Show cover of The Harper’s Podcast

The Harper’s Podcast

Since 1850, Harper’s Magazine has provided its readers with a unique perspective on the issues that drive our national conversation, featuring writing from some of the most promising to most distinguished names in literature—from Barbara Ehrenreich to Rachel Kushner. Listen as Harper’s editors and contributing writers take a deep dive into these topics and the craft of long-form narrative journalism. Subscribe to the magazine for only $16.97 per year: harpers.org/save

Tracks

In June, writers Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner joined Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll for a conversation and Q&A in front of a live audience at the NYU Skirball Center in downtown Manhattan. Listen to Cusk and Lerner read from their recent Harper’s essays and discuss the state of contemporary fiction, Cusk’s use of artists’ biographies in her newest novel Parade, reading in a second language, parenthood, the role of ego in writing, and much more. Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97 per year: harpers.org/save. “The Hofmann Wobble” by Ben Lerner, from the December 2023 issue of Harper’s “The Spy” by Rachel Cusk, from the October 2023 issue of Harper’s 11:31: “You can’t be both an encyclopedia and a news source without some kind of contamination.” —Ben Lerner 19:09: “First of all, I thought, God, if I’d never told anyone who I was, starting with my parents, if I hadn’t accepted that containment in myself, what would I have created? What would my relationship to reality be?”  —Rachel Cusk 25:18: “I mean this as a total compliment, but I read your books with a lot of dread.” —Ben Lerner to Rachel Cusk 26:36: “What the novel has tried to do, kind of wrongly, I guess, in the end, is for the act of reading to also be an act of shared experience.” —Rachel Cusk 28:34: “Being a good parent in the moment of composition, if you’re trying to take care of those imagined readers, can be deadly for the work – not always, but sometimes.” —Ben Lerner 28:49: “On the other hand, having kids for me, especially young kids, it does refresh your wonder before language.” —Ben Lerner 29:43: “If your work can change in the way you change, or people change, when you have children, I think that’s a really powerful thing.” —Rachel Cusk 32:10: “I’m really into animal vocalization stuff.” —Ben Lerner 34:23: “French has completely changed my English.” —Rachel Cusk 40:24: “My dad told me never to learn to type because I would end up being someone’s secretary, which was kind of feminist of him I guess, but typing is the thing I’ve done the best with in my whole life.” —Rachel Cusk 41:23: “I think there’s a lot of ego involved in the claim to disavow ego in writing.” —Ben Lerner 42:45: “What is a shame is the idea that examination of self is egotistical.” —Rachel Cusk

7/10/24 • 46:49

Inspired by the pulp collectors Gary Lovisi and Lucille Cali, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Joe Kloc embarked on a freewheeling search for a magazine lost to time: the inaugural issue of Golden Fleece Historical Adventure. In this week’s episode, Kloc joins Violet Lucca to discuss his adventures exploring the world of pulp magazines, the act of collecting, and Lost at Sea, a book based on a previous feature Kloc wrote for Harper’s, slated for release in 2025. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “The Golden Fleece”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/the-golden-fleece-kloc/ “Empathy, My Dear Sherlock”: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/empathy-my-dear-watson-netflix/ “Lost at Sea”: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/lost-at-sea-richardson-bay/ 3:55 “What appealed to me about Gary and pulp collecting in general is, this is really for the love of the game.” 4:06 “I was interested in the idea that people would be so passionate about those objects when it didn’t have that same monetary incentive.” 16:20 “Pulps technically mean only the magazines, not the paperbacks.” 19:00 “These pulp writers became those comic book writers. Those comic books become comic book movies, and these comic book movies are constantly competing for your attention.” 25:52 “It gives you a feeling of being a child and remembering a time when all was before you and anything could happen.” 27:28 “These objects carry a deeper meaning, even if they’ve been destroyed or lost.” 37:18 “It’s hard to describe the power of Sherlock Holmes in the pulp collecting world.” 41:02 “I’m not going to let go of my imagination. It always has been fun to think like this and it always will be fun to think like this.” 44:40 “It’s a form of vernacular creativity.”

10/30/23 • 63:12

With Trump as the forerunning Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party appears to be falling back on the same familiar logic: better than the alternative. But certain progressive candidates are still looking to disrupt the status quo, however unlikely support from the establishment left may be. In this week’s episode, Harper’s Magazine’s Washington editor, Andrew Cockburn, joins senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to survey the landscape of the 2024 election with a focus on three insurgent candidates: Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Andrew Cockburn’s article “Against the Current”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/against-the-current 3:03: “Popping up on the picket line is actually a very hard turn for him as a president.” 4:08: “It’s Trump all over, fake populism as usual.” 5:40: “It’s only when the DNC decided to throw its full weight behind him … then Biden was popular for a while.” 7:42: “He’s really not that old.” 12:10: “I can’t think of any example where a president nominates a strong alternative. Instinctively no leader wants to be encouraging a potential rival.” 14:39: “You don’t get anywhere by promising to make people’s lives better. The only thing you can do is convince people the alternative is worse, which is an infinitely depressing point of view.” 17:30: “Obviously the candidate who has gotten the most attention has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he has evoked a hysterical response.” 19:14: “Marianne Williamson, who has gotten much less attention, has detailed proposals on everything.” 19:53: “Cornel West has the most straightforwardly progressive agenda.” 26:58: “She said the Republicans were like the dog who caught the car, and it was a car full of angry women.” 28:44: “When people are asked why they don’t support Biden, they always cite the economy. The economy seems to be doing well, and yet, people are hurting.” 31:38: “It’s getting late now for any kind of insurgency.” 39:40: “The other fear is that people who would never vote for Trump can’t be bothered to vote for Biden or stay home.”

10/2/23 • 41:25

Today we’re rerunning an episode from 2018 featuring two interviews with Harper’s Magazine’s former New Books columnist, Lidija Haas, and with our current Easy Chair columnist Rachel Kushner. Listen in advance of our event tonight at the Center for Fiction, “What Happened to Gen X?,” which will see Harper’s editor Christopher Beha in conversation with his generational peers Rachel Kushner and Ethan Hawke as they explore the question at the center of our September issue. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, the event illustrated how we are socialized to perform and understand gender, race, and class. In this episode, New Books columnist Lidija Haas joined Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss a handful of recent publications that deal with these issues: Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, and Kristen M. Ghoddsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. In the second segment, Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and Telex From Cuba joined Lucca to discuss an essay she wrote that was included in the October 2018 issue’s Readings section, pulled from her memories of the late Nineties New York art world. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Learning to Wait,” Rachel Kushner’s latest column for the October issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/learning-to-wait/ Rachel Kushner’s latest book, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Hard-Crowd/Rachel-Kushner/9781982157708 Lidija Haas in the Harper’s archive: https://harpers.org/author/lidijahaas/ Lidija Haas’s review of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad for Bookforum: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2503/rebecca-traister-s-case-for-feminist-rage-20155 “Red Letter Days,” Rachel Kushner’s 2018 essay on the late Nineties New York art world: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/red-letter-days/ “What Happened to Gen X?”, our event tonight at the Center for Fiction: https://centerforfiction.org/event/the-center-for-fiction-and-harpers-magazine-present-what-happened-to-gen-x/

9/18/23 • 57:04

Isolated for years by strict censorship laws, community infighting, and language barriers, the writer Amir Ahmadi Arian often turned to Hamed Esmaeilion’s work for solace. In addition to authoring short stories and two novels, Esmaeilion chronicled mundane moments with his family on a blog that resonated deeply with Arian, someone of the same generation also working and living in the Iranian diaspora. Following the tragic death of Esmaeilion’s wife and daughter in the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, Arian witnessed his friend publicly mourn his family and transform his fury into action. Arian sat down with Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, to discuss Esmaeilion’s journey into activism and the responsibility of Iranian diasporic artists. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Waiting for the Lights,” Amir Ahmadi Arian’s report in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/waiting-for-the-lights/ Arian’s English-language debut novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him Esmaeilion on his memoir, It Snows in This House: https://bookshop.org/p/books/then-the-fish-swallowed-him-amir-ahmadi-arian/8025040 Canada’s response to the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 tragedy: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/flight-vol-ps752.aspx?lang=eng 7:24: “Before thinking about how to develop your characters, or how you structure the story, or the themes you want to focus on, the first thing you had to consider was: Will the book I am writing survive the censorship office” 9:01: “I think it’s kind of a miracle we still have a literary culture, given the circumstances.” 13:00: “The whole process is made to intimidate you, to show you that they know more about you than you would think and actually use it against you.” 13:29: “He was being interrogated when his father-in-law passed away.” 26:52: “So you go through all this difficulty, all this trouble, to just have an ordinary life.” 28:31: “It’s not so much a decision that he made to pursue justice, it’s just an inevitable turn of events. There’s nothing else left to do.” 33:12: “There was this hunger for any figure outside of Iran that could bring people together.” 37:52: “All walks of life, all stripes, they were there, they were together shouting the same thing.” 40:05: “The thing about the government in Iran is they have mastered the art, if you can call it the art, of containing any kind of revolutionary mass protest.” 44:43: “The way out of Iran has been pretty much a one-way road.” 47:17: “I have the freedom to tell what I want to tell, to tell the stories that I think are untold and unknown, while carrying the life that I had in my chest.”

9/11/23 • 48:59

Reviewing Zadie Smith’s The Fraud for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Kirsch takes stock of Generation X as a literary phenomenon. He finds “Gen X lit” to be composed of two distinct waves, between which Smith is caught. The younger wave, including writers Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, and Tao Lin, has formed its ideas about art, culture, and society partly in opposition to predecessors like David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Dave Eggers—who claimed a great moral power for art—and partly in response to the younger millennials, who question whether art has any value at all. Kirsch is joined in this episode by Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss how Smith’s historical fiction operates within this literary lineage, why autofiction came to succeed the confessional memoirs of the Nineties, and what the novel form can do for us. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Come as You Are” Adam Kirsch’s review in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/come-as-you-are-kirsch/ “My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/ 6:01: “Instead of rushing up to the reader and giving them a bear hug and saying, ‘This is who I am, please love me,’ which I think is a sense that I often get from David Foster Wallace, these younger writers are a lot more complex and ironic and elusive.” 8:46: “Autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide.” 14:21: “Smith is writing about things that have come up in her fiction since the beginning—things like: Is it my job to be politically virtuous as a writer? Or am I supposed to be telling some other kind of truth? Is there some sort of artistic mission that is somehow removed from political virtue?” 18:44: “If you step back and make it an alternative reality—in this case, something in the past—you can make more of an effort to see all the way around the subject. And that’s something that Smith does very well in The Fraud.” 31:06: “So much of it is about this sort of solidness and resistance to getting involved in things … As we get older and assume different roles in life, something of that remains, the desire to be a sort of Bartleby and say no rather than yes—maybe that’s what Gen X will be remembered for.”

9/5/23 • 31:54

In his September cover story for Harper’s, Justin E. H. Smith sets out to define Generation X, that nameless cohort wedged between boomers and millennials whose members, in midlife, now face “an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us.” Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/ “Permanent Pandemic” Justin E. H. Smith’s piece from June 2022 about the endurance and overextension of COVID-19 digital infrastructure: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/permanent-pandemic-will-covid-controls-keep-controlling-us/ 2:24: “my ideal audience is Harper’s readers” 3:22: the relationship between art and politics 19:07: “as a teenager in the 1980s, there was a widespread sense that our era was kind of a weak aftershock of what our parents had experienced.” 27:04: “I think one way to think about this generation is a generation that came of age intellectually and emotionally and perhaps politically before the September 11 attacks.” 37:06: “If we think that the state of emergency requires of us that we stop thinking about art as an autonomous sphere of creation … once you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

8/29/23 • 44:35

Stephen Sondheim may have brought the cryptic crossword to America, but Richard E. Maltby Jr. brought it to Harper’s Magazine. The lyricist, director, and cryptic creator sat down with Harper’s and one of his checkers, Roddy Howland Jackson, to talk about the history of the puzzle, the declining use of dictionaries, and the rise in word puzzle fascination. After all, “What holds the country together is the diversity of different nerd populations.” Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s puzzles in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/sections/puzzle/ A link to uploads of Stephen Sondheim’s Crossword Puzzles: http://blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/putting-it-together.html Christopher Tayler on T.S. Eliot’s legacy: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/t-s-eliot-legacy-an-hallucinated-man-the-wasteland/ Ryan Ruby on Nabokov: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/ 4:01: Stephen Sondheim’s cryptic crossword legacy 7:51: The musicality of the cryptic 14:14: “If you’re going to do something that is tricky, you have to be fair.” 17:44: There’s no such thing as the English language.” 26:26: On getting stumped by your own puzzle 33:56: Modernist poetry’s puzzles and contemporary poetry’s…plain prose 38:09: Clues are “designed to be read wrong.” 39:56: Nabokov’s crossword legacy 47:06: The dictionary as Bildungsroman 55:26: Wordle! Spelling Bee! “As the language gets more and more debased, people seem to be more interested in language.” 1:02:41: A cryptic proposal

8/21/23 • 66:16

In the spring of 2001, Benjamin Hale’s six-year-old cousin went missing in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting one of the largest search-and-rescue missions in Arkansas history. Her miraculous discovery is a story in itself, but in a long Folio for the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hale also tells of the loss of another young girl in the same woods, decades prior, that seems eerily connected to his cousin’s. In conversation with Harper’s editor, Christopher Beha, Hale tackles questions of belief raised by a sequence of events so uncanny that they have prompted listeners—as well as those intimately involved—to search for other explanations. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Who Walks Always Beside You?” Benjamin Hale’s essay in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/who-walks-always-beside-you/ “The Last Distinction?” Benjamin Hale’s piece from August 2012 about monkeys: https://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/the-last-distinction-talking-to-the-animals/ 2:10: “I try to give the nutshell version and end up giving a story for an hour” 10:50: Having to live in order to save another 13:51: “My militant atheism was more informed by Carl Sagan” than Richard Dawkins 17:00: There are certain things I don’t understand, I will never understand, and I’m okay with that.” 20:54: The ethos of Arkansas 25:16: “Go to the water, go to the river” 30:42: On the 5,000 words that didn’t make the cut

8/14/23 • 35:02

In “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s story for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, a woman visits an old friend whose husband has recently died, only to discover that the nature of her friend’s grief is more chilling than she could have imagined. Oates is joined by her former student Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s, to discuss the connections between writing and teaching, and between writing and time. Revisiting stories by Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, and more, they consider the ghosts that haunt Oates’s story, the ghosts that haunt fiction, and the ghosts we would argue with if given one more chance. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s short story in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/joyce-carol-oates-the-return/?logged_in=true A complete collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories Short stories by John Updike: https://bookshop.org/p/books/trust-me-short-stories-john-updike/11077187?ean=9780449912171 Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Borges and I”: https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-gabriel-garcia-marquez/286337?ean=9780060883287 Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: https://bookshop.org/p/books/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/581281?ean=9780679723424 John Gardner and William Gass’s debate over literature: https://medium.com/the-william-h-gass-interviews/william-h-gass-interviewed-by-thomas-leclair-with-john-gardner-1979-e6de4d424107 Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” A Void by Georges Perec: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-void-georges-perec/623575?ean=9781567922967 James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.: https://bookshop.org/p/books/ulysses-james-joyce/1408797?ean=9780679722762 https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce/17762276?ean=9780142437346 4:00: Teaching allowed you to “open a door, step into that other world of people” 7:01: “It’s such a pleasure to read with other people” 10:38: On being a “puppet-like dummy” 14:06: “Not everyone is reading autofiction” 23:00: “I find myself going into a surreal world, because the lost person is still real to the deeper self” 25:21: Even in postmodernism, “there’s always that core of the lone beating heart” 31:03: “If I’m writing a novel, it stretches out to the horizon” 41:31: “If people came back from the dead, they would be the same people they were before”

8/8/23 • 42:17

In his August cover story for Harper’s Magazine, Jason Blakely argues that an overreliance on scientific authority, or “scientism,” only furthered the divide between those who adhered to and those who disobeyed public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of engendering legitimacy through dialogue, Blakely says, policymakers passed down “neutral” doctrines in the name of science and often at the expense of other social values. Blakely sat down with Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss his piece and its implications as we’ve gained hindsight on the pandemic. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Read “Doctor’s Orders,” Jason Blakely’s piece in the August edition of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/ Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: https://bookshop.org/p/books/we-built-reality-how-social-science-infiltrated-culture-politics-and-power-jason-blakely/13834194?ean=9780190087388&gclid=CjwKCAjwt52mBhB5EiwA05YKo3uXmyJK8wby9dq8EZ2OL-QjWDi1IHNN9iiqOVTd9recWt0-_anIkBoCKfgQAvD_BwE The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism-max-weber/11609371?ean=9780486427034 Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: https://bookshop.org/p/books/homo-sacer-sovereign-power-and-bare-life-giorgio-agamben/10913759?ean=9780804732185 4:32: How could these two opposite positions “shed light on our situation” 8:12: “Some very extreme human experiences happened at that time” 15:11: It’s the economy, stupid! 17:02: “Humans are a weird animal; we can become like the things that describe us” 23:20: “People have to be listened to in order to understand what’s guiding their life” 27:26: RFK Jr., and the blurred lines between anti-scientism and anti-science 37:09: “As daunting as it is to say politics must start from the bottom up, there’s no other way”

7/31/23 • 40:59

An estimated one out of every four Nigerians is a silent carrier of sickle cell disease, a hemoglobin disorder that can cause serious health problems and even death. With recent advancements in genetic testing, many Nigerians won’t take the risk of reproducing with other silent carriers or people with the disease. But, as Krithika Varagur reports, love doesn’t always accord with the Punnett square. Providing a snapshot of what our “genetic responsibility” could be as prenatal tests proliferate, Varagur sat down with Harper’s Magazine senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to discuss one couple’s story of public health, family, and most of all love in Lagos. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease,” Krithika Varagur’s story in the August edition of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/love-in-the-time-of-sickle-cell-disease/ Krithika Varagur’s book, “The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project”: https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-s-poetics-hippocrates-g-apostle/17272634?ean=9781950071036 Larissa MacFarquhar on the family court system: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/when-should-a-child-be-taken-from-his-parents Katherine Boo’s piece, “After Welfare”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/after-welfare Aristotle’s Poetics: https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-s-poetics-hippocrates-g-apostle/17272634?ean=9781950071036 3:35: The story started as “an aside my friend in Nigeria made” 8:10: “I am a romantic, and I don’t think I would write this story about people who don’t choose love” 13:25: “In a lot of traditions, unlimited choice is not the one way route to a good life” 14:52: There’s been a “revolution” in sickle cell treatment over a single generation 17:35: “Sickle cell is no longer a death sentence,” which complicates responsibility 22:30: A range of possibilities is “closer to our reality with genetic testing” than a yes/no 26:00: “Genetic responsibility shouldn’t turn into a genetic blame game” 34:25: The best story is one that would be powerful at the dinner table 37:55: To quote Carl Sagan, “If you want to invent an apple pie from scratch, you have to create the universe”

7/24/23 • 39:34

Christopher Carroll, the reviews editor at Harper’s, sits down with the former New Books columnist, Claire Messud, and her successor, Dan Piepenbring, to discuss the history, challenges, and pleasures of the storied column. The three critics go over their influences, the changes in publishing today, and, above all else, the great opportunity the column has given each writer to “go on a walk through your own mind.” Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Claire Messud’s “New Books” columns: https://harpers.org/author/clairemessud/ Claire Messud’s “New Books” column on Kurt Wolff, Phillipe Sands, and Tom Stoppard: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/02/reviews-endpapers-the-ratline-tom-stoppard-wolff-hermione-lee-phillippe-sands/ Chris Carroll’s “New Books” column for July: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/new-books-harvey-sachs-henry-bean-martin-cruz-smith/ Dan Piepenbring’s premier “New Books” column for August: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/dan-piepenbring-new-books/ Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 “The Decline of Book Reviewing” essay in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/1959/10/the-decline-of-book-reviewing/ Claire Messud’s novel, The Emperor’s Children: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-emperor-s-children-claire-messud/8718221?ean=9780307276667&gclid=CjwKCAjwhdWkBhBZEiwA1ibLmNLXWamvWO_e0R14ztZIVsKTiCbUXZ1kfgM81EXmTzIizusWfIz4ChoC2tgQAvD_BwE Dan Piepenbring’s book CHAOS: https://bookshop.org/p/books/chaos-charles-manson-the-cia-and-the-secret-history-of-the-sixties-tom-o-neill/113666 “New Books” columns, including Zadie Smith, Joshua Cohen, and John Leonard: https://harpers.org/sections/new-books/ Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Perchance to Dream” from April, 1996: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/04/perchance-to-dream/ 0:49: History of “New Books” coverage 3:38: What goes into choosing a book 7:36: Writing fiction as a critic 9:10: Changes in publishing today, “gone are those days” 13:59: “Centripetal vs. centrifugal forces” in book criticism 15:45: “If you care enough about what happens, then the book has already won you over.” 17:16: The critical pan, and why they’re less necessary now 29:10: The pleasure of connecting different titles, “serendipitously”

7/18/23 • 33:34

Braucherei, a form of healing used in Amish and Mennonite communities, might seem like an appropriately antiquated practice for a traditional culture. But the writer Rachel Yoder returned to her Mennonite roots to investigate the practice’s modern uses. Embodying all the contradictions and complexities of the much-discussed Amish community overall, Braucherei might be most significant because of its commitment to an ancient practice: someone honoring your pain. “What could be more valuable?” Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “In the Glimmer,” Rachel Yoder’s essay in the July issue of Harper’s The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts and Remedies 1:36: The origins of Braucherei 4:25: The “flattening” of Amish and Mennonite communities in media 14:20: An alternative solution to chronic pain: “pain itself can be so mysterious to modern medicine” 19:33: The power of it: “Being two bodies together in a place and caring for each other.” 26:59: The “evolution” of these communities 33:40: Being interested in “the mysterious” as a direct link to being a writer 35:52: Writers as a “secular clergy” 37:17: Goop-mystics on the Upper West Side and the Amish healer 43:04: Returning home

7/11/23 • 45:04

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, yet the nuclear panic of the 1960s feels like history. Jackson Lears, who served as a naval officer on a nuclear-armed ship during the Cold War, discusses how we have embraced the myth of technological prowess to detach ourselves from the horrors of war. “War is the most unpredictable, least controllable enterprise that human beings are capable of, and yet it’s the one to which we pay the most technological homage,” he writes. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Behind the Veil of Indifference,” Jackson Lears’s story in the July issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/behind-the-veil-of-indifference-lessons-from-a-nuclear-life 2:35: 9/11 security state and its doomsday undertones 6:40: The government has “given up on diplomacy” 10:25: Stalin was less demonized than Putin today 13:45: “The media is more like a stenographer for the security state now” 16:45: “There was genuinely more interest in, curiosity about, and public awareness of the danger of nuclear war in the 1960s.” 21:03: Faith in technology allows for a distance between the soldier and the target 29:05: “Algorithmic rationality” protects the soldier from the “dreaded human error” 37:38: The religiosity of the American military 46:15: Assange, Ellsberg, any hope for whistleblowers?

7/3/23 • 51:36

After the Titan submersible imploded last week, Matthew Gavin Frank’s journey to the depths with Karl Stanley, a friend of Stockton Rush’s, took on a new meaning. (Frank rode in Stanley’s sub in February of this year; his essay, in which Frank meditates on the eternal dangers and allure of deep-sea exploration, went online the day after the OceanGate sub went missing.) He discusses Stanley’s warnings to Rush, mass fear, and whether he regrets his experience. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save “Submersion Journalism,” Matthew Gavin Frank’s essay in the July issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/submersion-journalism-homemade-submarine-honduras-deep-sea-diving [8:46] Submersible enthusiasts ignore the all-encompassing danger of the sea [13:57] The psyche of a submersible enthusiast vs. the psyches of the rest of us [16:13] “There is a malign quality to this certain and particular breed of wonder.” [19:32] The Titan tapped into “a fuse of our greatest, fearful hits.” [20:31] How the countdown aspect made us “keenly aware of how much closer we are to our own deaths” [22:38] Joking out of love, joking out of spite, and roasting someone after they’ve died [25:53] The media’s endless quest for ratings [32:15] “If there is such a thing as an expert in risk assessment in one-off, uncertifiable, deep-sea manned vehicles, my resume is hard to beat.” [35:28] Going for a walk, as an antidote to submersible addiction

6/27/23 • 37:11

Exploring 2,000 feet below the sea’s surface is something only professionals—or billionaires—are able to do. However, the writer Matthew Gavin Frank found Karl Stanley, an eccentric submariner, to take him to the depths in a DIY sub off the coast of Honduras. Frank dived to the bottom of the sea against his own anxieties and explored not only bioluminescence and sharks, but also the sublimity of being “completely quieted” as a writer. Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save Read Frank’s essay, “Submersion Journalism”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/submersion-journalism-homemade-submarine-honduras-deep-sea-diving

6/20/23 • 57:11

Only the good die young—no, really. The historian and Harper’s Magazine contributor Daniel Bessner joins Violet Lucca to discuss the series of love fests for Henry Kissinger, and Christopher Hitchens’s “The Case Against Henry Kissinger,” an iconic two-part takedown of the statesman published in early 2001. You can read this masterwork—and everything else Harper’s has published since 1850—for only $16.97 a year: harpers.org/save The first part: https://harpers.org/archive/2001/02/the-case-against-henry-kissinger-part-one/ The second part: https://harpers.org/archive/2001/03/the-case-against-henry-kissinger-part-two/

6/15/23 • 23:50

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/

6/6/23 • 38:46

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/

5/30/23 • 46:07

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

5/22/23 • 41:01

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

5/15/23 • 49:39

“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?”

5/8/23 • 70:35

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

5/2/23 • 35:24

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

4/24/23 • 48:43

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

4/17/23 • 44:32

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

4/6/23 • 52:58

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

3/30/23 • 40:16

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

3/20/23 • 51:10

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

3/14/23 • 89:31

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