The Harper’s Podcast

The advent of radical centrism; journalists’ fantasy that they are part of the professional elite; the shuttering of local newspapers; the impending extinction of the book editor; your Comp Lit degree from Brown: All are symptoms and causes of the dissolution of American society. In June, the day after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory in the Bronx led many (but perhaps too few) to rethink...

Natalie Holly reads Jenn Alandy Trahan’s short story from the September issue “They Told Us Not to Say This.” Then, Trahan joins Web Editor Violet Lucca for a discussion of her work. Trahan is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she was a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction.

Hailed as a major victory for conservatives seeking to reduce collective-bargaining rights, the recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 has further emphasized the precarious position occupied by American unions. Formerly ranked in the top tier of nations for collective-bargaining rights by the International Trade...

There are 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and, by one estimate, one in ten of them has been the victim of some sort of fraud—deceived by scammers who promise to expedite their visas, free them from detention, or help with their asylum claims for a fee. The true scale of these schemes, collectively known as notario fraud, is impossible to know because victims are rel...

When both war and the military-industrial complex hum unchallenged in the background of American life, it turns out that a fighter pilot, in the right circumstances, has the ability to launch a nuclear attack. Barack Obama’s commitment to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal over the next twenty-five years at a cost of at least $1.2 trillion failed to generate public outrage; now that Donald Trump i...

The western United States is experiencing longer-burning, wider ranging, and more deadly fires now than at any point in the past century. The attitude towards fire and fire management in the rural West and Washington, however, has changed little in the last 100 years: Rather than letting it burn, as part of a natural process, firefighters must risk their lives to extinguish it; requiring the use o...

The United States has the largest population of prisoners in the world: at present, nearly 2.2 million adults are inside correctional facilities. The incarcerated are disproportionately African-American and Latinx, and nearly half have been diagnosed with a mental illness. In her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, journalist Alisa Roth reports on the lack of care availabl...

Bank-owned bikeshares and empty condos. Record numbers of homeless families and “curated” pop-up shops. A poverty level that’s higher than the “Fear City”–era. Such are the realities of living in New York City in 2018. In his July cover story “The Death of a Great American City,” Kevin Baker peels back the veneer of urban affluence and reveals how public amenities have been gradually destroyed by...