The Harper’s Podcast

A little after the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, Lewis Lapham discusses three essays he wrote during the George W. Bush era. With fine prose and razor-edged contempt for war, lies, and complacent members of the commentariat, each article captures a distinctive historical moment. “The American Rome” (August 2001): https://harpers.org/archive/2001/08/the-american-rome/ “Cause for Dissent” (April...

The unprecedented has happened: a former president was arrested and charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records. Though some of Donald Trump’s supporters dismiss it as spectacle, others see it as the fulfillment of prophecy. Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of the new book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, discusses what this latest develo...

Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, explores modern pilgrimage from a secular perspective, attempting to comprehend the force of conviction that motivates someone to eschew all worldly possessions. Ann Sieben, a middle-aged pilgrim from New Jersey who has walked through conflict zones and remote wildernesses in winter with only the clothes on her back (and, more...

What’s wrong with a little bit of climate optimism? Kyle Paoletta discusses how the pendulum of climate coverage swings between catastrophism and heavy-handed reassurance, and has a chilling effect on climate resilience. Like doom-scrolling, catastrophism can be paralyzing—and sweeping optimism can make an equally harmful impression on the public, whose trust in the media may erode as they experie...

Mass demonstrations have swept through Israel since January 4, when Yariv Lenin, Israel’s justice minister, announced proposed changes to the country’s judiciary. If enacted, this so-called “Supreme Court override” bill would limit the Court’s power, as well as the power of government legal counselors; in their place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition would be granted a major...

Anne Fadiman unpacks her latest essay, “Frog,” a 6,000-word piece about Bunky, her family’s African clawed frog. Although he was easy to care for, this “unpettable pet” raised a number of philosophical and ethical questions about pet ownership. For nearly two decades, Bunky lived inside a too-small aquarium on Fadiman’s kitchen counter, ribbitting for a mate that could never come. Fadiman probes h...

Christian Lorentzen sat through the entirety of United States v. Bertelsmann, et al., an antitrust case taken up by the Department of Justice to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. In this episode, he discusses the industry—born in the 1920s as part of a middlebrow revolution, and consolidating in the 1970s to ultimately become today’s Big Five publishing houses. “This corpo...

Caitlin Chandler talks to Violet Lucca about the nature and purpose of the largely unremarked U.S. military presence in Niger. They discuss the history of the conflict in Niger and the way that U.S., European, and Russian interventions in the region have exacerbated the problems left behind by colonial borders. Chandler explains what the U.S. military’s increased reliance on remote warfare after t...

“Every New Yorker deserves dignity, and we are demonstrating that this is possible,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams in May of 2022, shortly after rolling out an initiative to remove homeless encampments throughout the five boroughs. In the following months, Adams implemented other policies—including involuntary hospitalizations for the mentally ill and/or homeless—that granted more power to p...

Google’s domination of internet search is a fact of life. What’s less apparent—if you don’t work in publishing or advertising—is Google’s control of internet ad sales. It’s estimated that the company pulls in nearly 30 percent of all digital advertising dollars. The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that it “abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website...

Michael Robbins explores the shape that apocalyptic thought has taken in American Christianity (despite its slim textual basis) and in contemporary secular contexts like climate catastrophe. Robbins also draws on systems analysis to bring out the structural factors that could be pushing us to the edge of apocalypse. He discloses his own attitude, which is neither optimistic nor defeatist, but rath...

Violet Lucca talks to Sasha Frere-Jones about the signs and symptoms of audiophilia. Frere-Jones explains how Spotify Wrapped, yearly best-ofs, and other attempts to quantify and rank music have disfigured the listening experience. He criticizes the assumption underlying audiophilia: that there is a Platonic ideal of what an album is supposed to sound like. Instead, Frere-Jones compares audiophili...

Kate DiCamillo—the author of Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Beatryce Prophecy, and many other novels—speaks with Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Beha about discovering her vocation in children’s literature. DiCamillo discusses how her writing for children is shaped by a sense of responsibility toward them, and what children’s literature can offer to adults. Rather than tra...

Clare Bucknell talks to Violet Lucca about Giacomo Casanova, the man whose surname is synonymous with romance. Bucknell discusses the difficulty of separating fact from self-invention in his memoir, Histoire de ma vie. She identifies the novelistic tropes that eighteenth-century readers would have recognized in Casanova’s writing and discusses whether the way the Histoire blurs genres prefigures a...

Ryan Ruby talks to Violet Lucca about Vladimir Nabokov’s Berlin period. He describes seeing Berlin through Nabokov’s eyes and noticing the quotidian texture of the city in the author’s novels from this period. He recalls the birth of his own son, in the same neighborhood where Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, was born, and learning to appreciate Nabokov’s non-linear notion of time, a notion that Ruby believ...

It’s expensive to run for any elected office—something that’s reflected in the highly educated, wealthy individuals who make up most of our representatives. Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, joins Violet Lucca to discuss the potential outcome of the midterm elections. With voting, abortion, and the economy on the line, will...

Elizabeth Barber and Matt Johnson speak to Violet Lucca about the politics and methods of factory farming. Barber and Johnson offer insights into the subject from the perspective of a not entirely neutral observer and a criminally liable activist, respectively. Barber discusses the difficulties of writing about a subject that intrudes uncomfortably on people’s lifestyles and routines, while Johnso...

Charlotte Shane speaks to Violet Lucca about the state of abortion rights in post-Dobbs America. Shane expresses her frustrations with pro-choice arguments based on the right to privacy or on medical prudence. Instead, she argues that the right to abortion follows from the principle of bodily autonomy. Shane also touches on the difficulty of writing about abortion in an authoritative but not imper...

Claire-Louise Bennett speaks to Violet Lucca about Louise Bourgeois’s work and the process of free association she chose to document her experience of it. Bennett discusses what it means to regiment pain—the persistent subject of Bourgeois’s work, her “business”—to the demands of form in writing. She follows other threads of association that weave together the artist’s life and her own. Bennett’s...

There are many monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate and politician who founded the DeBeers Company, around Cape Town, South Africa. These statues have been vandalized and reconstituted, respectively, by his detractors and supporters—the latter camp embedded a GPS device inside concrete within a replacement for a Rhodes statue’s decapitated head. In the December 2021 issue, Hedley Twidle,...

Only 13 percent of Americans receive treatment for substance abuse disorder. The reasons for this alarming gap are, like the causes of addiction itself, multifarious. In West Virginia, the state hardest-hit by the opioid epidemic—where the number of deaths outpaces births—four people who struggled with long-term addiction underwent an experimental procedure in which a microchip was implanted to de...

“Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, a man whose afterlife on YouTube has come to define the entirety of his decades-long career. Though Hitchens always pilloried the existence of a higher power and those who believed in one, his earlier output—defined by his elite education, Marxism, and savvy deploym...

In August 2021, Fred Bahnson accompanied Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk dedicated to preserving religious texts in zones of conflict, to Gao, Mali. One year later, Bahnson and Stewart reflect on their journey in terms both spiritual and tangible. Stewart tells the story of his life’s work and details the importance of digitizing texts—regardless of faith—and of forming human connection...

Daniel Bessner, author and professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington, sits down with web editor Violet Lucca to discuss his Harper’s Magazine cover story about the future of the United States and its place in the world during an era of shrinking economic and material might. Bessner suggests a path forward that aims to be practical at the cost of optimism, at a moment whe...

Although “tree poaching” sounds like a niche, victimless crime, this multibillion-dollar illicit trade contributes to climate change in vulnerable parts of the world and, more often than not, harms humans and animals alike. Environmental scientists and advocates have long understood the potential that lies in tree DNA but have lacked the resources to utilize it. Now, with the assistance of volunte...