Harper's Magazine

02/10/2024

“South Beach Reflection,” a photograph by Anastasia Samoylova, whose book Adaptation was published this month by Thames & Hudson.

© The artist. Courtesy Thames & Hudson

25/09/2024

A photograph of Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter playing a game of chess using live pieces during the filming of Richter’s 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1956) from the book Chess Players: From Charlie Chaplin to Wu-Tang Clan, which was published this month by FUEL.

© Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. Courtesy FUEL and Artbook/D.A.P

01/08/2024

“Girl Woman Lady,”“Cascade 2,”and“Running,” unique photographic reliefs (embossed gelatin silver photograms, fabric dye) from the series Rainbow Bruise by Klea McKenna () © The artist.

Courtesy EUQINOM Gallery (), San Francisco

31/07/2024

The Mountains, a painting by Andrea Breinbauer (), whose work was on view last month with Sobering Galerie () at the Seattle Art Fair ().

© The artist. Courtesy Sobering Galerie, Paris

25/06/2024

Travis Scott was arrested for trespassing and disorderly intoxication after breaking into a Miami yacht to yell at its passengers; Scott admitted that he had been drinking and explained himself by saying that “it’s Miami”; he has since begun selling a shirt bearing those words underneath a photo of his mug shot, which had been digitally altered to feature a broad smile.

https://harpers.org/2024/06/weekly-review-muwasi-refugees-blitzkrieg-hezbollah-gaza-war-crimes-starvation-west-bank-aid-hajj-heat-climate-activism-taylor-swift-boeing-juneteenth-putin-kim-jong-un-dui-travis-scott-miami/

A commemoration of the rapper’s brief arrest in Miami Beach, the shirt reinforced the idea that for some celebrities, a brush with the law can be good for business.

25/06/2024

Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Benjamín Labatut has written a spirited treatise on the philosophical threat posed by AI, and a winding historical narrative about its intellectual predecessors—a fascinating and tortured set of characters that include the 19th century mathematician George Boole, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, logician Walter Pitts, and finally Boole’s great-great-grandson, Geoffrey Hinton, who put his ancestor's ideas into practice as a computer scientist and vice president at Google, developing neural networks and some of the early iterations of what we now know of as AI, before quitting to warn the world about the dangers of these creations.

Before and after artificial intelligence

20/06/2024

“All you can authentically do is reproduce the flow, make your art as much like life as possible. If there’s a problem with immediacy as a style, it’s that it abolishes critical distance. Instead of an interrogation of reality, which is surely one of the jobs of art, there’s just affirmation, clicks and likes, a big thumbs-up for things just as they are.”

July 2024 Issue [Easy Chair] Be Here Now Download PDF Adjust Share by Hari Kunzru, On March 14, 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic sat down at a small table in the center of a gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Visitors were invited to take a seat opposite her and meet her gaze. She re...

19/06/2024

“Do you know any alcoholics or drug addicts? If so, you have a good idea of how the lies of addicts can erode the life of a family or a couple. Do you know to what extent greed and rivalry can deprive children not only of money but also of love? That’s the story of O’Neill’s (Irish) family and of my own family (on the Scottish side), both destroyed by premature deaths, each poisoned by the uniquely American disease of every man for himself – a fundamental hostility to helping one another.”

https://harpers.org/2024/06/american-disease/

18/06/2024

In Rome, attendees of a Pride parade carried cardboard cutouts of Pope Francis days after it was reported that he used a homophobic slur for the second time in recent weeks. “Priests sometimes talk a lot, and you don’t understand what they are talking about,” said the Holy Father, instructing priests to keep their speeches under eight minutes so as to dissuade their congregants from falling asleep. During a speech in which he got the name of his doctor wrong, Donald Trump challenged President Biden to take a cognitive test. Congressman Greg Steube introduced a bill that would rename the coastal waters around the United States “the Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States,” a former White House staffer claimed that on several occasions Trump mused out loud about executing people while in office, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the former president to Jesus Christ.

https://harpers.org/2024/06/weekly-review-gaza-netanyahu-humanitarian-aid-united-nations-who-malnutrition-ukraine-zelenskyy-modi-meloni-pope-pride-slur-execution-sugar-daddy-degenerate-crypto-rodeo/

17/06/2024

Resisting AI; facing the ghosts of resistance and exile in Cologne; among the ruins of Aleppo; fiction by Nicolette Polek and Joy Williams; the political history of Olympics pictograms; Donna Tartt, Simone Weil, Hari Kunzru, and more, in the July issue, now available https://harpers.org/archive/2024/07/

15/06/2024

“The twenty-first century’s protagonists of history, according to white-collar common sense, do not sweat in fields or factories, much less carry bundles down country roads. The involuntary, palpitating life palpitates elsewhere now. It flashes and darts through a vortex of global finance, trade, and engineering, somehow producing AI search engines, coronavirus vaccines, and the blockchain, all without the input of a single mud-stained worker. This may be pure ideology. But it carries a political odor, and surely has something to do with the kind of hardy perennial one so often sees in the New York Times: why do the democrats keep losing the working class?”

Matthew Karp

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/easy-chair-as-if-you-was-a-insect-matthew-karp/

14/06/2024

“After trying your hand at the market, you might realize you’re not that good at this buying low and selling high, nor do you have the know-how to diversify your portfolio enough to mitigate risk. So you give your money to someone who has told you, or at least implied—but never promised, and certainly not on paper—that over time, they can make more for you than you can make for yourself, even after taking their fees into account. This relationship can assume quite a few forms, though one of the most popular has been the mutual fund, in which the savings of many individual investors are pooled together and controlled by money managers. Though they’re commonplace today (by 2022, just over half of U.S. households had shares in at least one mutual fund), they didn’t get Joe and Jane Investor’s attention until the Sixties—when funds began advertising to the broader public—and only really started to catch on in the Eighties, thanks to a bull market, name-brand stock pickers like Peter Lynch and Michael F. Price, and the rise of the retirement plan.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/what-goes-up-andrew-lipstein-401k-doomsday-index-fund-catastrophe/

13/06/2024

“No one can torch the English language like a Beltway insider. A few years ago, phrases like ‘a feature, not a bug’ and ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ burned so fiercely through the Washington commentariat that they enjoyed hardly a moment between the flame of novelty and the ash of cliché.”

Have you read Dan Piepenbring’s New Books column? If you haven’t, you are in for a treat!

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/new-books-dan-piepenbring-all-the-worst-humans-frostbite-spycraft/

12/06/2024

“It is difficult to conceive of manual laborers—let alone rural, Trump-voting American workers—as a source of our own wealth and comfort. To the extent that urban liberals appreciate this logic at all, it drifts toward dim and distant thoughts about supply chains, and perhaps the dark origins of the iPhone in a Chinese factory or Congolese cobalt mine. If anything, the argument travels in the opposite direction.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/easy-chair-as-if-you-was-a-insect-matthew-karp/

07/06/2024

T.D. Allman reported on the U.S. led repression of a guerilla insurgency in El Salvador at a time when America’s support for that country’s military dictatorship was at its height. “However diligently one searched for significance,” he wrote in 1981, “one found only terrorized, hapless people — abused, barefoot women with no food or medicine for their malnourished children; landless, jobless, illiterate men and boys fleeing for their lives from the ‘security forces’ of their own national government; mutilated bodies beside the road.”

06/06/2024

“Two centuries after our independence from Britain, our past is to us what the monarchy has become to the British. It long ago lost the power to govern our actions, and its illusory glitter often blinds us to the realities of both the world and our place in it. But the past, if we are willing to listen, still has the power to warn.”

T.D. Allman, from “The Doctrine That Never Was,” which appeared in the January 1984 issue

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/the-monroe-fantasy/

04/06/2024

Sprinkler, a painting by Olivia Hill, whose work was on view in April at Bel Ami, in Los Angeles.

Courtesy the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles

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04/06/2024

“Political retribution,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson; “political malpractice,” complained Senator Mitt Romney; “fascism,” railed Senator J.D. Vance; “the kind of thing you would expect to see in the communist U.S.S.R.,” groused GOP co-chair Lara Trump.

https://harpers.org/2024/06/weekly-review-ceasefire-red-lines-elections-corruption-trump-guilty-coup-campaign-alito-flags-supreme-court-ethics-right-to-vote-south-korea-north-korea-balloons-kim-jong-un-beijing-pandas-adams-rats/