The Harper’s Podcast

Mike Pence is a pedophile who has been replaced by a clone. But Mike Pence also had the power to reject Electoral College votes and overturn the 2020 presidential election results. In April 2020, the U.S. military liberated 35,000 sexually abused children from hidden tunnels beneath Central Park. There’s a video of Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton ritually killing a child for its adrenochrome. The...

Edmund Gosse. Thomas De Quincey. James Baldwin. For Vivian Gornick, what connects these writer’s disparate oeuvres is that although each pursued other genres—poetry, journalism, novels, or plays—their “significant work turns out to reside in a memoir” (or personal essays, in Baldwin’s case). In an essay in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, Gornick nominates to this list Storm Jameson, a pro...

When Dusan Simien, a San Francisco native with a knack for technology, enrolled in a two-year coding program at the for-profit Holberton School, he financed it with an income share agreement: a contract in which he agreed to pay the school 17 percent of his income for a set period after graduation. But before long, Simien found himself struggling with Holberton’s instructorless education model and...

Today, more than 270 million people live outside their country of origin. Many of them are forced to live in legal limbo, protected neither by citizenship nor by official refugee status. Lebanon, which has the highest per-capita refugee population, exemplifies this no-policy policy. The influx of refugees from Syria—three for every ten Lebanese citizens—have been referred to euphemistically as “di...

When Garth Greenwell was growing up in Kentucky, the LGBTQ section of his local bookstore was a lifesaver: a refuge, even in the pre-internet era. But the implications of that categorization—keeping LGBTQ authors’ books separate from the rest—suggested that the experiences of queer people and other traditionally marginalized groups were somehow inaccessible to the general public, that they failed...

The first chapter of Don DeLillo’s new novel, THE SILENCE, performed aloud. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo, read by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland, Robin Miles, Jay O. Sanders, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Copyright © 2020 by Don DeLillo. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Last year, 43 of the 50 most-watched television broadcasts in America were football games—despite the fact that the NFL season lasts a mere six months. For decades, entrepreneurs have been trying and failing to fill that off-season void with professional football leagues that start play after the Super Bowl. The most recent—and perhaps most successful—attempt was made by Vince McMahon, the CEO of...

In 2018, an Irish technologist by the name of Dylan Curran downloaded all the data Google had collected about him—the equivalent of more than three million Word documents—and sifted through it, revealing the extent to which Google had surveilled his online activity over the course of a decade. All of his Google searches, emails, YouTube views, website visits, and more were preserved in 5.5 gigabyt...

In February, Naomi Jackson entered Mount Sinai Hospital to give birth to her son. But when the baby finally came, at her side were only her doula and her sister; the ob-gyn hadn’t believed Jackson when, twenty minutes earlier, she had assured the doctor that the baby was coming soon. This was not the first time that Jackson’s wishes and intuitions had been ignored during her pregnancy, or even dur...

The opening line of Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic” was written nearly one hundred years ago, but it holds bitter relevance to our current moment: “America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire.” Yet the poet’s verse doesn’t simply take aim at the United States’ imperial ambitions—it takes aim at human civilization as a whole. Over the course of his car...

Annie Hylton’s “In Plain Sight,” published in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, explores the efforts of Syrian refugees to bring the war criminals of the Assad regime to justice. Hylton’s article centers on a refugee and human-rights lawyer named Anwar al-Bunni, who escaped to Germany in 2014 after being detained and tortured by Assad. But after a Vertigo-esque encounter with his former capto...

Over the course of their careers, war reporters often end up spending more time in conflict zones than active-duty soldiers do, and many suffer from profound psychological trauma as a result. In “On Moral Injury,” published in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Janine di Giovanni sheds light on the alarming incidence of trauma among journalists. She focuses on an often-overlooked variant calle...

In “False Dawn,” the poet Khadijah Queen narrates her experience of the pandemic through a zuihitsu, an ancient Japanese form that interweaves poetry with personal reflections. She shares intimate anecdotes from her quarantine while grappling with the broader political issues thrown into relief by the coronavirus. In this episode of the podcast, Queen joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to dig...

The community land trust is an ownership model in which land is collectively controlled by community members, and it has garnered attention in recent years as a promising solution to the affordable-housing crisis. In “We Shall Not Be Moved,” published in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, Audrea Lim tells the story of the country’s first community land trust: a farming cooperative in Albany, Geo...

Peat extraction in Ireland is at once an ecological catastrophe that destroys a piece of the country’s heritage as well as a tool of economic sovereignty that frees Ireland from depending on foreign coal. The industry has also provided good jobs for energy workers. “Bogland,” William Atkins’s article in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, is an attempt to untangle a thorny contradiction: that “ev...

Disaster City is the name of a training compound in College Station, Texas, where first responders prepare for catastrophic scenarios through hands-on practice. In “This Is Not a Test,” his July cover story, Barrett Swanson visits Disaster City to participate in a simulated catastrophe, uncovering in the process the dark side of our society’s fixation on disaster preparedness. In narrating his exp...

Public housing has had an embattled history in the United States. It’s been a constant site of political struggle, from its heyday in the Thirties to its erosion under the Reagan Administration in the Eighties. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Ian Volner explores that struggle through one of its principal characters: his grandfather Kelsey Volner, who began his career in public housing and...

The June issue marks the 170th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine. As Harper’s editor Christopher Beha notes in his new column, Editor’s Desk, the magazine has published “more than two thousand issues, few of them produced under such challenging circumstances.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Beha about the challenges of creating a magazine while the world is on lockdown, as wel...

Political organizing during a worldwide lockdown is hard if not impossible, and embattled authoritarian regimes the world over are surely breathing sighs of relief. In the United States, surging unemployment rates continue to break records, and a world-historical depression seems inevitable. Op-ed columnists everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post have taken the opportunity...

The film maudit (“cursed film”) is a genre that everyone is familiar with, even if you’ve never heard its name. They are movies—usually very expensive ones—that were derided upon their initial release, but came to be appreciated many years later by scholars and cinephiles. Jacques Tati’s PlayTime (1967) is one of the most prominent examples, and its reputation only continues to grow. Following the...

In June 2019, mass protests erupted in Hong Kong in response to a bill that would have allowed the extradition of fugitives to mainland China. As the protests continued throughout the year, the objectives shifted, and a broader, more complex, and increasingly violent movement emerged. The movement quickly converged around five key demands: the complete withdrawal of the extradition bill, the estab...

The Federal Reserve, the central banking system of the United States, was created in response to the Panic of 1907, a depression caused by a crisis in the country’s banks. Signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the 1913 Federal Reserve Act established twelve Federal Reserve Banks, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Open Market Committee. The unique private-...

Five years ago, Ishion Hutchinson went searching for paradise in the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, a small town in northern Ethiopia. The multilevel houses of worship, carved out of the rocky ground, are attributed to King Lalibela, who set out to create a New Jerusalem during his reign. The site is a marvel for even the most jaded fan of history and architecture, but Hutchinson, who was raised...

James Pogue hated gun culture. Having spent much of his career reporting on paramilitary groups, he especially disliked how often the “gun guys” he’d met were “small-minded or cruelly callous about the blood that guns spill, [and] evasive about the reason people actually own guns.” As Pogue points out in the April cover story of Harper’s Magazine, that reason is almost always to provide the owner...

In May 1942, six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, General George C. Marshall gave a commencement speech at West Point in which he stated, “We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.” In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Andr...