It’s a familiar story, but one no less tragic because of its familiarity: a female author makes a huge splash with her debut novel, but despite her promise, the doors slam shut and she fades from view. Nancy Lemann, author of the cult novel Lives of the Saints (1985), discusses the experience of that career trajectory, as well as the recent, renewed enthusiasm for her writing in the pages of Harper’s, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. With candor and her distinctive sensibility, Lemann also lays out her myriad influences, from Walker Percy to Evelyn Waugh. Read Lemann’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/lion-and-daughters/

On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America called a strike. While this may seem far afield from an august magazine that specializes in literary nonfiction, the WGA’s demands are in-line with the mission of Harper’s: to uphold the rights and unique voices of writers. As the balance of power in Hollywood has shifted away from traditional studios and toward streaming companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, their plan for “disrupting the industry” is almost identical to what tech companies did to journalism in the aughts. Tom Bissell, a member of the WGA and a contributing editor to Harper’s, discusses the finer points of the strike, the mood on the picket line, and the false menace of A.I. Read Bissell’s latest essay for the magazine: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/meditations-marcus-aurelius-stoicism/

What is it about Tucker Carlson that unites the divergent ideologies of national conservatism? In July 2019, the writer and historian Thomas Meaney attended the first National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and other right-wing thinkers sought to expand on Donald Trump’s politics. One reason that Carlson is so effective, Meaney remarks, is his consistent attack on two common foes of national conservatism: neoliberalism, and the neoconservatism of the Bush years. “It’s the shared enemy rather than any kind of shared mission among themselves,” Meaney says. And while these shared enemies (and the National Conservatism Conference itself) are nothing new, they are newly relevant as Carlson relaunches his program on Twitter, declaring, “You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true.” ● Read Meaney’s report: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/ ● Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save ● [11:44] Why is Tucker Carlson such an exciting figure for national conservatism? ● [16:46] Nationalism is a big tent. What is the common root to all these groups? ● [20:29] The fractured nature of national conservatism in some ways reflects the internet ● [30:33] There’s a profound strain worse than xenophobia ● [37:39] How do national conservatives resolve the difference between what Trump says he’s doing and what he’s actually doing

Do non-indigenous people have a right to perform or practice indigenous rituals? There’s no single answer, as Native Americans are not a monolithic group with a single opinion on the matter. Sierra Crane Murdoch reports on a group of religious organizations that purportedly offer “authentic” ceremonies—run by people with dubious claims to indigenous heritage—and give their participants peyote, a medicinal plant considered a sacrament by many Native Americans. Read Murdoch’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/a-native-american-church-without-native-americans-take-the-medicine-to-the-white-man/ Take our podcast survey: harpers.org/survey Subscribe to the magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

“The reason it’s so hard to write a cruise piece is because of David Foster Wallace,” explains Lauren Oyler, a critic and the author of the novel Fake Accounts. In her recent Harper’s Magazine cover story, she takes on Wallace’s 1997 cruise essay, also published in Harper’s, as she describes her experience aboard the Goop cruise. “But I didn’t want it to just be a work of criticism reckoning with David Foster Wallace’s reputation,” Oyler adds. So her essay goes beyond reputation to discuss “male feminists,” class dynamics on cruise ships, and the tired nature of materialist critiques of wellness in order to—as she puts it in her essay—“unite irony and sincerity once and for all.” Oyler’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/ Wallace’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/01/shipping-out/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save ● [3:16] Some problems Oyler takes with David Foster Wallace ● [10:08] How the public understanding of David Foster Wallace reflects on the popular understanding of the essay as well as contemporary women’s literature ● [15:41] “The male feminist” and women’s writing in relation to David Foster Wallace ● [24:05] The confusing economic class of people who goes on cruises ● [31:51] On the tired nature of materialist critique of wellness (Goop) ● [46:40] Oyler’s unification of irony and sincerity ● [55:35] “Didn’t anything good happen to you on this cruise?”

Internet culture has made different types of neurodivergence—particularly anxiety—more visible than it has ever been. Michael W. Clune, author of White Out, offers an account of how difficult it was to understand what a panic attack was before mental illness was instantly diagnosable with Dr. Google. More remarkably, his essay eloquently and accurately expresses what the experience of a panic attack is like. He speaks about the process of writing this memoir, discovering Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and creating types of narratives about anxiety. Read Clune’s memoir: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-anatomy-of-panic/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Take a survey about the podcast: harpers.org/survey

In the May issue, Erik Baker and Hari Kunzru debunk the conservative and leftist visions of the “crisis of work.” Rather than automation and quiet quitting, the problem lies with the shared feeling that the American experiment is failing. The all-consuming entrepreneurial drive we’ve been taught will give our lives meaning has revealed itself to be false, as stagnation abounds in all aspects of work: technology hasn’t made us more productive, nor has greater effort made us richer. With an eye toward the historical, Baker and Kunzru consider the true roles that technology, ideology, resources, and finance play in contemporary work culture. Where Tomorrow Meets Today, by Hari Kunzru: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/where-tomorrow-meets-today/ The Age of the Crisis of Work, by Erik Baker: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-age-of-the-crisis-of-work-quiet-quitting-great-resignation/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

A little after the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, Lewis Lapham discusses three essays he wrote during the George W. Bush era. With fine prose and razor-edged contempt for war, lies, and complacent members of the commentariat, each article captures a distinctive historical moment. “The American Rome” (August 2001): https://harpers.org/archive/2001/08/the-american-rome/ “Cause for Dissent” (April 2003): https://harpers.org/archive/2003/04/cause-for-dissent/ “Going by the Book” (November 2006): https://harpers.org/archive/2006/11/going-by-the-book/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

The unprecedented has happened: a former president was arrested and charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records. Though some of Donald Trump’s supporters dismiss it as spectacle, others see it as the fulfillment of prophecy. Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of the new book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, discusses what this latest development means to Trump’s faithful flock, and his years of reporting on the right-wing extremists who have become the new center-right. Read Sharlet’s past reporting for Harper’s: https://harpers.org/author/jeffsharlet/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, explores modern pilgrimage from a secular perspective, attempting to comprehend the force of conviction that motivates someone to eschew all worldly possessions. Ann Sieben, a middle-aged pilgrim from New Jersey who has walked through conflict zones and remote wildernesses in winter with only the clothes on her back (and, more recently, a COVID pass), is Wells’s guide of sorts. In what ways does the pilgrim find freedom? What role does gender play in the journey? Can it be a metaphor—for motherhood, say, or for storytelling? When you steep yourself in narratives, whether of saints or the secular, the distance between reader and story gets thinner. You begin to inhabit stories in a new way. “I think that’s maybe the crux of the whole thing for me,” said Wells, of pilgrimage. “That it can be a gift to let go of the romantic story so you can, with clear eyes, encounter the embodied reality of your situation.” Read Wells’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/numinous-strangers-pilgrimage/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

What’s wrong with a little bit of climate optimism? Kyle Paoletta discusses how the pendulum of climate coverage swings between catastrophism and heavy-handed reassurance, and has a chilling effect on climate resilience. Like doom-scrolling, catastrophism can be paralyzing—and sweeping optimism can make an equally harmful impression on the public, whose trust in the media may erode as they experience the whiplash of moving from the doomsday to the sanguine with little explanation. Paoletta describes some red flags in climate journalism: the more global a story grows, and the more into the future it predicts, the more we readers ought to take it with a grain of salt. “The only real path I see is being very engaged with people’s day to day lives and the actual things that they’re facing,” Paoletta adds. His book on cities of the Southwest will be published by Pantheon in 2024. Read Paoletta’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/the-incredible-disappearing-doomsday-climate-catastrophists-new-york-times-climate-change-coverage/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Mass demonstrations have swept through Israel since January 4, when Yariv Lenin, Israel’s justice minister, announced proposed changes to the country’s judiciary. If enacted, this so-called “Supreme Court override” bill would limit the Court’s power, as well as the power of government legal counselors; in their place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition would be granted a majority on the committee that appoints judges, thereby limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to rule against the executive and strike down legislation. Why is this happening now, and how much is at stake? The most common explanation is that Netanyahu is (yet again) under indictment, and this judicial overhaul plan would undermine the people and institutions likely to put him in prison. But Bernard Avishai, a professor at Hebrew University and Dartmouth College, the author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic, and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, explains that this is “only half the truth,” and the full explanation is far more complex, requiring an understanding of a culture war between theocracy and democracy that has persisted since Israel’s founding. Read Avishai’s past essays for Harper’s: https://harpers.org/author/bernardavishai/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani

Anne Fadiman unpacks her latest essay, “Frog,” a 6,000-word piece about Bunky, her family’s African clawed frog. Although he was easy to care for, this “unpettable pet” raised a number of philosophical and ethical questions about pet ownership. For nearly two decades, Bunky lived inside a too-small aquarium on Fadiman’s kitchen counter, ribbitting for a mate that could never come. Fadiman probes her continued guilt over whether this animal had lived a decent life—after all, you can’t spay or neuter a pet frog. Suffused with this unease, Fadiman’s essay departs from the typically saccharine or sentimental approach to writing about pets and death, respectively. As she explains in this episode, “Death is hard to face, so it’s interesting to face. It’s a literary challenge. And not all deaths are the same.” Bunky’s departure lends lessons on writing, caretaking, connections, confinement—in a word, relationships. Read Fadiman’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/frog-what-happens-to-the-pets-that-happen-to-you/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani.

Christian Lorentzen sat through the entirety of United States v. Bertelsmann, et al., an antitrust case taken up by the Department of Justice to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. In this episode, he discusses the industry—born in the 1920s as part of a middlebrow revolution, and consolidating in the 1970s to ultimately become today’s Big Five publishing houses. “This corporate agglomeration seems almost inevitable,” Lorentzen explains. “If we lived under a different intellectual property regime and a different system that wasn’t capitalism, maybe things would be different.” But does lack of competition between publishing houses really harm authors? This is the question at the heart of the trial and Lorentzen’s argument. Though the government ultimately blocked the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the trial made public some questionable practices of the Big Five, such as how publishers can prevent their imprints from upping bids against one another. For better or worse, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins are here to stay, influencing all parts of the world of books—what readers read, and what writers create for the mass market. Read Lorentzen’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/at-random-simon-and-schuster-bertelsmann-merger-trial-penguin-random-house/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Caitlin Chandler talks to Violet Lucca about the nature and purpose of the largely unremarked U.S. military presence in Niger. They discuss the history of the conflict in Niger and the way that U.S., European, and Russian interventions in the region have exacerbated the problems left behind by colonial borders. Chandler explains what the U.S. military’s increased reliance on remote warfare after the Iraq War has meant for Nigeriens. She also shares the difficulties of reporting the piece, including the need to hire an armed guard to travel outside the capital. Chandler’s letter appeared in the December 2022 issue. Read Chandler’s report: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/niger-the-next-frontier-in-the-war-on-terror/ Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

“Every New Yorker deserves dignity, and we are demonstrating that this is possible,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams in May of 2022, shortly after rolling out an initiative to remove homeless encampments throughout the five boroughs. In the following months, Adams implemented other policies—including involuntary hospitalizations for the mentally ill and/or homeless—that granted more power to police and less to the unhoused. However, as Wes Enzinna reports in the February issue, criminalization isn’t the only solution. In 2020, in Philadelphia, unhoused activists squatted in vacated properties, and eventually created a land trust that provided stable housing to dozens of people in need. This unconventional solution defied conservative-liberal thinking, which for decades has been caught in an impasse over whether to criminalize homelessness or boost public benefits. Enzinna, author of a forthcoming book about an Oakland tent city, discusses the replicability of the Philadelphia experiment—and the current state of homelessness discourse, which has increasingly (and inaccurately) focused on mental illness and addiction over economic factors. Read Enzinna’s reporting on Philadelphia in the February issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/02/no-vacancy-homelessness-land-trust-homes-philadelphia/ Enzinna on the Minneapolis Sheraton: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/the-sanctuary-sheraton-minneapolis/ Enzinna on shack living: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/gimme-shelter-ghost-ship-fire-san-francisco/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Google’s domination of internet search is a fact of life. What’s less apparent—if you don’t work in publishing or advertising—is Google’s control of internet ad sales. It’s estimated that the company pulls in nearly 30 percent of all digital advertising dollars. The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that it “abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches.” In the past, the determinant for antitrust laws is whether or not anticompetitive practices have raised prices for consumers; here, publishers and advertisers have been harmed, which has led to a different—but arguably more malicious—impact on the public. Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, talks through this landmark case. Read Lynn’s story from 2020: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Michael Robbins explores the shape that apocalyptic thought has taken in American Christianity (despite its slim textual basis) and in contemporary secular contexts like climate catastrophe. Robbins also draws on systems analysis to bring out the structural factors that could be pushing us to the edge of apocalypse. He discloses his own attitude, which is neither optimistic nor defeatist, but rather informed by religious and leftist commitments, which in his view share a “structure of feeling.” Read Robbins’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/apocalypse-nowish/ This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

Violet Lucca talks to Sasha Frere-Jones about the signs and symptoms of audiophilia. Frere-Jones explains how Spotify Wrapped, yearly best-ofs, and other attempts to quantify and rank music have disfigured the listening experience. He criticizes the assumption underlying audiophilia: that there is a Platonic ideal of what an album is supposed to sound like. Instead, Frere-Jones compares audiophilia to addiction in its obsession with re-creating a certain prior experience—in this case, a certain sound—to the detriment of new experiences. The podcast ends on a personal note, as Frere-Jones reflects on his need for vibey spaces during the pandemic. Read “Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon,” which appears in the December issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/corner-club-cathedral-cocoon-audiophilia-and-its-discontents/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: https://harpers.org/save

Kate DiCamillo—the author of Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Beatryce Prophecy, and many other novels—speaks with Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Beha about discovering her vocation in children’s literature. DiCamillo discusses how her writing for children is shaped by a sense of responsibility toward them, and what children’s literature can offer to adults. Rather than trading on double entendres and other devices that enliven children’s stories for the parent reading at the bedside, DiCamillo recovers a child’s sense of magic for adult readers—one that isn’t displaced into a realm of fantasy. Read “On a Winter’s Night”: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/on-a-winters-night-kate-dicamillo/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.79: harpers.org/save