be my neighbor just rang my doorbell. He wanted to know if I had a chain to move a car. He did NOT look nor sound like any neighbor I know. My houseguest saw a strange person early Friday morning. Slight, dark-skinned, with an Afro/curly hair and weird lipstick. Couldn’t tell if person was a man or woman. Was checking out our cars and staring at our house/windows from the…

Peter Rasmussen was always able to identify with his patients, particularly in their final moments. But he saw himself especially in a small, businesslike woman with leukemia who came to him in the spring of 2007, not long before he retired. Alice was in her late fifties and lived in a sparsely furnished farmhouse outside Salem, Oregon, where Rasmussen practiced medical oncology. Like him, she was stubborn and practical and independent. She was not the sort of patient who denied what was happening to her or who scrambled after any possibility of a cure, no matter what the cost. As Rasmussen saw it, “She had long ago thought about what was important and valuable to her, and she applied that to the fact that she now had acute leukemia.” From…

In 1995, Kamel Daoudi, a twenty-one-year-old engineering student from the suburbs of Paris, moved out of his parents’ apartment. He had fought with his father, an Algerian immigrant obsessed with the possibility of his son’s success in France, his “acceptance by the system,” in Daoudi’s words. He resented his father and, determined to find a different path, took up the ideals of jihad. At a small prayer hall in his parents’ neighborhood, he met a group of like-minded men, older Algerians who felt adrift in their adopted country. France seemed to them a place of libertine excess, Daoudi said, and they shared a sense of “having betrayed one’s origins a bit, one’s values, and of being obliged, in order to return to the status quo ante, to go twice as…

1. On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign from office. I was playing in the street in San Luis Obispo when I heard. I had been raised to dislike Nixon and to consider him a buffoon, but I was a child: all I really knew was that the bad guy had lost. Still, my friends and I somehow got the news, and we jumped up and down shouting giddily—seven years old and caught up in the zeitgeist. On the day Nixon delivered his resignation speech, John Cage gave the first public reading, in Boulder, Colorado, of the fourth part of “Empty Words,” a piece for unaccompanied voice. “Empty Words” draws its text from Thoreau’s journals and subjects the source to chance operation: over the…

Discussed in this essay: Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life, by Jonathan Bate. Harper. 672 pages. $40. harpercollins.com. Among those who knew Ted Hughes—friends, rivals, lovers, wives—it was universally agreed that, his other qualities notwithstanding, he was very, very good-looking. Six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and floppy-haired, his face lantern-jawed and slightly concave, he was almost a caricature of manliness. At Cambridge in the 1950s— where, a romantic competitor claimed, Hughes was “the biggest seducer” on campus—he favored an old black corduroy jacket and unbelted trousers. He hunted and fished and hiked and cooked (masculine meals: fried herring in oatmeal, black pudding in a skillet, goat stew). He was graceful, self-possessed, and kind. His voice was uncommonly resonant. He gave off, wrote his first wife, Sylvia Plath, a “queer electric invisible radiance.”…

From a complaint filed in October 2014 on behalf of a woman who was harassed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Harris County, Texas. In October 2015, the officer, Patrick Quinn, pleaded guilty to official oppression and was sentenced to a year in jail. Ms. S was traveling north when she observed a police car traveling south. She was doing the speed limit and not otherwise breaking any traffic laws. However, she noticed the car make a sharp U-turn and catch up to her. The officer pulled in behind her once she stopped, asked for her driver’s license and proof of insurance, and told her that her insurance was expired. The officer then told her that he smelled marijuana in her car. Ms. S consented to a…

In the early Seventies, as the arcs of our postgraduate expectations seemed to be losing loft and conviction and the music seemed to be playing somewhat slower and the need to find a seat before it stopped had occurred to most, although not all, and everyone had already lived with everyone else for a time, it seemed, and the whole idea of domicile and self-reliance made for reluctant conversation—in this sad, departing summer of our lives, my friend the poet Robert Trammell lived for a while with me and my mom. My mom, an old freethinker herself, enjoyed my arty, pseudobohemian friends, and Bob, perhaps the artiest and most deeply pseudobohemian of us all, fit in quite happily, picking through her rather strange selection of books and, in the evenings,…

Why is the Universe as it is and not something else? Why is the Universe here at all? It is true that at present we have no clue to the answers to questions such as these, and it may be that the materialists are right in saying that no meaning can be attached to them. But throughout the history of science, people have been asserting that such an issue is inherently beyond the scope of reasoned inquiry, and time after time they have been proved wrong. I dare say that you yourself would have said, not so very long ago, that it was impossible to learn anything about the way the Universe is created. All experience teaches us that no one has yet asked too much. How then can we…

It was determined that nine of ten Canadians who kill their minor stepchildren are men, that the U.S. health-care system is not equipped to address the needs of pregnant men, and that American men who believe in traditional masculinity also believe in the efficacy of energy drinks. Lead exposure makes children sleepy in the daytime. Pediatricsleep experts called for smartphones to incorporate “bedtime mode.” Children raised in religious families are less altruistic and more punitive. Infants are unaware that the sensation of being tickled has a cause outside themselves. Highly numerate children of Tsimane forager-farmers are more likely to use merit as the basis for the distribution of bananas. Tsimane adults concur with members of modern industrialized societies that aging is more detrimental to women than to men. The larger…