The Harper’s Podcast

Black artists, intellectuals, and writers have long been asked to process their pain for white audiences—which has led some well-intentioned white progressives to view pain as the entirety of the black experience. Recognizing this fact inevitably leads us to wonder: what would have James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time been like if he had only addressed his fourteen-year-old nephew, or included a letter to his nieces?Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body, and Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, both seek to expand and break out of limiting narratives around race in their work. On March 7, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Rachel Poser moderated a discussion with Bernard and Smith at Book Culture that weighed the delicacies of genre, the expectations of audiences, and the act of parlaying experience into art. 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

Playful, big-eyed, and highly intelligent, sea lions seem to beg for human attention—except they don’t, because they’re animals. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Sallie Tisdale examines how human intervention—specifically, the construction of massive dams that trap fish and rising ocean temperatures—has led sea lions to make their way to bodies of water they shouldn’t be in, specifically the Columbia River in Oregon. Tisdale makes the case that we must guide this population back into balance, or face a population of starving sea lions and environmental collapse.In this episode, Tisdale, author of Advice for Future Corpses and other books, discusses the emotional, economic, and environmental issues that have exacerbated this problem with web editor Violet Lucca.Read Tisdale’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/catechism-of-the-waters-sea-lions-columbia-river/ 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 popularity of white nationalism is not limited to predominantly white countries, and in South Africa, a country upheld as a model of racial reconciliation, white anxiety has coalesced around the notion that white farmers are being systematically murdered for their land. In our March issue, James Pogue travels to South Africa to investigate why this narrative is particularly enticing for white nationalists around the world, and galling for the millions of landless, poor black South Africans. “Personally, I had come to South Africa with a sense of despair,” Pogue writes, “bringing with me a question about whether it was possible that the only real answers left to the issue of whiteness were exactly the options presented by Roche and his racist allies: a choice between a power-obsessed vision of innate white superiority, which I would never share, or a kind of permanent self-loathing and apology for sins of the past, which I did not think was very workable as a politics.”In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Pogue, author of Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West, about how South Africa has failed to disentangle race and class after apartheid.Please consider donating to Pogue’s GoFundMe, which benefits his fixer, Mophethe, who was attacked with acid shortly after the story went online: https://www.gofundme.com/help-mophethe-recover-from-acid-attack 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 medical technology continues to extend life spans, very little thought is given to the quality of those added years, or to what someone who is severely infirm but not terminally ill might need to feel fulfilled. In the February issue, Ann Neumann delves into the phenomenon of “mercy killings,” in which a man ends his spouse’s life once an illness has compromised her quality of life, and attempts suicide afterward. Not far from the house she grew up in, Neumann discovered the story of Philip and Becky Benight, two aging people in love who, after pushing against a system of care that disempowered them, decided to end their lives together. Their story is not unique; there are hundreds of so-called mercy killings each year in the United States, but our health care and legal systems have yet to catch up to the needs of the aging. In this audio essay, Philip Benight talks to Neumann and Violet Lucca, web editor of Harper’s Magazine, about his singular bond to Becky, the various institutions that sought to help but only hurt them, and the legal fallout of their actions.Read Neumann’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/going-to-extremes-elderly-assisted-suicide-caregivers/ 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, millions of people around the globe are displaced, and while many are able to resettle through official channels, millions more are forced to travel through unofficial, unsanctioned, often dangerous paths. When migrants vanish, whose responsibility is it to find them? In his piece for the February issue, Matthew Wolfe follows Javed Hotak as he searches for his brother Masood, who disappeared while attempting to migrate from Afghanistan to Germany. “The families of these migrants are left to mount searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what has been ripped apart.”In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Wolfe, a journalist and graduate student in sociology at NYU, about the “immense, mostly hidden catastrophe” of missing migrants and the people who can’t forget them.Read the article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/without-a-trace-migrants-afghanistan-turkey-greece-bulgaria/ 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 is an exquisite irony about the rise of the internet and personal computing: although they were once hailed as safeguards against authoritarianism, that’s precisely what they now enable. In the January issue, Fred Turner explains how the challenge of these new modes of communication stems from historical narratives. “If we’re going to resist the rise of despotism, we need to understand how this happened and why we didn’t see it coming. We especially need to grapple with the fact that today’s right wing has taken advantage of a decades-long liberal effort to decentralize our media. That effort began at the start of the Second World War, came down to us through the counterculture of the 1960s, and flourishes today in the high-tech hothouse of Silicon Valley.”For this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Turner, a professor of communication at Stanford University, about how, in an era of disembodiment and disempowerment, we can reimagine collective action and reconfigure digital systems. 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

Although many august publications have survived the shift to digital, they have retained many of the problems in how print outlets make assignments and edit their writers’ work—particularly when it comes to race. In the December issue, Mychal Denzel Smith writes, “There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor. This is not new. Navigating the constraints of white supremacy while establishing a self-definition outside of it is what being black in America has always meant. Slave narratives are powerful firsthand accounts of the horrors of slavery and important assertions of black humanity. But each one, whether Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is compromised by the fact that its intended audience was almost exclusively white. It was never the enslaved who needed to hear about the brutality of enslavement.” In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca is joined by Smith, the author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education and a fellow at the Nation Institute, to consider the structural problems of the news media, and how they mirror larger problems in society. 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

Comic genius, John Cleese, and internationally renowned psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, discuss the philosophical and biological underpinnings of how we each understand the world. Topics include the impact of poetry on the body, the struggle of writing and connecting different fields of knowledge, the fallibility of machines, opposing realities rooted in brain structure, the power of attention in shaping perception, the involvement of brain hemispheres in music processing, and the power and limitations of language.

Comic genius John Cleese and renowned psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explore the connections between comedy and neuroscience. They discuss historical figures' success related to their height, their collaboration on 'The Divided Brain' documentary, the comedic genius of a professional comedian, the impact of rushing on decision-making, the left hemisphere's lack of self-awareness, decreasing attention spans, performing for different audiences, exploring emotions, and reductionism in 'Fawlty Towers'.

Social media has changed “the future of history.” Our lives and the historical events of our time are recorded differently now, with tweets and Instagram posts replacing letters and film rolls as primary sources for future generations to study. In the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, the writer and journalist Nora Caplan-Bricker delves into the world of internet archiving to explore how traditional methods of preservation are being adapted to accommodate our digital footprints. “Preservation Acts” chronicles the changes in attitudes toward archiving the internet over the past decade, as archivists shift from attempts at wholesale preservation to selective processes that take into account ethical considerations surrounding our rights and privacy online. In this week’s podcast, Caplan-Bricker joins web editor Violet Lucca to discuss the fast-moving field of digital preservation; contextualizing and prioritizing tweets in the age of Russian bots; preserving discourse from the darker corners of the internet; and the challenges of ethical archiving in a digital age. 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