The Harper’s Podcast

Thomas Chatterton Williams is an expatriate writer and a former Harper’s Magazine Easy Chair columnist. He joins editor in chief Christopher Beha to discuss his essay, “Continental Divide,” in which Williams travels to Leukerbad, Switzerland, to retrace James Baldwin’s journey in “Stranger in the Village.” The two reflect on the rewarding perspectives gained from living outside one’s home country,...

Rachel Riederer joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss Riederer’s November cover story about the potential for military conflict in space. At present, there is no common understanding of what constitutes an act of war in space, nor are there clear guidelines for private companies entering orbit. In this episode of the podcast, Riederer and Lucca parse these inadequacies, the vulnerabilities of m...

Sierra Crane Murdoch, author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, discusses her latest essay for Harper’s Magazine, which asks a simple yet provocative question: What makes a good mother? Murdoch, a childless white woman, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about the process of affirming to the state her belief that her friend and the subject of her book...

Memoirist and critic Vivian Gornick joins Violet Lucca to discuss Gornick’s essay “Put on the Diamonds” with novelist Sigrid Nunez, whose review of Italo Svevo’s A Very Old Man also runs in the October issue. Together Gornick and Nunez consider the inescapable evil that is humiliation; the unevenness of power; its connections to vulnerability and vengefulness; and the dire need to think well of ou...

In this episode of the podcast, Lisa Wells, the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, discusses her latest report for Harper’s Magazine, “To Be a Field of Poppies,” with Ann Neumann, the author of The Good Death, and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. The trio’s discussion of death is profound and unorthodox, yet humor-filled as well. Wells lays out the process of natural orga...

Joseph Bernstein, senior reporter at Buzzfeed and 2021 Nieman Fellow, joins Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca to discuss “Bad News,” the cover story of the September issue. Together they explore the misconceptions surrounding disinformation; the mythical power of digital advertising according to Big Tech; the idea that social media itself has the capability to slow the spread of fake news;...

Andrew Quilty is a photographer and reporter who has lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, since 2013. In “When the Raids Came,” his article for the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Quilty follows the story of one family in rural Wardak province over nearly twenty years of war, offering a holistic view of the U.S. military’s impact. Quilty joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to survey Afghanistan’s...

In the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Wyatt Mason makes the startling claim that the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Septology, a challenging and experimental work about the chaos of interiority and the fragmented nature of the self, begins a fresh chapter in the development of the novel: “With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before...

No other twentieth-century political philosopher dominated Trump-era discourse like Hannah Arendt. In the mainstream and on the fringe, writers quoted Arendt with abandon, signaling again and again to their baffled readers that she was the thinker best equipped to help us understand Trump’s strange ascent and imminent destruction of democracy. Amid the endless cavalcade of sloppy think pieces, Are...

Land and sea meet in a dance of littoral literature on this week’s episode, in which two writers train their minds on overlooked expanses. Gillian Osborne considers the American lawn, a private buffer expressing our nostalgia for common spaces. Leanne Shapton takes us into open water, where swimmers find vulnerability, wonder, and a sense of scale. They examine how great writers have drawn inspira...

Every presidential campaign is accompanied by news reports that attempt to frame existing realities as new developments or special insights. One prominent recurring story is about the fact that more and more Latinos are voting for Republicans. This realization then leads a journalist—who is usually not Latino—to attempt to pin down why that is, and to explain what exactly the “Latino vote” is. But...

This summer marks a jolting return to socializing with friends, family, and seas of strangers. On the street, in museums, in restaurants, and in theaters, many people are faced with a painful contradiction: we want to be around one another more than ever, but months of isolation have made us hostile, exhausted, and even pained—probably more than most of us are willing to admit. Isolation affects t...

Perhaps you’ve heard of Jon Meacham, a former editor in chief at Newsweek and author of many popular histories about the United States. His books are ubiquitous and regularly make bestseller lists. Yet the ideas in them are frequently reductive, incorrect, and strangely in thrall to a distinctly American version of the great man theory. Meacham is committed to fetishizing the role of the president...

Tales of the harrowing—and often degrading—working conditions at Amazon have spread far and wide. Yet the company has successfully circumvented attempts to change its ways. With the aid of extremely accommodating local, state, and national officials, America’s second-largest company (right after Walmart) has developed an elaborate system of workplace surveillance and anti-union propaganda to preve...

What if we conceived of the fight against climate change as a “just war”—as both the biggest fight in human history and a global search for meaning? As fires rage, oceans rise, and pandemics ravage, the demands for international solidarity and world-scale deployments of resources are readily apparent. But in the face of ideological divisions wrought by centuries of capitalist and colonial destruct...

For those who make, or might once have made, a living as artists, the pandemic and the economic depression that followed it took away two vital sources of revenue: in-person events and day jobs that sustained creative endeavors. Yet, as William Deresiewicz describes in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, all sectors of the arts economy were already vulnerable for collapse: years of declining publ...

According to Hollywood legend, director Mervyn LeRoy “discovered” Lana Turner when she was sixteen, at the soda counter of Schwab’s Pharmacy in Los Angeles. While the tale is apocryphal, the notion that anyone could be a star motivated untold hordes of youths to go west for decades afterward. (Let’s be honest: most of them turned out like the “grotesques” of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust....

Shortly before he left office, Donald Trump reactivated the federal death penalty—putting an end to a seventeen-year hiatus and executing an unprecedented thirteen people in less than a year. While the brutality of this killing spree is well-documented, the byzantine legal process through which it was authorized has received little attention. For the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Caroline Lester...

Whether or not you remember anything from high school biology, the word “species” seems fairly self-explanatory: a kitten isn’t the same thing as a crab. Yet what distinguishes a particular species from its subspecies is a far trickier determination to make than “cat ≠ crustacean.” The act of taxonomic classification has befuddled biologists regardless of specialization or era. “I look at the term...

As work subsumes leisure time, worldwide anxieties mount, and a pandemic reshapes comfort and togetherness, meditation has been touted as a panacea. People who are stressed out (are there any other kind?) can take a meditation course, read an article, go on a retreat, or use an app; the hope is to gain from meditation peace, health, productivity, focus, or a good night’s sleep. It comes almost uni...

The photographer Richard Rothman spent more than a decade taking pictures in a small town along the Front Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The resulting monograph, Town of C, was published by Stanley/Barker, and a selection of the photographs appears in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. The book’s scope is comprehensive, documenting the grandeur and the despoliation of the region’s geograp...

“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the pavement, the beach!”) was the rallying cry of the May 1968 protests in France. As demonstrators tore up paving stones in order to build barricades or to hurl at the police, they discovered that there was sand beneath the streets. Though this was a typical building practice, it reinforced the protesters’ belief that everyday life wasn’t quite what it appea...

This month will see the release of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography—the authorized biography of the famous novelist, who died in 2018. Roth himself selected Bailey to write his life story. In addition to many long conversations, Roth granted Bailey complete access to his personal archives and helped set up interviews with many of his friends, lovers, and colleagues. In the March issue of...

“Sometime in late 1991,” Don DeLillo told a Paris Review interviewer in 1993, “I started writing something new and didn’t know what it would be—a novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing, and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing I’ve done.” The result was the novella “Pafko at the Wall,” first published as a Folio in the October 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazin...

In 2002, a new crop of Dead Sea Scroll fragments that were said to have come from the Swiss vault of the late antiquities dealer Khalil Iskander Shahin went up for sale. These fragments were bought by a number of evangelical institutions, including the Museum of the Bible, which was founded by the family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and-crafts stores. In the March issue of Harper’s Maga...