Harpers.org

The difference between protest and reform

Against “relevance” in art

The difficult pleasures of William Gaddis

Electoral politics in an ailing democracy

A much-publicized open letter endorsing herd immunity as a response to COVID-19 was found to have been signed by a number of homeopaths and fictitious medical professionals, including Dr. Johnny Bananas and another whose name was listed as the...

From Breaking Bread with the Dead, which was published last month by Penguin Press. Navigating life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. There are days we can’t even put gas in our cars without being assaulted by...

Mike Pence and the evangelical fantasy of persecution

Americans who are old, white, uneducated, unemployed, and live in someone else’s house at no cost to themselves are especially unlikely to wear face masks. Darker-skinned white people tend to cling to their whiteness. Pelagic fish with ultra-black...

When is it time to abandon a place to climate change?

Wendy Carlos’s music of the spheres

Life in a cop-free zone

The soothing clarity of Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Jackson’s devastating 1948 short story “The Lottery” takes place in what might be a provincial corner of America in which an annual, compulsory lottery lends a degree of adventure and meaning to otherwise uneventful lives. One summer morning...

On July 7, we published on our website an open letter signed by more than one hundred and fifty prominent writers, artists, and scholars. “The free exchange of information and ideas,” the letter warned, “is daily becoming more constricted.” This...