Annie Hylton’s “In Plain Sight,” published in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, explores the efforts of Syrian refugees to bring the war criminals of the Assad regime to justice. Hylton’s article centers on a refugee and human-rights lawyer named Anwar al-Bunni, who escaped to Germany in 2014 after being detained and tortured by Assad. But after a Vertigo-esque encounter with his former captor, an ex-colonel in the Assad regime who had also happened to settle in Berlin, al-Bunni was inspired to continue his lifelong mission of holding war criminals accountable under the law. Hylton follows his efforts to prosecute former regime officials in Europe using the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which offers legal recourse for atrocities committed abroad. In this episode of the podcast, Hylton joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her piece. They unpack al-Bunni’s story and the continuing progress of his lawsuits; the current situation in Syria amid the pandemic and a fresh round of sanctions; and Hannah Arendt’s insights on using the legal system to punish crimes against humanity.Read Hylton’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/in-plain-sight-syrian-war-criminals-in-europe/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

Over the course of their careers, war reporters often end up spending more time in conflict zones than active-duty soldiers do, and many suffer from profound psychological trauma as a result. In “On Moral Injury,” published in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Janine di Giovanni sheds light on the alarming incidence of trauma among journalists. She focuses on an often-overlooked variant called moral injury, which is distinguished by the victim’s belief that they have failed to live up to their own ethical standards. Journalists who witness terrible atrocities face choices between their obligation to help and their duty to observe, and many remain haunted by their decisions for years afterward. Di Giovanni illustrates the psychological damage inflicted by these ethical dilemmas with harrowing stories from her own career as a frontline journalist. In this episode, di Giovanni joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to explore some further dimensions of moral injury. They discuss the protections that news organizations should offer their reporters; the responsibilities that journalists have toward their subjects; and the moral injuries that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely inflict on us all. Read di Giovanni’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/08/on-moral-injury-ptsd/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 “False Dawn,” the poet Khadijah Queen narrates her experience of the pandemic through a zuihitsu, an ancient Japanese form that interweaves poetry with personal reflections. She shares intimate anecdotes from her quarantine while grappling with the broader political issues thrown into relief by the coronavirus. In this episode of the podcast, Queen joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to dig deeper into some of the larger questions her piece raises, underscoring the impossibility of returning to “normal” after the pandemic is over. They discuss the work of Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman on the commodification of black suffering; the value of slowing down as a method of resistance; and the capacity of poetry to catalyze political change. 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 community land trust is an ownership model in which land is collectively controlled by community members, and it has garnered attention in recent years as a promising solution to the affordable-housing crisis. In “We Shall Not Be Moved,” published in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, Audrea Lim tells the story of the country’s first community land trust: a farming cooperative in Albany, Georgia, called New Communities. She unearths its origins as a pioneering effort to build economic power among poor black farmers, and explores the challenges it has faced over the years, including discrimination and persecution. In this episode of the podcast, Lim joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to delve into the lessons that contemporary community land trusts can learn from New Communities. They discuss the group of activists that spearheaded the formation of New Communities; the strengths and limitations of the different types of community land trusts; and how collective ownership can spur further grassroots organizing and cultural revitalization.Read Lim’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/we-shall-not-be-moved-collective-ownership-black-farmers/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

Peat extraction in Ireland is at once an ecological catastrophe that destroys a piece of the country’s heritage as well as a tool of economic sovereignty that frees Ireland from depending on foreign coal. The industry has also provided good jobs for energy workers. “Bogland,” William Atkins’s article in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, is an attempt to untangle a thorny contradiction: that “even despoliation can look like an act of largesse in certain circumstances.” In this episode of the podcast, Atkins joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to share more details from his journey through the bogs of Ireland. They discuss the odes to peatland penned by Seamus Heaney and Tim Robinson; the journalistic ethics of travel writing; and the litany of crazy things lurking in the bogs’ depths.Read Atkins’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/bogland-bog-of-allen-ireland-peat-bog-bord-na-mona/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

Disaster City is the name of a training compound in College Station, Texas, where first responders prepare for catastrophic scenarios through hands-on practice. In “This Is Not a Test,” his July cover story, Barrett Swanson visits Disaster City to participate in a simulated catastrophe, uncovering in the process the dark side of our society’s fixation on disaster preparedness. In narrating his experience as one of the simulation’s “Victim Volunteers,” Swanson ferries us through the compound’s funhouse-mirror vision of America, complete with elaborate replicas of real disasters such as a bombed-out parking garage and a tornado-shredded motel.But there’s something disturbing lurking within this “Disneyland for first responders.” Much like the real Disneyland, Swanson suggests, the function of Disaster City is to obscure the way the world outside the park really works. As the emblem of the American preparedness mindset, Disaster City “seems to sanction and sacralize the inevitability of catastrophes”—at the expense of a deeper reckoning with the structural problems that produce them. According to this mindset, there can only ever be triage, as opposed to true prevention. In this episode, Barrett Swanson joins Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca to explore the lessons he learned while reporting from Disaster City, and how they might apply to the disaster in which we now find ourselves. The two discuss the inspiration Swanson drew from his personal experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder; the lessons we failed to learn from the Gulf War and Hurricane Katrina; and how French critical theory anticipated our current system of disaster capitalism.Read Swanson’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/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

Public housing has had an embattled history in the United States. It’s been a constant site of political struggle, from its heyday in the Thirties to its erosion under the Reagan Administration in the Eighties. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Ian Volner explores that struggle through one of its principal characters: his grandfather Kelsey Volner, who began his career in public housing and ended it in disgrace in the private sector. In telling his grandfather’s story, Volner finds a parable for the fate of affordable housing in this country. But there has been a sea change in recent years. Responding to rising discontent with skyrocketing real estate prices, advocates have renewed their efforts to build affordable developments. In the face of a myriad of obstacles—“from local opposition to byzantine funding requirements and state-level interference,” as Volner writes—they have employed a variety of canny tactics to piece together their projects. Volner tells the stories behind new affordable housing complexes in Queens, Austin, Texas, and Jackson, Wyoming, to illustrate the way that “designers and developers have learned to adapt, grafting an entire subeconomy onto a warped bureaucratic rootstock.” In this episode, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca and Volner delve into the broader issues surrounding the contemporary housing crisis, epitomized by the condo boom and brought to a boil by the coronavirus pandemic. They discuss public housing’s aesthetics and socioeconomic demographics; its stigmatization at the hands of the right; and where we go should from here to guarantee housing for all.Read Volner’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/grand-designs-affordable-housing/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 June issue marks the 170th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine. As Harper’s editor Christopher Beha notes in his new column, Editor’s Desk, the magazine has published “more than two thousand issues, few of them produced under such challenging circumstances.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Beha about the challenges of creating a magazine while the world is on lockdown, as well as the larger question of how to begin processing the enormity of this pandemic and its economic and political fallout.Read Beha’s column: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/tests-of-time-covid-19/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

Political organizing during a worldwide lockdown is hard if not impossible, and embattled authoritarian regimes the world over are surely breathing sighs of relief. In the United States, surging unemployment rates continue to break records, and a world-historical depression seems inevitable. Op-ed columnists everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post have taken the opportunity to publicly wring their hands about another impending surge of “populism”—their favored name for a tendency that is said to encompass both the rise of anti-democratic demagogues like Donald Trump and the mass appeal of the progressive Bernie Sanders. Where did this word come from, and how can it mean so many different things? In his May cover story for Harper’s Magazine, the historian Thomas Frank tells the story of the term’s optimistic invention by members of the People’s Party of the late nineteenth century—a mass movement of farmers and factory workers who mounted what Frank calls “our country’s final serious effort at breaking the national duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats.” While the Populist movement is seldom remembered today, Frank’s excavation of the era’s anti-Populist rhetoric shows that the hatred and fear that class-based politics inspired—even including some specific insults—have never really gone away. In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Thomas Frank—author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas?—about the roots of his interest in Populism; the undeniable charm and pernicious wrongness of Richard Hofstadter; what to do with the momentum of the Sanders campaign; and the research that went into Frank’s new book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, soon to be available from Metropolitan Books.Read Frank’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/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 film maudit (“cursed film”) is a genre that everyone is familiar with, even if you’ve never heard its name. They are movies—usually very expensive ones—that were derided upon their initial release, but came to be appreciated many years later by scholars and cinephiles. Jacques Tati’s PlayTime (1967) is one of the most prominent examples, and its reputation only continues to grow. Following the success of his Academy Award–winning Mon Oncle, Tati, the writer, director, and star, decided to skewer the excesses and alienation of modern city life on a grand scale: he had a miniature city built on the outskirts of Paris, complete with paved roads and skyscrapers built from glass and steel. For eighteen months, Tati shot complicated visual gags on extra-wide 65-mm film stock and mimed the actions for every one of the hundreds of extras so that they could copy his movements; he also designed and recorded much of its soundtrack. Despite this painstaking work, PlayTime was dropped by its American distributor, while in France, the film’s critique of modernity was written off as shopworn. The comedian made two more feature-length films on increasingly smaller scales, but he never recovered—financially or emotionally—from the rejection of PlayTime. Now, PlayTime regularly appears on lists of the best films of all time. It has been restored multiple times, and gets special runs at art houses around the world. Tati’s notorious film maudit has also gone on to inspire directors such as David Lynch and Wes Anderson. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca discusses PlayTime, as well as the director’s other work, with Geoffrey O’Brien, whose review of the book The Definitive Jacques Tati appeared in the May issue. As their conversation reveals, Tati’s filmography has eerie and fascinating echoes in today’s world.Read O’Brien’s review here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/constant-delighted-astonishment-jacques-tati/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