The Harper’s Podcast

September is here, bringing with it a new school year, the first day of fall, and the start of football season in America. After weeks of preseason games and predictions, the thirty-two teams of the N.F.L. begin five months of competition culminating in the Super Bowl, the televised broadcast of which drew an estimated 98.2 million viewers in 2019. Winning a Super Bowl is a dream for N.F.L. hopefuls across the nation. But, for individual athletes, what does it take to get there? In the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rich Cohen takes readers back to before preseason and the draft to the N.F.L. Scouting Combine. Cohen discusses the combine’s history, its current procedures, its blind spots, and what the results mean for N.F.L. teams and their players. In this episode, Cohen, the author of Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football and a contributor to Rules of the Game, speaks with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca about the combine and subsequent draft, about football’s inherent violence, and about seeing the game as a scale model of the best—and worst—of American capitalism and the country’s identity as a whole.Read Cohen’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/the-wood-chipper-nfl-draft-combine/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

Each year, the City of David, the archaeological site believed to be the ancient core of Jerusalem, attracts some six hundred thousand tourists, who come to see the place where King David may have ruled in the 10th century BC. The problem is that, as Harper’s Magazine senior editor Rachel Poser explains in our September issue, the City of David is no scientific operation. Elad, the organization that manages it, is in fact “a right­wing settler group that employs archaeology as part of a long-term effort to strengthen Israeli control over Jerusalem,” and the City of David is only one of many such projects that, taken together, constitute a threat to the legitimacy of archaeological research throughout the region. Poser, who once trained as an archaeologist herself, charts the uneasy history of archaeology as a “national vocation” in Israel, from the country’s founding to the current use of excavations as both justification and method for evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.In this episode, Poser speaks with Israeli archaeologist Rafi Greenberg—a vocal critic of Elad, a professor at Tel Aviv University, a cofounder of the nonprofit Emek Shaveh, and a subject in the article—about his political disillusionment, the possibilities and limitations of the archaeological record, and an experiment in decolonized excavation.Read Poser’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/common-ground-archeology-israel-palestine/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

If you have an email account, you’ve almost certainly received an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince. Yet despite the notoriety of this scam, it continues to net billions of dollars every year—and, as Sean Williams explains in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, these scams constitute just a fraction of the criminal activity committed by Nigerian cults like the Black Axe. Though its membership now focuses on accumulating as much wealth and turf as possible, the group grew out of a pan-African movement that endeavoured to embrace the richness of Nigerian culture.In this episode, Williams speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about the social, economic, and political factors unique to Nigeria that contributed to the unfortunate evolution of this particular organization, its ties to the Italian mafia, and the internal and external attempts to curb its violent activities.Read Williams’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/the-black-axe-nigeria-neo-black-movement-africa/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 separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of American democracy; Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Yet there have been plenty of people who’ve tried to erode that boundary, or at the very least work around it. In the March 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Jeff Sharlet published a story that revealed (some of) the inner workings of one religious organization that has been at the task for decades: the Family. Since 1953, the Family has organized the National Prayer Breakfast—a seemingly innocuous nonpartisan event. Yet this annual celebration has allowed leaders from around the world—including dictators, warlords, foreign agents, and legitimate clergy—to covertly access the halls of power and exert influence. Espousing the ambiguous philosophy of “Jesus plus nothing,” the Family’s willingness to work with powerful but diabolical leaders arises from their interpretation of predestination—if you’re in power, it’s because God said so, and isn’t it better to have the wolf king on your side?Jeff Sharlet’s reporting on the Family has led to several more articles and two books: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. Netflix and Sharlet recently adapted this reporting into a five-part documentary. Web editor Violet Lucca spoke with Sharlet and director Jesse Moss about adapting this wealth of material into a documentary, the difficulties of getting straight answers out of deeply secretive Family members, and the organization’s ascendant power.Read Sharlet’s “Jesus Plus Nothing”: https://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/jesus-plus-nothing/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

Misremembered histories are often more powerful than fact—look no further than the Tea Party, a political movement that wealthy donors and disaffected cranks built upon stacks of unused high school textbooks. However, the United States isn’t alone in such wonky mythologizing. Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, has embraced Turanism, which entails a bogus story of his nation’s founding, in order to further the success of his political party, Fidesz. This revision, which asserts that Hungarians are descended from triumphant Turkic barbarian empires from the East, has grown a culture in direct opposition to the European West. With state support to fund false anthropologists (and to silence critics), Turanism’s aggressive nationalism takes priority over neoliberal multiculturalism—and keeps Orbán in power.As Jacob Mikanowski discovered when he visited Hungary to report for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, this feedback loop is equal parts kitschy and dangerous. Equestrian pageantry and yurt exhibits draw crowds to the Great Kurultáj, an annual festival, while Orbán and Fidesz rewrite the Hungarian constitution. In this episode, Mikanowski speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about gerrymandering, tribal politics, and Attila the Hun T-shirts.Read Mikanowski’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/the-call-of-the-drums-hungarian-far-right/ 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 American West has historically attracted defiant, self-sufficient people who are suspicious both of being asked for and of receiving help. In our August cover story, Ted Conover describes the months he spent among a modern crop of homesteaders in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, who have chosen to live off the grid with their guns, marijuana, and solar panels. Following Matt Little, a homesteader who’s also a case manager for a nonprofit that provides assistance to many of these fiercely independent souls, Conover documents how he and other homesteaders carve out an existence. This part of the West, where BLM stands not for Black Lives Matter but for the Bureau of Land Management, is not famously diverse, but Conover’s reportage reveals the wide array of sensibilities, lifestyles, and identities that coexist on these swaths of prairie. In this episode, Conover, an author and journalist who has gone undercover in slaughterhouses and penitentiaries, talks to web editor Violet Lucca about medical deserts, bartering with homegrown marijuana, and the second season of Deadwood.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

Like Occupy Wall Street, the Gilets Jaunes movement was born of an economic crisis, and has been driven by a desire for systemic change; the media has tarred supporters of both as anti-Semitic and misogynistic. But are the yellow vests’ protests also fated to fizzle out under the weight of their aspirations? In the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christopher Ketcham takes issue with such misrepresentations. Ketcham was beat up and teargassed alongside the Gilets Jaunes earlier this year while reporting on the origins and dynamics of the movement. He celebrates the Gilets Jaunes for both their politesse and their purposeful destruction of property. In this episode, Ketcham, author of the new book This Land, talks with web editor Violet Lucca about the cultural gulfs between the American and French traditions of protest, the military-industrial complex’s inordinate contributions to climate change, and Hillary Clinton, the “faithful servant of mammon.”Read Ketcham’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/a-play-with-no-end-gilets-jaunes/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

As time goes on, the world seems increasingly cruel and absurd—the president tweets hateful memes that originated on Reddit, which are then analyzed by the media and archived by the Library of Congress. But as Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Nicotine, and the forthcoming Doxology argues, it’s not that things are getting worse, but simply that they’ve never been in such clear, horrific focus. Her commitment to realism in her upcoming novel, excerpted in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, captures the brutal irony of modern life with care. Pam and Joe are caught in the genuine optimism of the early Nineties, and they attempt to become revolutionary rock stars and make love aimlessly and earnestly. When the gyre widens, they struggle against an overdetermined world that, as Zink puts it, “refuses to show its face.” Herself an ex-post-punk guitarist, Zink lived through the decade’s nascent hopefulness and bathetic turns. In this interview, she recalls the bygone era with candor and touches upon fluffy idealism, pet-centric zines, and her 10-hour writing days.Read “Marmalade Sky,” the excerpt from Doxology: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/07/marmalade-sky-nell-zink/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

2019 has been a banner year for xenophobia. Before news broke of lice-ridden migrant children forced to sleep on frigid cement, before the racist jokes Border Patrol officers traded on private Facebook groups were made public, President Trump sowed fear over “migrant caravans” headed for the land of the free—caravans that might’ve had “Middle Easterners” among their ranks. Such bald-faced lies conspired with long-sublimated national myths to obscure the actual crisis at our border, and to obscure the identities of those suffering the consequences. In the interviews and photographs that compose William T. Vollmann’s cover story for the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, people on both sides of the border—migrants, volunteers for charitable organizations that seek to help them, Trump fans, merchants, and others—come into focus. Their indivisible testimonies—of coyotes and ankle bracelets, of assaults and soup kitchens—build to a humble but unflinching indictment. In this week’s episode, Vollmann—a National Book Award–winning novelist and journalist—sits down with web editor Violet Lucca to talk about covering the region at this crucial moment. Read Vollmann’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/07/just-keep-going-north/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 mainstream fight for gay rights—for inclusion, for marriage equality—has been waged over fraught territory. Its victories—a changed and changing culture, legal and political leaps unimaginable half a century ago—are nothing short of monumental. But rainbow flags are as double-edged as they are fabulous. Visibility often means complicity; normalization can mean collective amnesia. At the Stonewall Inn in 1969, diverse queer folks rioted and danced, birthing the Gay Liberation Front and the Pride marches of today—many of which have become corporatized. The June issue of Harper’s Magazine featured “Stonewall at Fifty,” a forum of eight writers and artists across the L.G.B.T.Q.+ spectrum who offered personal and political reflections about a place that has become more symbol than structure.In this week’s episode, three of the forum’s contributors unpack Pride with web editor Violet Lucca. Novelist-essayist and Whiting Award¬–winner Alexander Chee insists on conceiving of the queer community not as a monolith but as an amalgam of queer communities: plural, overlapping, in challenging but transformative conversation. T Cooper, novelist and director of the award-winning 2018 documentary Man Made, charts empowerment for people of difference, which can move from the streets to the screen to the classroom, an activism as polyphonic as the identities it emboldens. And T Kira Madden, author of the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, encourages us to be buoyed, rather than dismayed, by the contradictions that the next fifty years of Pride and Stonewall will carry in tow. 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