Harper’s Magazine
Since 1850. “America’s most interesting magazine” —New York Times
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- “What we need is a dynamic landscape with lots of different types of media ownership to offset the shortcomings of any one particular system. A healthy media ecosystem, like a healthy democracy, requires diversity.” Jelani Cobb in the November Harper’s Forum. buff.ly/hcVLGZK
- “The therapist’s death could not have occurred at a worse time, coming as it did just as the depressed person was beginning to process and work through some of her core shame- and resentment-issues concerning the therapeutic process.” —David Foster Wallace
- “All that loot pumped out of the Armenian proletariat, says the gaur, and for what. Hurry up, says the pig, we’ll be here for eternity at this rate.” From Jokes, by Keston Sutherland, which was published in November by The Last Books.
- “It is difficult not to feel that more mercy, rather than less, would be salutary for our society today.” Bernadette Meyler on the presidential pardon. buff.ly/XPek6cN
- “At school we had two English teachers, and they were very different. This was a private, single-sex high school in Los Angeles in the early Nineties.” A high school memory shifts on second inspection in Nell Freudenberger’s latest story.
- A risk-free bet before Super Bowl Sunday: Harper’s Magazine is offering subscriptions at the special price of $18.97 for a yearlong subscription. Subscribe before 2/8 for this special offer. buff.ly/4S7BlhO
- “Sixty years later, the Spectacle saturates us in ways the Situationists never imagined. Online platforms structure our personal relationships; algorithms nudge us toward the platform owners’ preferred choices.” — @harikunzru.bsky.social
- “What terms might be used to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” From January 1998: The Depressed Person, by David Foster Wallace.
- “I’m looking to speak to young women on TikTok who have opted out of working life to become stay-at-home girlfriends. I’m looking to speak to someone who has entered into a lavender marriage due to the cost of living.” From posts shared on X by journalists.
- “Bainbridge wasn’t shy about plundering her personal life for material. The first novel she wrote reimagines a flirtation she’d had as a young woman with an older married man, backdated a few years to make the age gap more disquieting.”
- “Do you think Zuckerberg cares what we, the Christian community, think about AI? Or Sam Altman? We have to show up together to shape technology.” From a talk delivered by Patrick Gelsinger, head of the faith-based technology platform Gloo.
- "Melania: Devourer of Men, a parodic erotic thriller depicting the First Lady as a monster, became the number one bestseller in the Conspiracy Thrillers category on Amazon."
- “What does it look like inside one of these detention centers?” “It’s completely devoid of color. Eloy is that weird institutional blue paint…I’ve not been inside any of the cells, because I’m not allowed, only into the consultation room.” From "Just Keep Going North"
- “Much like the sovereigns of old, Trump has also sought to maximize the theatrical impact of his pardons. The documents themselves boast his enormous signature, significantly larger on the page than those of his predecessors.” —Bernadette Meyler
- “The drug war hadn’t just created scores of widows and grieving families. It had entirely disrupted Filipino society, replacing with suspicion, fear, and mistrust the attributes and unwritten rules that once governed barangay life.” — @swilliamsjourno.bsky.social
- “What a strange comfort it is to read of this long-dead man’s soggy pillows, his heartaches and stomachaches, the terrace with a view of the sea where he liked to study.” Dan Piepenbring on Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance.
- “Nobody knows quite how much money is bet on baseball every year. A vague idea came out of an investigation seven years ago, which found that one bookmaker handling bets on baseball from New York State gamblers alone made a profit of $500,000 in eight weeks.”
- “Four years later, I have wagered more than $18,000 on FanDuel. The story of my spending, and burgeoning football fandom, is freakishly conventional. Really, it was FanDuel that gave me a reason to watch football.” —Jasper Craven
- “The gunman asked again, You’re not government? You look like government. That’s a government haircut. I’m just here to shoot the goats, Adi said. That’s my job. I swear.” From Eradication by Jonathan Miles.
- A grueling mattress maneuver awakens James to the world’s underlying geometry in this 1993 story, which is a selection from a then-unfinished manuscript of Infinite Jest. buff.ly/8Ehshl1
- “We wore pleated flannel skirts, navy sweaters, saddle shoes—an ensemble as maladapted to the Southern California climate as it was to our bodies at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.” A high school memory shifts on second inspection in Nell Freudenberger’s latest story.
- Every month in our Findings column, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi presents a constellation of the most—and least—important scientific discoveries. buff.ly/pjOOYMb
- “The possibility of abuse does not vitiate the need, demonstrated over the course of centuries, for pardoning as both a remedy for problems within the criminal justice system and as a force for societal reconciliation.” —Bernadette Meyler
- “What terms might be used to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” From January 1998: The Depressed Person, by David Foster Wallace.
- From July 2019: William T. Vollmann on the actual crisis at the border.
- “What do we pay the owner of the place where the treasures are buried? … Perhaps I will return my clay to the earth in exchange for the statue it will give me: we shall only be trading an image of man for an image of man.” —François-René de Chateaubriand
- “At once we were back in the age of real interest— Geode splitting, Necco wafers, coin purses, Yo-yo tricks, jacks, and snakes in a can.” From Agate Head / Stone Soup, by Patricia Lockwood (@tricialockwood.bsky.social) which will be published this year by Penguin Poets.
- “What a strange comfort it is to read of this long-dead man’s soggy pillows, his heartaches and stomachaches, the terrace with a view of the sea where he liked to study.” Dan Piepenbring on Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance. buff.ly/mp4gQ94
- “The gunman asked again, You’re not government? You look like government. That’s a government haircut. I’m just here to shoot the goats, Adi said. That’s my job. I swear.” From Eradication by Jonathan Miles (@doubledaybooks.bsky.social)
- “Humanity doesn’t come cheap, says the chicken. It’ll blow over, says the whelk. I’ll be back, says the olm, just crawling out for a quick look at the screaming sky. Don’t stare, says the raven. It hates it.” —Keston Sutherland
- From this month’s Harper’s Index. buff.ly/KnNIZZo
- “At their best, today’s bettors in the bleachers give the game a flavor beyond the Cubs’ poor power to add or detract. The bidding has a pace and a rhythm that are almost contrapuntal.” From the Harper’s archive, from the July 1966 issue.
- “Sometimes, if I lose more than $100, I place a bigger bet to make up for it. This phenomenon is called ‘chasing your losses,’ and in large doses, I’m told, it can signal a problem.” @Jasper_Craven on America’s new gambling epidemic.
- “Was the utter disregard for the private feelings of another human being the price of entry into the charmed circle of the published writer? And if so, did I want that distinction badly enough to pay it?” From a new story by Nell Freudenberger.
- “Divorce, naturally, wasn’t mentioned. The affair wasn’t either. They continued to edit and publish Bainbridge’s novels.” Christopher Tayler ( @mansfieldvonrank.bsky.social ) on Beryl Bainbridge and Anna and Colin Haycraft.
- “I’m looking to speak to young women who are part of a trio of friends. Ever been paranoid that the other two are bitching about you? I’m looking to speak to a doctor or therapist about signs that your cortisol levels are out of control.” harpers.org/archive/2026...
- “Reading Beloved Son Felix feels like peeping through a forgotten keyhole into the sixteenth century. Lo and behold, death and disease await.” Dan Piepenbring on Beloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance.
- “Talayan had, somehow, gotten poorer since Duterte’s rule. The cost of living had soared—it might take four thousand pesos to rent a family home, and food prices had shot up.” @swilliamsjourno.bsky.social reports on the aftermath of Duterte’s drug war.
- “Adi said, The foundation—they sent me here for five weeks. To—to eradicate the goats. Again the men traded glances before crumpling into deeper laughter; Adi was beginning to apprehend they were drunk.” From Eradication by Jonathan Miles, from @doubledaybooks.
- “I am not nostalgic, exactly, but lately I have been preoccupied by something that I used to believe I had found in London—a city within the city, above and beneath and between the everyday.” — @harikunzru.bsky.social
- “All right, says the dog, I’m only doing this once. Everyone shut up. So, it’s winter. I’m writing a book of jokes. The jokes are funny, everyone loves them.” From Jokes, by Keston Sutherland, which was published in November by The Last Books.
- “This particular morning Luz wanted me to see how Duterte’s agenda played out after dawn, when the drug war bled into what she called Manila’s war on the poor.” @swilliamsjourno.bsky.social reports on the aftermath of Duterte’s drug war.
- “Seventy percent of Nobel Prize winners of the past hundred years are Christians. Do you want to win the Nobel Prize? The best way to do that is to become a Christian.” From a talk delivered by Patrick Gelsinger, head of the faith-based technology platform Gloo.
- “Feldman provides an exceptional guide to a culture that produced castrati only to discard them, and to the haunted sense of too-lateness that left Moreschi outside his own life.” Dan Piepenbring on Castrato Phantoms by Martha Feldman. harpers.org/archive/2026...
- “Ice and snow storms led to disruptions across the U.S., causing power outages, school closures, and multiple deaths; and FEMA instructed staff not to use the word ‘ice’ in public communications, citing concerns about memes mocking immigration officers.”
- Reposted by Harper’s Magazine[Not loaded yet]
- “Perhaps what the score most resembles is a topographical map, with the arcs like a distant outcropping of mountains and the arrows at the bottom right bringing sketched-out directions to mind.” @oliviagiovetti.bsky.social on political possibilities of graphic notation.
- “Inarguably, the pardon power has been put to some dishonorable use by recent administrations. But would we really be better off without it?” Bernadette Meyler on the presidential pardon.
- “Was the utter disregard for the private feelings of another human being the price of entry into the charmed circle of the published writer? And if so, did I want that distinction badly enough to pay it?” From a new story by Nell Freudenberger.
- “Words are not so much endowed with life by a critic as their existing yet dormant life is activated by the critic’s process of noticing what’s already there.” Katie Kadue on reanimating a cliché.
