Mike Pence is a pedophile who has been replaced by a clone. But Mike Pence also had the power to reject Electoral College votes and overturn the 2020 presidential election results. In April 2020, the U.S. military liberated 35,000 sexually abused children from hidden tunnels beneath Central Park. There’s a video of Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton ritually killing a child for its adrenochrome. The pandemic isn’t real, and Bill Gates has created a vaccine that will change your DNA and control your mind. This is just a sample of QAnon supporters’ many beliefs, some of which openly contradict each other. As Hari Kunzru observes in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine, QAnon is less concerned with finding the root cause of society’s purported ills than it is with laying out, in ever more intricate terms and with ever more involved symbols, how entrenched those ills are. If the guesswork and speculation surrounding the Kennedy assassination provides a benchmark of popular American suspicion, then Q has “the feel of something new, a blob of unreason against which the Kennedy narrative seems quaint, almost genteel,” Kunzru writes. Various preconditions figure into the rise of Q at this historical moment—the aesthetics of contemporary political theater, the accelerant nature of the internet—but beneath them all is a human yearning for simplicity, for an incomprehensible world to make sense according to our preferred terms.In this episode, Violet Lucca talks with Kunzru, a novelist and Harper’s new Easy Chair columnist, about the antecedents and present-day mechanics of QAnon. They discuss the myths of its origins, its fraught internal logic, and its “impoverished understanding of how power actually works.”Read Kunzru’s column here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/01/complexity-qanon-conspiracy-theories/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Edmund Gosse. Thomas De Quincey. James Baldwin. For Vivian Gornick, what connects these writer’s disparate oeuvres is that although each pursued other genres—poetry, journalism, novels, or plays—their “significant work turns out to reside in a memoir” (or personal essays, in Baldwin’s case). In an essay in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, Gornick nominates to this list Storm Jameson, a prolific English novelist whose autobiography, Journey from the North, is a prime example of a writer finding her voice—all the more striking in Jameson’s case because she made the discovery near the end of a long and, in Gornick’s estimation, otherwise middling career. In the immediacy of self-disclosure, something clicked for Jameson—but why? Gornick, who struggled at novel writing herself before hitting her stride in memoirs such as Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City, has “something of a vested interest in this mysterious matter of a writer’s natural métier.… I was well into my thirties,” she writes, “before I understood that I was born for the memoir.”In this episode of the podcast, Gornick begins with a reading from the arresting first pages of Journey from the North. In the conversation that follows, she and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca discuss Jameson’s life and legacy; the perennial excuse of “writing down” to make ends meet; the questionable value of the “autofiction” label; and Gornick’s reading (and rereading) habits during the pandemic.Read Gornick’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/storm-jameson-if-only-i-could-begin-again/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

When Dusan Simien, a San Francisco native with a knack for technology, enrolled in a two-year coding program at the for-profit Holberton School, he financed it with an income share agreement: a contract in which he agreed to pay the school 17 percent of his income for a set period after graduation. But before long, Simien found himself struggling with Holberton’s instructorless education model and its cheaply designed curriculum. And when he was expelled on a dubious charge of plagiarism, he found himself owing the school a percentage of his paycheck from the same job he’d had when he enrolled.Simien’s case typifies a growing trend. As Avi Asher-Schapiro documents in the December issue, income share agreements (ISAs) have taken off in the past few years as a means of financing education, and they’ve caught the attention of policymakers—and investors—across the political spectrum. To their proponents, ISAs are an answer to traditional financing options that have left many poor Americans, especially African-American students like Simien, unable to attend college without taking on exorbitant debt. These financial tools could theoretically make institutions more accountable, by tying institutional profits to alumni success. To their detractors, ISAs can be predatory loans in disguise, ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous institutions such as Holberton. By tying contract terms to projected earnings, they also increase the pressure on students to seek careers that are likely to be financially lucrative.In this episode of the Harper’s Podcast, Violet Lucca talks with Asher-Schapiro, who covers technology and human rights issues at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, about these and other hopes and concerns for the growing ISA market. They discuss the origination of the ISA idea by Milton Friedman, parallels between ISAs and the charter school movement, and the potential ramifications of “treating students like startups.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Today, more than 270 million people live outside their country of origin. Many of them are forced to live in legal limbo, protected neither by citizenship nor by official refugee status. Lebanon, which has the highest per-capita refugee population, exemplifies this no-policy policy. The influx of refugees from Syria—three for every ten Lebanese citizens—have been referred to euphemistically as “displaced,” as “guests,” and, increasingly, as “enemies.” Although they are granted some rights by the Lebanese government, refugees are permitted to work only in construction, agriculture, and sanitation, and are consigned to live in makeshift camps. There, they are at the mercy of shawishes, who broker their most basic needs. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by journalist Alexander Dziadosz to discuss his piece “State of Exception” from the November 2020 issue of the magazine; the two cover the shawish system, Lebanese politics, the impact of climate change on mass migration, and the future of the Syrian refugee crisis.Read Dziadosz’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/state-of-exception-lebanon-refugee-crisis/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

When Garth Greenwell was growing up in Kentucky, the LGBTQ section of his local bookstore was a lifesaver: a refuge, even in the pre-internet era. But the implications of that categorization—keeping LGBTQ authors’ books separate from the rest—suggested that the experiences of queer people and other traditionally marginalized groups were somehow inaccessible to the general public, that they failed to speak to any “universal” truths of human life. Years later, Greenwell would have his work described by a professor as “a sociological report on the practices of a subculture,” as though his choice to focus on queer subjects was a hindrance to artistic resonance. Since then, of course, the cultural pendulum has swung the other way, and stories featuring white, male, cisgender protagonists are increasingly derided as irrelevant and shopworn. In the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, Greenwell questions the meaning of “relevance” and its place in our cultural discourse, disputing the idea that art must be “relevant” to be resonant, and even that “relevance” is a fruitful ground for analysis in the first place.In this episode of the podcast, Greenwell, author of the novels What Belongs to You and Cleanness, reflects on his essay and discusses with host Violet Lucca the concept of universality, the high speed of Twitter discourse, the way dating apps are anathema to the true nature of desire, the future of art in our current political climate, and the LGBTQ section of a bookstore near you.Read Greenwell’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/making-meaning-garth-greenwell/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

The first chapter of Don DeLillo’s new novel, THE SILENCE, performed aloud.Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo, read by Laurie Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Marin Ireland, Robin Miles, Jay O. Sanders, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Copyright © 2020 by Don DeLillo. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Last year, 43 of the 50 most-watched television broadcasts in America were football games—despite the fact that the NFL season lasts a mere six months. For decades, entrepreneurs have been trying and failing to fill that off-season void with professional football leagues that start play after the Super Bowl. The most recent—and perhaps most successful—attempt was made by Vince McMahon, the CEO of WWE and founder of the XFL. McMahon’s league, which aspired to the theatricality of professional wrestling, debuted and then folded in 2001. In 2018, McMahon revived the XFL in a less-goofy iteration that focused on fast, enjoyable games and actively encouraged fans (and announcers) to wager on them. Alas, the new league’s first season began this February. Across the country, football fans gathered ironically or earnestly to consume the sport—but their numbers dwindled each week. Undone by COVID-19 and low ratings, the league folded, but the XFL has promise of returning once again: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a former WWE wrestler, purchased it for a mere $15 million.In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by the essayist Kent Russell to discuss his article “America’s Game,” from the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. The two discuss ironic nostalgia, McMahon’s business acumen and entertainment aesthetics, the spiritual mysteries of American football, and the Holy Grail that is six more months of professional play each year. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

In 2018, an Irish technologist by the name of Dylan Curran downloaded all the data Google had collected about him—the equivalent of more than three million Word documents—and sifted through it, revealing the extent to which Google had surveilled his online activity over the course of a decade. All of his Google searches, emails, YouTube views, website visits, and more were preserved in 5.5 gigabytes’ worth of detail—part of the tech giant’s massive effort to turn individuals’ data into advertising revenue. Criticism of companies like Google has only mounted in recent years, including a series of antitrust hearings this past summer that saw Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon defending themselves before Congress. In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by Barry C. Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute and author of “The Big Tech Extortion Racket,” an article in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine that was adapted from his forthcoming book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People. They discuss the ways in which tech companies have circumvented and rewritten the laws that govern our markets. In his description of how tech companies enact discriminatory pricing, Lynn reflects on the principles behind common carrier rules, the end of net neutrality, the rise of tech monopolization, and the future of our democracy under these troubled circumstances.Read Lynn’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

In February, Naomi Jackson entered Mount Sinai Hospital to give birth to her son. But when the baby finally came, at her side were only her doula and her sister; the ob-gyn hadn’t believed Jackson when, twenty minutes earlier, she had assured the doctor that the baby was coming soon. This was not the first time that Jackson’s wishes and intuitions had been ignored during her pregnancy, or even during her labor. Only hours earlier, a nurse had upped her dosage of Pitocin shortly after Jackson had asked her to stop. But Jackson is not alone in experiencing such dismissiveness. Such treatment is typical of the care black mothers receive. They experience maternal complications and adverse outcomes at a shockingly high rate. Black babies today are substantially more likely to suffer infant mortality than white babies; the rate surpasses that recorded during slavery. And the dearth of black female medical professionals means that black women struggle to secure culturally responsive care, with its accompanying better outcomes. Black mothers—Jackson included—carry this heavy burden with them into labor.In this episode of the podcast, Naomi Jackson—an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University–Newark and the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill—reflects on her narrative essay in Harper’s Magazine’s September issue, “A Litany for Survival.” Jackson and host Violet Lucca discuss her reasons for sharing her birth story, the all too often dire experiences that black women have in the birthing room, and the multifarious sociocultural factors that prevent black women from receiving proper care even as awareness of these experiences grows.Resources for black mothers that were mentioned in the episode or are recommended by Jackson:Bronx Rebirth & Progress Collective - https://www.bxrebirth.org/Black Mamas Matter Alliance - https://blackmamasmatter.org/National Black Midwives Alliance - https://blackmidwivesalliance.org/Jamaa Birth Village - https://jamaabirthvillage.org/Ancient Song Doula Services - https://www.ancientsongdoulaservices.com/Dr. Sara Whetstone, University of California, San Francisco - https://meded.ucsf.edu/people/sara-whetstoneDr. Deirdre Cooper-Owens, University of Lincoln, Nebraska & author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology - https://history.unl.edu/deirdre-cooper-owensNubia Martin, midwife & founder of Birth from the Earth - https://birthfromtheearth.vpweb.com/Nicole Jean-Baptiste, Sese Doula Services - https://www.sesedoulaservices.com/Linda Villarosa, journalist & contributing writer to New York Times magazine https://www.lindavillarosa.com/Dr. Dana-Ain Davis, CUNY Graduate Center and author of Reproductive Justice: Racism, Pregnancy & Premature Birth - http://qcurban.org/faculty/dana-ain-davis/Dr. Pooja K. Mehta, Women’s Health Lead, CityBlock Health - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pooja-mehta-1b891689/Dr. Toyin Ajayi, Chief Health Officer & Co-Founder, CityBlock Health - https://www.linkedin.com/in/toyin-ajayi-ba57b078/Chanel Porchia-Albert, founder of Ancient Song - https://www.chanelporchianyc.com/about-meMalaika Maitland, doula, artist & yoga teacher in Grenada - http://malaikamaitland.com/birthAndrea Jordan, midwife, cofounder of Better Birthing in Bim and The Breastfeeding and Child Nutrition Foundation - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-jordan-4832b3127/Dani McClain, journalist and author of We Live for the: The Political Power of Black Motherhood - https://danimcclain.com/bioDr. Lynn Roberts, CUNY School of Public Health - https://sph.cuny.edu/people/lynnroberts/Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, author of Killing the Black Body - https://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/roberts1/Efe Osaren, doula & midwifery student, https://www.linkedin.com/in/efe-osaren-959824113/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

The opening line of Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic” was written nearly one hundred years ago, but it holds bitter relevance to our current moment: “America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire.” Yet the poet’s verse doesn’t simply take aim at the United States’ imperial ambitions—it takes aim at human civilization as a whole. Over the course of his career, Jeffers grappled with humanity’s ugliness and its detrimental impact on the environment, never arriving at sentimental conclusions. As Erik Reece argues in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Jeffers’s work—both its line of argument and its focus—is worth reappraising at a time when climate catastrophe looms. In this episode of the podcast, Reece speaks with web editor Violet Lucca and discusses deep time, extinction, and hope.Read Reece’s article here: This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com