The Harper’s Podcast

“Until the news can say, ‘We have no show (or paper) today because there is nothing of significance to concern you,’ the news will build its monument to truth on a lie.” So writes Greg Jackson in “Vicious Cycles,” published in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine, an essay that looks past the transfixing plotlines of the news cycle to question the inherent limitations of the news. For Jackson, a...

If you’re reading this, you already know that over the past five years both the quantity and the popularity of podcasts have exploded. Non-fiction podcasts—particularly those about true crime and history—have cultivated devoted audiences. Yet these shows are largely exempt from the standards of veracity, sourcing, and ethics to which newspapers and magazines are held. When a podcast does plagiariz...

Evangelical churches in Brazil’s favelas serve as a source of redemption for many, and there are many pastors who work earnestly to save the souls of gang members, whose numbers have grown significantly in recent years. Yet some pastors in Rio de Janeiro have become entangled in violence, the drug trade, political corruption, and the exploitation of Brazil’s poor. Complicating the issue of faith f...

Whether Donald Trump wins or loses the upcoming presidential election, the shift in Republican values he has ushered in is sure to outlast him. What aspects of Trump’s legacy will the next generation of conservatism cling to, and under whose leadership? In July, historian and writer Thomas Meaney braved the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., for the inaugural National Conservatism Conference, where...

The Comoro Islands, an archipelago off the eastern coast of Africa, offers a glimpse into the future of the global climate crisis. After the islands’ natural resources were depleted, the local economy failed—except on the island Mayotte, which is an overseas department of France. In search of an escape, citizens of the independent Union of the Comoros embark on a potentially fatal journey to Mayot...

In July 2018, local police informed Alexis Stern, a recent high school graduate in Big Lake, Minnesota, that there was reason to believe someone wanted her dead. A hit had been requested, for a little over $5,000 in bitcoin, through a website called Camorra Hitmen, a dark-web market advertising gun-for-hire services to anonymous buyers. As it turned out, the site was a scam operation, designed to...

Many of this decade’s pop culture juggernauts—from Orange Is the New Black to Caitlyn Jenner—have highlighted the lives of trans people. These artifacts have helped popularize the narrative of “switching” from one gender to the other, or feeling “trapped” in your body. But while this narrative has made transitioning easier for many, it has also reinforced the notion that people are either male or...

Though you might’ve been raised not to talk about politics at Thanksgiving dinner, food itself has always been political. The questions of who grows it—and for whom—are loaded, especially in the United States, a country that took its farmland from indigenous people and built its wealth from the labor of slaves. These imbalances of access and ownership have persisted through contemporary times, wit...

Each wave of feminism in the United States has been met with a rise of men’s groups, which have sought to “heal” men and reconnect them to traditional masculinity. These movements—such as Robert Bly’s Iron John—have attempted to adapt to or resist the societal changes that have come along with increased rights for women. Now, YouTube gurus such as Jordan Peterson are not only responding to the con...

Today, November 13, 2019, as witnesses take the stand in the first public hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, the Harper’s Podcast looks back to another major report on presidential infraction. The Department of Justice released its redacted version of the Mueller Report almost seven months ago, on April 18. Although the 448-page document revealed new depths to the chaos of the...

Last week, on October 28, Boris Johnson—the British prime minister who said he would “rather be dead in a ditch” than request another Brexit extension from the European Union—requested and received such an extension from the European Union, making this the third time that Brexit has been delayed since the June 2016 referendum. In anticipation of the deadline, the Harper’s Podcast convened four exp...

Public service, stewardship, restraint: these were among the watchwords of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, a group nearly synonymous with the American ruling class from the late nineteenth century through roughly the late Sixties. Compare these ideals with the ruthless exhibitionism and unabashed nihilism of today’s elites, and one can see how a temptation might arise to feel nostalgic for...

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, philanthropists and New Orleans education reformers saw an unprecedented chance to completely restructure a failing school system. As a result, New Orleans has become the only city in the United States where charter schools have completely replaced public schools. It’s the most dramatic test case for the claims of the self-styled, traditional school choice mo...

The Constitution of the United States is a foundational element of national mythology, an exceptional document for its time that, unlike other constitutions, is still cited in contemporary political discussions. In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, five lawmakers and legal scholars—Donna Edwards, five​-​term congresswoman from Maryland, serving in the House of Representatives; Mary Anne Fran...

At this year’s Emmys, the biggest names in television presented their usual awards, while the show itself represented an industry in flux. The hostless proceedings saw record low ratings even as new television shows and streaming services continue to infinitely expand. In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Wilson considers the market and technological forces that gave rise to the “Golden...

September is here, bringing with it a new school year, the first day of fall, and the start of football season in America. After weeks of preseason games and predictions, the thirty-two teams of the N.F.L. begin five months of competition culminating in the Super Bowl, the televised broadcast of which drew an estimated 98.2 million viewers in 2019. Winning a Super Bowl is a dream for N.F.L. hopefu...

Each year, the City of David, the archaeological site believed to be the ancient core of Jerusalem, attracts some six hundred thousand tourists, who come to see the place where King David may have ruled in the 10th century BC. The problem is that, as Harper’s Magazine senior editor Rachel Poser explains in our September issue, the City of David is no scientific operation. Elad, the organization th...

If you have an email account, you’ve almost certainly received an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince. Yet despite the notoriety of this scam, it continues to net billions of dollars every year—and, as Sean Williams explains in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, these scams constitute just a fraction of the criminal activity committed by Nigerian cults like the Black Axe. Th...

The separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of American democracy; Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Yet there have been plenty of people who’ve tried to erode that boundary, or at the very least work around it. In the March 2003 issue of Harper’...

Misremembered histories are often more powerful than fact—look no further than the Tea Party, a political movement that wealthy donors and disaffected cranks built upon stacks of unused high school textbooks. However, the United States isn’t alone in such wonky mythologizing. Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, has embraced Turanism, which entails a bogus story of his nation’s f...

The American West has historically attracted defiant, self-sufficient people who are suspicious both of being asked for and of receiving help. In our August cover story, Ted Conover describes the months he spent among a modern crop of homesteaders in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, who have chosen to live off the grid with their guns, marijuana, and solar panels. Following Matt Little, a homesteader w...

Like Occupy Wall Street, the Gilets Jaunes movement was born of an economic crisis, and has been driven by a desire for systemic change; the media has tarred supporters of both as anti-Semitic and misogynistic. But are the yellow vests’ protests also fated to fizzle out under the weight of their aspirations? In the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christopher Ketcham takes issue with such misrep...

As time goes on, the world seems increasingly cruel and absurd—the president tweets hateful memes that originated on Reddit, which are then analyzed by the media and archived by the Library of Congress. But as Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Nicotine, and the forthcoming Doxology argues, it’s not that things are getting worse, but simply that they’ve never been in such clear, horrif...

2019 has been a banner year for xenophobia. Before news broke of lice-ridden migrant children forced to sleep on frigid cement, before the racist jokes Border Patrol officers traded on private Facebook groups were made public, President Trump sowed fear over “migrant caravans” headed for the land of the free—caravans that might’ve had “Middle Easterners” among their ranks. Such bald-faced lies con...

The mainstream fight for gay rights—for inclusion, for marriage equality—has been waged over fraught territory. Its victories—a changed and changing culture, legal and political leaps unimaginable half a century ago—are nothing short of monumental. But rainbow flags are as double-edged as they are fabulous. Visibility often means complicity; normalization can mean collective amnesia. At the Stonew...