In July 2018, local police informed Alexis Stern, a recent high school graduate in Big Lake, Minnesota, that there was reason to believe someone wanted her dead. A hit had been requested, for a little over $5,000 in bitcoin, through a website called Camorra Hitmen, a dark-web market advertising gun-for-hire services to anonymous buyers. As it turned out, the site was a scam operation, designed to lure credulous buyers into paying for an act that wouldn’t really be carried out. But for Stern—whose case remains largely unaddressed by police investigators even now—that fact has never been all that reassuring. Stern’s story, and the story of the white-hat hacker who spends his off-hours battling and exposing these assassination markets, is the subject of Harper’s Magazine’s January cover story, an investigative report by writer and journalist Brian Merchant. In this episode of the Harper’s Podcast, host and web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Merchant about the deep ambiguity of online assassination requests, what it’s like to come face to face with the disinhibition effect, and the frustrating slowness of police agencies to apprehend this new form of crime.Read Merchant’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/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

Many of this decade’s pop culture juggernauts—from Orange Is the New Black to Caitlyn Jenner—have highlighted the lives of trans people. These artifacts have helped popularize the narrative of “switching” from one gender to the other, or feeling “trapped” in your body. But while this narrative has made transitioning easier for many, it has also reinforced the notion that people are either male or female, and that there is no middle ground. For genderqueer or gender nonconforming people, that narrative is insufficient, and they’re often left struggling to explain to TSA agents, to clothing retailers, even to close friends that neither pronoun reflects who they are. That understanding is slow in coming. As Alex Marzano-Lesnevich wrote in their January essay in Harper’s Magazine, many people still ask, “I mean, what am I supposed to think of you as?”In this week’s podcast, Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about why it’s so hard to convey a nonconforming identity to a society trained to sort everyone into one of two bins. Historically, they argue, this gender essentialism is relatively recent, a product of a simplex Darwinian worldview that reduced everything to the biological elements of reproduction. Through this essay and conversation, Marzano-Lesnevich says, they hope to open more space for those who feel confined by the gender binary, and illustrate how the quotidian minutiae of their experience add up to a life that we have the language to understand.Read their essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/body-language-genderqueerness/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

Though you might’ve been raised not to talk about politics at Thanksgiving dinner, food itself has always been political. The questions of who grows it—and for whom—are loaded, especially in the United States, a country that took its farmland from indigenous people and built its wealth from the labor of slaves. These imbalances of access and ownership have persisted through contemporary times, with food deserts and stagnating wages restricting what poor people eat.On November 7, Harper’s Magazine and UNC Press presented a conversation between Rhonda Y. Williams, a historian and the series editor of UNC Press’s “Justice, Power, and Politics” books; Lana Dee Povitz, author of Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice, about the history of food activism in the United States; and Monica M. White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, which tells the story of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative. In this episode, the three academics discuss historical and modern inequalities surrounding food accessibility and production, as well as the power of telling the long-obfuscated stories of farmers. 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

Each wave of feminism in the United States has been met with a rise of men’s groups, which have sought to “heal” men and reconnect them to traditional masculinity. These movements—such as Robert Bly’s Iron John—have attempted to adapt to or resist the societal changes that have come along with increased rights for women. Now, YouTube gurus such as Jordan Peterson are not only responding to the concept of toxic masculinity and the #MeToo movement, but to the fact that men make up the majority of the nation’s suicides and have been disproportionately affected by the opioid epidemic. In the November cover story of Harper’s Magazine, Barrett Swanson reports on an Evryman, an organization that hopes to create a space for men to open up about past traumas and their feelings. Swanson details his personal experience during a weekend retreat, as well as the larger goals and practices of the organization. In his conversation with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca, Swanson discusses how the organization markets itself, questions the effectiveness of catharsis as cure, and assesses the limitations of approaching all of men’s (or women’s) issues exclusively through the lens of gender.Read Swanson’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/men-at-work-evryman-barrett-swanson/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

Today, November 13, 2019, as witnesses take the stand in the first public hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, the Harper’s Podcast looks back to another major report on presidential infraction. The Department of Justice released its redacted version of the Mueller Report almost seven months ago, on April 18. Although the 448-page document revealed new depths to the chaos of the Trump presidency, its inconclusiveness was a disappointment and a setback to those who had hoped to see clear grounds for impeachment.On May 30, Harper’s Magazine organized a discussion about the report’s implications between four experts—Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School; Elizabeth Holtzman, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives who recommended three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon; James Oakes, an American historian specializing in slavery, antislavery, and the Civil War; and Brenda Wineapple, author of a recent book on the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. In a conversation that takes on new relevance during the current prosecution, the panelists discussed common misunderstandings of the impeachment process (at least one of which was shared by Donald Trump), the narrowness of the argument that impeachment proceedings might perversely “help” the president, and the provision’s larger historical importance as a means of reasserting the limits of presidential power. The panel took place at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and was moderated by Harper’s president and publisher John R. MacArthur.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

Last week, on October 28, Boris Johnson—the British prime minister who said he would “rather be dead in a ditch” than request another Brexit extension from the European Union—requested and received such an extension from the European Union, making this the third time that Brexit has been delayed since the June 2016 referendum. In anticipation of the deadline, the Harper’s Podcast convened four experts and participants in U.K. politics—David Renton, James Foley, Cat Boyd, and Richard Seymour—to discuss the complex political landscape of Brexit, its possible implications for different sectors of the population, and the hope that may lie in the situation’s vast and continuing uncertainties.This forum is an extension of a conversation between socialist writer Ashley Smith and University of Glasgow professor Neil Davidson that was published in New Politics. An excerpt from that interview was reprinted in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. The episode was co-moderated by Smith and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca.Cat Boyd is a trade-union organizer in Glasgow.James Foley is a postdoctoral researcher at Glasgow Caledonian University and the author of a forthcoming book on Scottish independence, which will be published by Verso in 2020.David Renton is a barrister, historian, and long-standing anti-fascist activist.Richard Seymour is a founding editor of Salvage magazine and author of The Twittering Machine. His writings can be read on Patreon.Read the excerpt of Smith’s interview here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/left-of-europe-brexit-european-union/This episode was produced and edited 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 service, stewardship, restraint: these were among the watchwords of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, a group nearly synonymous with the American ruling class from the late nineteenth century through roughly the late Sixties. Compare these ideals with the ruthless exhibitionism and unabashed nihilism of today’s elites, and one can see how a temptation might arise to feel nostalgic for old-fashioned WASP supremacy. But is it really wise to hearken back to the days of boat shoes and blue bloodlines? What was the nature of WASP power, and to what ends did they really wield it? Doug Henwood pursues these and similar questions in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, in an essay that explores the rise and fall of WASP leadership and its often disastrous contributions to American life, from the popularization of eugenics to the document that initiated the permanent war economy. In this episode, host Violet Lucca speaks with Doug Henwood—former publisher of the Left Business Observer and current host of KPFA, Berkeley’s Behind the News—about the WASPs’ legacy of polite brutality, the decay revealed in Washington by the failure to rein in Trump, and the opening this could create for challenges from the left.Read Henwood’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/to-serve-is-to-rule-wasps-doug-henwood/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 the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, philanthropists and New Orleans education reformers saw an unprecedented chance to completely restructure a failing school system. As a result, New Orleans has become the only city in the United States where charter schools have completely replaced public schools. It’s the most dramatic test case for the claims of the self-styled, traditional school choice movement—a nationwide push, led by a slew of major philanthropists and by current secretary of education Betsy DeVos, to privatize education and treat schooling as a business like any other. As Andrea Gabor documents in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, the experiment is not producing the desired results. The skewed incentives of the portfolio model, which stakes school survival largely on standardized test scores, have caused many schools to treat students like prisoners while deliberately discouraging or underserving children with special needs. In districts where charters and public schools coexist, competitive pressure and poor funding can make public schools dysfunctional “dumping grounds” for harder-to-teach children, victims of a system that values profitability over community needs.In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Andrea Gabor—author of After the Education Wars and the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York—about the reality of school choice, the mind-set of Big Philanthropy, and the often-neglected tipping point at which charter schools begin harming nearby public schools.Read Gabor’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/the-k-12-takeover-charter-schools-new-orleans/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 Constitution of the United States is a foundational element of national mythology, an exceptional document for its time that, unlike other constitutions, is still cited in contemporary political discussions. In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, five lawmakers and legal scholars—Donna Edwards, five​-​term congresswoman from Maryland, serving in the House of Representatives; Mary Anne Franks, President and Legislative and Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and author of the new book The Cult of the Constitution; David Law, Charles Nagel Chair of Constitutional Law and Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Sir Y. K. Pao Chair in Public Law at the University of Hong Kong; Lawrence Lessig, professor at Harvard Law School, specializing in constitutional and comparative constitutional law; Lewis Michael Seidman, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in constitutional law and criminal justice; and Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks—participated in a forum that went beyond speculations about what the framers would want and considered, among other questions, how the Constitution could be changed in an era of partisan polarization, and whether the whole thing should be scrapped and rewritten. This week’s episode is an excerpt from the forum that did not appear in print, and which begins with a very topical issue: impeachment. The legal scholars and lawmakers discuss the functions and limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment, and how we could think differently about the relationship between the constitutionality and democracy of impeachment.Read the forum: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/constitution-in-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

At this year’s Emmys, the biggest names in television presented their usual awards, while the show itself represented an industry in flux. The hostless proceedings saw record low ratings even as new television shows and streaming services continue to infinitely expand. In the October issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Wilson considers the market and technological forces that gave rise to the “Golden Age of television,” and how it has subsequently led to “Peak TV.” Wilson asks how shifts in the consumption habits of the small number of viewers who watch “prestige” television (rather than comedies on the Big Three networks) have changed the ways the major players do business—and whether they truly have. In this episode, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca talks with Wilson, the author of three books, including the forthcoming novel Sensation Machines, about the questionable label of prestige television, experimentation in visual narrative media, and the shifting nature of stardom—i.e., what it’s like to get tweeted at by Lizzo.Read Wilson’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/good-bad-bad-good-golden-age-of-television/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