The Harper’s Podcast

We’ve all been scammed in some way. Yet when we hear stories about somebody else getting taken, our knee-jerk reaction is to ridicule their gullibility and deride them for not seeing through the lie. In believing that it’s the victims and not the grifters who err, Hannah Zeavin writes, “We do what Americans do best: project the demands of a vulnerable age onto its casualties.” As anyone who has be...

It sounds so romantic: fighters who answered President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for help and traveled halfway around the world to uphold democracy in Ukraine. However, as Seth Harp reports in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, there is no real Ukrainian foreign legion. Harp, who traveled to the war-torn nation in March and stayed through all of April, found that these would-be freedom fighters...

Ottessa Moshfegh (Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation) discusses her latest novel, Lapvona. Born out of the seclusion of the pandemic, Lapvona is a work whose perspective-shifting, fable-like narration and medieval setting differ from much of the author’s previous work. During the conversation, Moshfegh deconstructs her characters and goes beyond the text at hand to address her writing more bro...

It has always been difficult to parse the experience of war. Following two decades of “forever wars” in the Middle East and an accompanying surfeit of information, that challenge has deepened for reporters. Yet the artful, mournful, and devastating images photojournalist Nicole Tung has sent back from Ukraine can break through the din of struggle—if you simply take the time to look closely. Tung,...

For over a century, carnivals have provided a unique mix of seedy, woozy, all-American fun. Where else can you knock down milk bottles for prizes, see a man breathe fire, and ride the Tilt-a-Whirl until you throw up fried Oreos? But in a world where entertainment options are vast, what motivates the performers who take on the backbreaking labor and constant travel of the carnival life? In the May...

Humanity has long sought to literally and metaphorically banish darkness. But as poet and novelist Suzannah Showler writes in the May issue, succeeding in that aim poses great spiritual and biological risk. Showler describes her journey to Grasslands National Park, the darkest place in Canada, to commune with obscurity. Her essay examines the cultural and philosophical history of light and darknes...

Although video porn, webcams, and teledildonics have existed for decades, rapid advancements in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics mean that a new era of digisexuality is—please forgive us—coming. In the May issue, Sam Lipsyte explores the “warm, sticky horse carcass” of technological intimacy with a trip to the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas, where he meets a sex robot na...

Although Thomas Edison is usually credited with the invention of the movie camera, as with so much surrounding the Wizard of Menlo Park, the truth is more complicated. Louis Le Prince, a French-born artist and inventor, made a short film six years before Edison, but mysteriously disappeared before he could get a patent for the device he used to shoot it. In the April issue, Nat Segnit reviews Paul...

Modern American secessionist movements are commonly perceived as buffoonish or quixotic. Yet when their members take up arms after failing to achieve independence by electoral means—and openly state that they have no other recourse than violence—they cannot be so easily dismissed. James Pogue joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss his reporting from the proposed State of Jefferson, a swath of co...

Benjamin Kunkel, a novelist and co-founder of n+1, joins Violet Lucca to discuss his review of Richard Zenith’s biography of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa, a Portuguese author who was “too faithful to his imagination to spoil it by fraternizing with the actual world,” wrote poetry attributed to an array of heteronyms—elaborate, invented personalities who each possessed a singular background and point of...

There’s nothing new about the desire to control our dreams. After all, these highly subjective, intense, yet easily forgettable nighttime experiences have offered artists and spiritual leaders insights to their respective professions throughout history. In the April issue, Michael W. Clune writes about the profound insights offered by the Dormio, a device that offers users the opportunity to influ...

Of all the manifestations of love described in philosophy, eros—the sensual, the passionate—is often the most exalted. But in its power to override rational and ethical impulses, eros can become monstrous, throwing you into a cycle of misery in which you’re impervious to common sense. Philosopher Agnes Callard, author of Aspiration, joins web editor Violet Lucca for a cathartic conversation about...

How do birds make breakneck turns in perfect formation as they soar thousands of feet above the ground? Nobody knows. But the answer could allow us to better comprehend numerous natural systems, from subatomic particles to schools of fish to ourselves. In the March issue, Vanessa Gregory writes about a group of physicists investigating a similar mystery: how certain species of fireflies synchroniz...

Anyone who has cracked a smartphone screen or needed to replace a failing laptop battery knows the frustration that awaits. Devices that are vital to our daily lives are nearly impossible to fix ourselves, and manufacturer repairs are often so expensive that it makes more sense to trash it and buy a new one. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her article in the Mar...

It’s often thought that world-famous athletes hype themselves up into a fit of frenzy or descend into a state of serene calm in order to excel in front of huge crowds. But many athletes can’t help but hear one voice inside their heads—that of their coach, who seems to guide them every step of the way. Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann spent two years interviewing elite athletes about what wen...

Nicolas Cage—who draws inspiration from Elvis, superhero Luke Cage, Edgar Allen Poe, and others—has an unmistakable dramatic style that has garnered a cult following. Dan Piepenbring joins web editor Violet Lucca to analyze Cage’s “neo-shamanic” acting, how he stands apart from other actors who revel in bigness (aka hams), and how he has used the press to cultivate eccentricity and has made himsel...

The broad strokes of the Jim Crow South are well-known: the laws, the cruelty, and the protest movements that ultimately brought the era to an end. But as Adolph Reed Jr. argues, less attention is paid to the quotidian details of everyday life within that socio-economic system. Reed, whose book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is excerpted in the February issue, joins web editor Violet Lucca...

Permitless carry is the law in more than twenty states, even though it’s unpopular with the vast majority of gun owners. Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her latest report on the small, vocal groups of gun activists who are agitating to expand this right. The two also break down the false ideas that sha...

Jessica Camille Aguirre joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss “Another Green World,” her piece in the February issue that explores a new experiment inside the infamous Biosphere 2 facility near Tucson, Arizona. Together, they discuss the relationship between climate change, the desire to travel in space, and a failure to confront the lingering colonialist tendency to control and exploit earth’s...

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss Findings, one of the most iconic sections of the magazine, and his recent short story, “An Errand.” Together, they explore his process for finding Findings and carefully juxtaposing recent scientific studies to form an alternately juvenile and highbrow comedic chronicle. They also delve into the...

This year, resolve to think differently about habit. Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, discusses the spiritual, cognitive, and creative benefits of embracing routine in an increasingly automated world. O’Gieblyn dispenses with narrow notions of life hacking and argues that habits can free us from rigid algorithms to create sp...

What does advice from the world’s most notorious consulting firm look like? Ian MacDougall discusses the McKinsey mystique, its work culture, the inner workings of its project to reduce violence at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, and how the firm has shaped American capitalism over nine decades. You can read MacDougall’s annotation of one of McKinsey’s PowerPoint slides, created for the Rik...

Writer Scott Sayare discusses his most recent piece for Harper’s Magazine, which addresses what little we know for certain about our ability to smell, as well as the secretive world of the fragrance industry and our tendency to take olfaction for granted. Sayare also explains new methods of helping those who’ve lost their ability to smell, a common lingering effect of COVID-19.

Critic and novelist Lauren Oyler discusses her conflicted feelings about the work of W. G. Sebald, an author whose influence and place in the canon is well established. Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca and Oyler talk through Sebald’s similarities to contemporary novelists, his feather-ruffling academic career, and what Carole Angier missed in her new Sebald biography, Speak, Silence. Read...

Will Self, author of Umbrella, How the Dead Live, and a new memoir, Will, discusses his provocative argument that trauma—in literary, historical, and cultural criticism—is wildly overused and misapplied. Rather than it being a phenomenon that has persisted throughout human history, Self contends that it is a product of modernity; while past injustices and injurious experience (war, slavery, abuse)...