The Harper’s Podcast

In June, writers Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner joined Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll for a conversation and Q&A in front of a live audience at the NYU Skirball Center in downtown Manhattan. Listen to Cusk and Lerner read from their recent Harper’s essays and discuss the state of contemporary fiction, Cusk’s use of artists’ biographies in her newest novel Parade, reading in a second lang...

Inspired by the pulp collectors Gary Lovisi and Lucille Cali, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Joe Kloc embarked on a freewheeling search for a magazine lost to time: the inaugural issue of Golden Fleece Historical Adventure. In this week’s episode, Kloc joins Violet Lucca to discuss his adventures exploring the world of pulp magazines, the act of collecting, and Lost at Sea, a book based on a prev...

With Trump as the forerunning Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party appears to be falling back on the same familiar logic: better than the alternative. But certain progressive candidates are still looking to disrupt the status quo, however unlikely support from the establishment left may be. In this week’s episode, Harper’s Magazine’s Washington editor, Andr...

Today we’re rerunning an episode from 2018 featuring two interviews with Harper’s Magazine’s former New Books columnist, Lidija Haas, and with our current Easy Chair columnist Rachel Kushner. Listen in advance of our event tonight at the Center for Fiction, “What Happened to Gen X?,” which will see Harper’s editor Christopher Beha in conversation with his generational peers Rachel Kushner and Etha...

Isolated for years by strict censorship laws, community infighting, and language barriers, the writer Amir Ahmadi Arian often turned to Hamed Esmaeilion’s work for solace. In addition to authoring short stories and two novels, Esmaeilion chronicled mundane moments with his family on a blog that resonated deeply with Arian, someone of the same generation also working and living in the Iranian diasp...

Reviewing Zadie Smith’s The Fraud for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Kirsch takes stock of Generation X as a literary phenomenon. He finds “Gen X lit” to be composed of two distinct waves, between which Smith is caught. The younger wave, including writers Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, and Tao Lin, has formed its ideas about art, culture, and society partly in opposition to prede...

In his September cover story for Harper’s, Justin E. H. Smith sets out to define Generation X, that nameless cohort wedged between boomers and millennials whose members, in midlife, now face “an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us.” Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar coun...

Stephen Sondheim may have brought the cryptic crossword to America, but Richard E. Maltby Jr. brought it to Harper’s Magazine. The lyricist, director, and cryptic creator sat down with Harper’s and one of his checkers, Roddy Howland Jackson, to talk about the history of the puzzle, the declining use of dictionaries, and the rise in word puzzle fascination. After all, “What holds the country togeth...

In the spring of 2001, Benjamin Hale’s six-year-old cousin went missing in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting one of the largest search-and-rescue missions in Arkansas history. Her miraculous discovery is a story in itself, but in a long Folio for the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hale also tells of the loss of another young girl in the same woods, decades prior, that seems eerily connected to h...

In “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s story for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, a woman visits an old friend whose husband has recently died, only to discover that the nature of her friend’s grief is more chilling than she could have imagined. Oates is joined by her former student Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s, to discuss the connections between writing and teaching, and between w...

In his August cover story for Harper’s Magazine, Jason Blakely argues that an overreliance on scientific authority, or “scientism,” only furthered the divide between those who adhered to and those who disobeyed public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of engendering legitimacy through dialogue, Blakely says, policymakers passed down “neutral” doctrines in the name of science...

An estimated one out of every four Nigerians is a silent carrier of sickle cell disease, a hemoglobin disorder that can cause serious health problems and even death. With recent advancements in genetic testing, many Nigerians won’t take the risk of reproducing with other silent carriers or people with the disease. But, as Krithika Varagur reports, love doesn’t always accord with the Punnett square...

Christopher Carroll, the reviews editor at Harper’s, sits down with the former New Books columnist, Claire Messud, and her successor, Dan Piepenbring, to discuss the history, challenges, and pleasures of the storied column. The three critics go over their influences, the changes in publishing today, and, above all else, the great opportunity the column has given each writer to “go on a walk throug...

Braucherei, a form of healing used in Amish and Mennonite communities, might seem like an appropriately antiquated practice for a traditional culture. But the writer Rachel Yoder returned to her Mennonite roots to investigate the practice’s modern uses. Embodying all the contradictions and complexities of the much-discussed Amish community overall, Braucherei might be most significant because of i...

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, yet the nuclear panic of the 1960s feels like history. Jackson Lears, who served as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship during the Cold War, discusses how we have embraced the myth of technological prowess to detach ourselves from the horrors of war. “War is the most unpredictable, least controllable enter...

After the Titan submersible imploded last week, Matthew Gavin Frank’s journey to the depths with Karl Stanley, a friend of Stockton Rush’s, took on a new meaning. (Frank rode in Stanley’s sub in February of this year; his essay, in which Frank meditates on the eternal dangers and allure of deep-sea exploration, went online the day after the OceanGate sub went missing.) He discusses Stanley’s warni...

Exploring 2,000 feet below the sea’s surface is something only professionals—or billionaires—are able to do. However, the writer Matthew Gavin Frank found Karl Stanley, an eccentric submariner, to take him to the depths in a DIY sub off the coast of Honduras. Frank dived to the bottom of the sea against his own anxieties and explored not only bioluminescence and sharks, but also the sublimity of b...

Only the good die young—no, really. The historian and Harper’s Magazine contributor Daniel Bessner joins Violet Lucca to discuss the series of love fests for Henry Kissinger, and Christopher Hitchens’s “The Case Against Henry Kissinger,” an iconic two-part takedown of the statesman published in early 2001. You can read this masterwork—and everything else Harper’s has published since 1850—for only...

It’s a familiar story, but one no less tragic because of its familiarity: a female author makes a huge splash with her debut novel, but despite her promise, the doors slam shut and she fades from view. Nancy Lemann, author of the cult novel Lives of the Saints (1985), discusses the experience of that career trajectory, as well as the recent, renewed enthusiasm for her writing in the pages of Harpe...

On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America called a strike. While this may seem far afield from an august magazine that specializes in literary nonfiction, the WGA’s demands are in-line with the mission of Harper’s: to uphold the rights and unique voices of writers. As the balance of power in Hollywood has shifted away from traditional studios and toward streaming companies like Netflix, Amazon,...

What is it about Tucker Carlson that unites the divergent ideologies of national conservatism? In July 2019, the writer and historian Thomas Meaney attended the first National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and other right-wing thinkers sought to expand on Donald Trump’s politics. One reason that Carlson is so effective, Meaney remarks, is his consistent...

Do non-indigenous people have a right to perform or practice indigenous rituals? There’s no single answer, as Native Americans are not a monolithic group with a single opinion on the matter. Sierra Crane Murdoch reports on a group of religious organizations that purportedly offer “authentic” ceremonies—run by people with dubious claims to indigenous heritage—and give their participants peyote, a m...

“The reason it’s so hard to write a cruise piece is because of David Foster Wallace,” explains Lauren Oyler, a critic and the author of the novel Fake Accounts. In her recent Harper’s Magazine cover story, she takes on Wallace’s 1997 cruise essay, also published in Harper’s, as she describes her experience aboard the Goop cruise. “But I didn’t want it to just be a work of criticism reckoning with...

Internet culture has made different types of neurodivergence—particularly anxiety—more visible than it has ever been. Michael W. Clune, author of White Out, offers an account of how difficult it was to understand what a panic attack was before mental illness was instantly diagnosable with Dr. Google. More remarkably, his essay eloquently and accurately expresses what the experience of a panic atta...

In the May issue, Erik Baker and Hari Kunzru debunk the conservative and leftist visions of the “crisis of work.” Rather than automation and quiet quitting, the problem lies with the shared feeling that the American experiment is failing. The all-consuming entrepreneurial drive we’ve been taught will give our lives meaning has revealed itself to be false, as stagnation abounds in all aspects of wo...