The Harper’s Podcast

Common sense seems to dictate that the rise of automation will bring about the economic demise of the working class. But need this be true? This assumption draws on a history of economic thought, from Malthus to Marx, that accepts laws such as the labor theory of value and the iron law of wages—laws that imply poverty as a necessary consequence—as inevitable. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Marilynne Robinson examines this history. Drawing upon Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, she explores economic theories that might support alternate modes of creating and distributing wealth across society. Robinson argues that, rather than being a corollary following from the laws of economics, “the creation of poverty is as fully intentional as the creation of wealth.” If poverty is not necessary but merely a consequence of how our current cultural beliefs and economic systems, how might we alter our notions of who creates value, and who benefits from it, in order to live in a more humane and just society? In this week’s episode, Christopher Beha, executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and the editor of “Is Poverty Necessary?,” speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about Marilynne Robinson’s self-education in economics, why poverty persists even as nations get richer, and whether a “third way” beyond Marxist theory and classical economics might exist.Read Robinson’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/is-poverty-necessary-marilynne-robinson/ 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 past few weeks, the legislatures of Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Utah have passed bills that have significantly restricted abortion to much earlier stages in pregnancy; Arkansas banned the procedure outright. However, this domino effect—which has been attributed to the presidency of Donald Trump and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—is part of a much older, coordinated attack on the rights established in Roe v. Wade. In this episode, Brigitte Amiri, a deputy director of the A.C.L.U. Reproductive Freedom Project, Madeleine Schwartz, a Harper’s Magazine contributor who has conducted interviews with former members of Jane, a pre-Roe reproductive health center in Chicago, and Rachel Nolan, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Columbia Society of Fellows and has written about El Salvador’s complete ban on abortion for Harper’s, discuss with web editor Violet Lucca the history of reproductive rights in the United States and elsewhere, the possible legal outcomes of these bills, and the very real consequences they pose for women’s health.Read excerpt from Schwartz’s interviews: https://harpers.org/archive/2017/04/jane-does/Read Nolan’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/10/innocents/ 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

For many Americans, our relationship with stuff ends when we take it to the curb on trash day. But for millions of items—everything from coat hangers to mattresses—this is the beginning of a second life, one that flows out the Miami River and on to Haiti. In the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rowan Moore Gerety explores how this process relies on cheap labor rather than cheap materials, the fine margins of which many Haitians rely on to survive. “Refugees from the northwest have long made up a disproportionate share of the ‘boat people,’” he writes. “Today, it remains Haiti’s poorest and most isolated region, and almost every family that can afford it has sent someone to South Florida in search of a living. For those who stay, fortunes rise and fall with the tide.”In this week’s episode, Moore Gerety talks with web editor Violet Lucca about how cocaine undergirds the industry, why a once agriculturally rich nation remains so poor, and how this story epitomizes the United States’ approach to territorial control in the Caribbean.Read Moore Gerety’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/downstream-haiti-american-junk/ 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 oxymoron “humanitarian war” is sometimes used ironically, at other times derisively, and still at others earnestly. In his recent book, excerpted in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, explores criteria deemed essential to justify violence. “While claiming to protect populations,” Brauman writes, “the United Nations is rehabilitating war—when in fact it was created to prevent it. And in granting itself the right to declare war and to call it ‘just,’ the U.N. is acting as both referee and player, and legalizing the conflation of judges and parties to a conflict.”In this week’s episode, Brauman is joined on a panel by Harper’s president and publisher John R. MacArthur and Columbia University professor Elazar Barkan. They probe the lessons of Libya, Somalia, and Kosovo; the threshold of violence that demands international involvement; and how the framework of humanitarianism can be co-opted, to disastrous effect, by propaganda.Read an excerpt of Brauman’s book here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/humanitarian-wars-regis-meyran-rony-brauman/ 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

For most Salvadorans, it’s difficult to avoid the nation’s gangs, vast networks that manifest their power through extortion and territorial control. Why, then, do so many Salvadorans vilify a man who had made extraordinary progress toward easing gang violence? In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Castro follows Raúl Mijango, an ex-guerrilla commander who had built seemingly impossible inroads between the gangs and the Salvadoran government, only for it all to crumble. “The story of the truce and its dissolution is central to understanding the United States’ responsibility for the current migration crisis,” Castro writes, “and it suggests what it might take to comprehensively address the root problem of gang violence in El Salvador today.”In this week’s episode, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Castro about the origins of the violence, who stands to benefit from sustaining the conflict, and the price paid in the name of security.Read Castro’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/gang-truce-san-salvador-raul-mijango/ 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

There remains an idea that society exacts its price, and that if we could simply bring ourselves to walk away from it all—our bank accounts, our homes, our internet connections—we could, like Thoreau, return to an Edenic existence. The truth, of course, is much more complicated. In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Joe Kloc explores the lives of anchor-outs, a group of people who live in abandoned boats near Sausalito, California, perhaps the last place in America where such a community exists. Although many of the hundred-plus anchor-outs chose to move there, Kloc discovers grimness along with high spirits. “Life is not easy. There is always a storm on the way, one that might capsize their boats and consign their belongings to the bottom of the bay. But when the water is calm and the harbormaster is away, the anchor-outs call their world Shangri-lito.”In this week’s episode, Kloc, an associate editor at Harper’s, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about how he befriended some of the anchor-outs, the surprising complexity of their economy, and how this microcosm illuminates the daily, unconscious decisions we make living in America.Read Kloc’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/lost-at-sea-richardson-bay/ 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

It’s not a new question, but it is an especially timely one: How do children of immigrant parents absorb and, in turn, imagine an idea of their ancestral country? Pierre Jarawan’s new novel, The Storyteller, follows Samir, a German-born son of Lebanese immigrants. Samir’s father disappears without a trace when he’s just a boy, which shatters the family. Years later, Samir goes searching for his father in Lebanon, and he must reconcile the imagined paradise his father portrayed with the real country he’s never known.In this week’s episode, Jarawan speaks to web editor Violet Lucca about how his experience as a slam poet helped him write a more compelling book, how art like his fits into the political moment, and what it takes to tap into the details of childhood that help a story quicken and begin to breathe. 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

Adoption is often idealized as an altruistic, almost saintly act. But, throughout history and across cultures, the paths babies have taken to reach those well-meaning parents have frequently involved coercion or trafficking. In a report for the April issue, Rachel Nolan examines the checkered history of international adoptions from Guatemala, once one of the world’s top sources of adoptive children. Following one adoptee, Jean-Sebastien Hertsens Zune, as he returns in search of his origins, Nolan writes that “Zune is part of a wave of adult adoptees who are now returning to Guatemala to face disconcerting revelations about their pasts.” In this week’s episode, Nolan, a historian of modern Latin America and lecturer at Columbia University, speaks with web editor Violet Lucca about the ways Guatemalan adoption complicates civil war, family, and attempts at reconciliation.Read Nolan’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/destined-for-export-guatemalan-adoptions/ 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 we live in a politically factious era, our cultural landscape is dominated by consensus, where even the New York Times publishes top-books lists and must-see-TV listicles in place of measured criticism. What do we lose by squaring art away into tidy monoculture? In his cover story for the April issue, Christian Lorentzen calls upon anyone who enjoys serious literature to push back against feed-based culture: “The edifice of ‘books coverage’ that has been constructed around the work of critics looks a lot like the coverage of television—a tissue of lists, recommendations, profiles, Q&As, online book clubs, lifestyle features, and self-promotional essays by authors of new books—an edifice so slapdash it could be blown away in a week.”In this week’s episode, Lorentzen talks with web editor Violet Lucca about how digital culture has fallen short of its cultural promise, why fans are drowning out the critics, and the false allure of imposing order upon the infinite world of literature.Read Lorentzen’s cover story: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/like-this-or-die/ 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

Cy Twombly’s art was in many ways the perfect avatar of Cy Twombly the man. As an artist at the intersection between two major movements in the twentieth century, he was an unplaceable combination of art outsider and someone with high-art sensibility, an artist who eschewed Americana but was its apotheosis. In interviews, he was either intensely private or flippant toward the interviewer, qualities that only increased his appeal. In the March issue, Andrew Martin, author of the novel novel Early Work, reviews two new books about Twombly. In this conversation with web editor Violet Lucca, Martin upholds the ambiguities of the persona, the artist, and the art, and reflects on what we are to make of Twombly today.Read Martin’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/cy-twombly-fifty-days-at-iliam-the-art-and-erasure-of-cy-twombly/ 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