Harper's Magazine

HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.

Harper’s Magazine

LETTERS

EASY CHAIR • Speaking Reassurance to Power

EXECUTIVE DISORDER • By William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, from Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency, which will be published this month by Princeton University Press.

WHITE RUSSIAN • From an anonymous message about Rinaldo Nazzaro, the founder of The Base, a white-supremacist group, that circulated on Telegram in April.

SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS • From an interview with the journalist Randall Sullivan that was conducted by Finn Cohen and published in the April issue of The Sun.

ECCE CUOMO • From public statements made by Andrew Cuomo since 2000.

HOTEL CALIFORNIA • By Maya Binyam, from Issue 44 of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, which was published this spring.

AUGHT BOURGEOIS • By Leigh Claire La Berge, from Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, which was published in June by Haymarket Books.

ARTIST OF NOTES • An artwork from the series Wall of Lamentations by Santiago Montoya that was on view in March at Halcyon Gallery, in London.

NOVEL ENCOUNTER • By Wu Jianren, from New Story of the Stone, which was published in June by Columbia University Press. The book, published in Chinese beginning in 1905, is considered one of China’s first works of science fiction. It is framed as a sequel to Cao Xueqin’s classic eighteenth-century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. Translated from the Chinese by Liz Evans Weber.

AT THE WINDOW • By Christopher Urban, from the Early Spring 2025 special fiction issue of Raritan, a quarterly journal published by Rutgers University that ceased operations this year.

PASSENGER PIGEON • From a Delta Air Lines passenger’s account of a flight on March 24, as reported by NBC News.

DIRTY BOULEVARD • By Leah Flax Barber, from The Mirror of Simple Souls, which was published in May by Winter Editions.

PLAYING DEAD • Do the Democrats really want reform?

THE DÉMODÉ PARTY

YOUR FACE TOMORROW • The puzzle of AI facial recognition

DEBT RECKONING • Has the Treasury market started to crack?

SOLUTION TO THE JULY PUZZLE

THE POISON THAT TASTES LIKE HOME • On a mother’s consuming love

IN THE CAVE OF THE SKULL

NEW BOOKS

INTO THE VORTEX • Yuko Tsushima goes beyond the human

CASUS BELLI • The origins of the war in Ukraine

FUN FEST

FINDINGS

Like Harper's but ALL science.