The Harper’s Podcast

Common sense seems to dictate that the rise of automation will bring about the economic demise of the working class. But need this be true? This assumption draws on a history of economic thought, from Malthus to Marx, that accepts laws such as the labor theory of value and the iron law of wages—laws that imply poverty as a necessary consequence—as inevitable. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine...

Over the past few weeks, the legislatures of Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Utah have passed bills that have significantly restricted abortion to much earlier stages in pregnancy; Arkansas banned the procedure outright. However, this domino effect—which has been attributed to the presidency of Donald Trump and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—is...

For many Americans, our relationship with stuff ends when we take it to the curb on trash day. But for millions of items—everything from coat hangers to mattresses—this is the beginning of a second life, one that flows out the Miami River and on to Haiti. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rowan Moore Gerety explores how this process relies on cheap labor rather than cheap materials, the fine...

The oxymoron “humanitarian war” is sometimes used ironically, at other times derisively, and still at others earnestly. In his recent book, excerpted in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, explores criteria deemed essential to justify violence. “While claiming to protect populations,” Brauman writes, “the United Nations is rehabilitating...

For most Salvadorans, it’s difficult to avoid the nation’s gangs, vast networks that manifest their power through extortion and territorial control. Why, then, do so many Salvadorans vilify a man who had made extraordinary progress toward easing gang violence? In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Castro follows Raúl Mijango, an ex-guerrilla commander who had built seemingly impossible inr...

There remains an idea that society exacts its price, and that if we could simply bring ourselves to walk away from it all—our bank accounts, our homes, our internet connections—we could, like Thoreau, return to an Edenic existence. The truth, of course, is much more complicated. In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Joe Kloc explores the lives of anchor-outs, a group of people who live in abandon...

It’s not a new question, but it is an especially timely one: How do children of immigrant parents absorb and, in turn, imagine an idea of their ancestral country? Pierre Jarawan’s new novel, The Storyteller, follows Samir, a German-born son of Lebanese immigrants. Samir’s father disappears without a trace when he’s just a boy, which shatters the family. Years later, Samir goes searching for his fa...

Adoption is often idealized as an altruistic, almost saintly act. But, throughout history and across cultures, the paths babies have taken to reach those well-meaning parents have frequently involved coercion or trafficking. In a report for the April issue, Rachel Nolan examines the checkered history of international adoptions from Guatemala, once one of the world’s top sources of adoptive childre...

Though we live in a politically factious era, our cultural landscape is dominated by consensus, where even the New York Times publishes top-books lists and must-see-TV listicles in place of measured criticism. What do we lose by squaring art away into tidy monoculture? In his cover story for the April issue, Christian Lorentzen calls upon anyone who enjoys serious literature to push back against f...

Cy Twombly’s art was in many ways the perfect avatar of Cy Twombly the man. As an artist at the intersection between two major movements in the twentieth century, he was an unplaceable combination of art outsider and someone with high-art sensibility, an artist who eschewed Americana but was its apotheosis. In interviews, he was either intensely private or flippant toward the interviewer, qualitie...

Black artists, intellectuals, and writers have long been asked to process their pain for white audiences—which has led some well-intentioned white progressives to view pain as the entirety of the black experience. Recognizing this fact inevitably leads us to wonder: what would have James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time been like if he had only addressed his fourteen-year-old nephew, or included a let...

Playful, big-eyed, and highly intelligent, sea lions seem to beg for human attention—except they don’t, because they’re animals. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Sallie Tisdale examines how human intervention—specifically, the construction of massive dams that trap fish and rising ocean temperatures—has led sea lions to make their way to bodies of water they shouldn’t be in, specifically t...

The popularity of white nationalism is not limited to predominantly white countries, and in South Africa, a country upheld as a model of racial reconciliation, white anxiety has coalesced around the notion that white farmers are being systematically murdered for their land. In our March issue, James Pogue travels to South Africa to investigate why this narrative is particularly enticing for white...

As medical technology continues to extend life spans, very little thought is given to the quality of those added years, or to what someone who is severely infirm but not terminally ill might need to feel fulfilled. In the February issue, Ann Neumann delves into the phenomenon of “mercy killings,” in which a man ends his spouse’s life once an illness has compromised her quality of life, and attempt...

Each year, millions of people around the globe are displaced, and while many are able to resettle through official channels, millions more are forced to travel through unofficial, unsanctioned, often dangerous paths. When migrants vanish, whose responsibility is it to find them? In his piece for the February issue, Matthew Wolfe follows Javed Hotak as he searches for his brother Masood, who disapp...

There is an exquisite irony about the rise of the internet and personal computing: although they were once hailed as safeguards against authoritarianism, that’s precisely what they now enable. In the January issue, Fred Turner explains how the challenge of these new modes of communication stems from historical narratives. “If we’re going to resist the rise of despotism, we need to understand how t...

Although many august publications have survived the shift to digital, they have retained many of the problems in how print outlets make assignments and edit their writers’ work—particularly when it comes to race. In the December issue, Mychal Denzel Smith writes, “There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor. This is not new. Navigating the constraints of white supremacy while est...

What do a comic genius and an internationally renowned psychiatrist have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out. So much, in fact, that Harper’s Magazine and Book Culture on Columbus brought John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist together for two nights of conversation. On the first night, McGilchrist interviewed Cleese; on the second, Cleese interviewed McGilchrist. With wit and intelligence, the two men...

What do a comic genius and an internationally renowned psychiatrist have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out. So much, in fact, that Harper’s Magazine and Book Culture on Columbus brought John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist together for two nights of conversation. On the first night, McGilchrist interviewed Cleese; on the second, Cleese interviewed McGilchrist. With wit and intelligence, the two men...

Social media has changed “the future of history.” Our lives and the historical events of our time are recorded differently now, with tweets and Instagram posts replacing letters and film rolls as primary sources for future generations to study. In the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, the writer and journalist Nora Caplan-Bricker delves into the world of internet archiving to explore how tradit...

With over 45,000 agents in its ranks, US Customs and Border Protection is the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Yet, as Melissa del Bosque notes in “Checkpoint Nation,” CBP’s jurisdiction extends farther than even congressional leaders realize, and relatively little is known by the broader public about how the agency operates. Last month, del Bosque, an investigative journalist and La...

In one of the most closely watched races of this midterm election cycle, Ted Cruz narrowly defeated Beto O’Rourke to gain reelection to the Senate for a second term. Unpopular among Democrats and Republicans alike, Cruz has been a target of national derision since his election on a Tea Party platform in 2012. In “The Tragedy of Ted Cruz,” published in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, Ana M...

Western Pennsylvania is a haunted-house mecca, boasting 40 haunts (as their owners like to call them) within 40 miles. With readymade Rust Belt ruins, low rents, and the horror legacy of George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead, Martin, and Creepshow, the area offers DIY scares as well as expansive Hollywood attractions. This episode is an audio tour of some of these haunts and the owne...

By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. The Republican Party, led by a president elected by a minority of voters, is advancing a set of policies that fewer and fewer Americans support, and with four sitting Supreme Court justices appointed by either President Trump or President George W. Bush, who also lost the popular vote, the impact of this imbalance of power is likely to be fe...

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an Associate Justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, this event illustrated of how we are socia...