It’s expensive to run for any elected office—something that’s reflected in the highly educated, wealthy individuals who make up most of our representatives. Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, joins Violet Lucca to discuss the potential outcome of the midterm elections. With voting, abortion, and the economy on the line, will the “blue wave”—itself a reductive term—be reversed? They discuss outsider candidates, issues impacting rural voters, and Smarsh’s own experience of being asked to run for Senate—and why she decided not to.Read Smarsh’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/in-the-running-sarah-smarsh-almost-running-for-office-kansas/Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/saveThis episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Stephanie Hou. 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

Elizabeth Barber and Matt Johnson speak to Violet Lucca about the politics and methods of factory farming. Barber and Johnson offer insights into the subject from the perspective of a not entirely neutral observer and a criminally liable activist, respectively. Barber discusses the difficulties of writing about a subject that intrudes uncomfortably on people’s lifestyles and routines, while Johnson notes the difficulty of attracting media attention to the subject at all. They both discuss what ethical consumption means for them. “Standing Trial” appears in the October issue; read it here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/10/standing-trial-should-we-care-about-animal-liberation-ag-gag-laws-iowa-slaughterhouse/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani.Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: www.harpers.org/save 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

Charlotte Shane speaks to Violet Lucca about the state of abortion rights in post-Dobbs America. Shane expresses her frustrations with pro-choice arguments based on the right to privacy or on medical prudence. Instead, she argues that the right to abortion follows from the principle of bodily autonomy. Shane also touches on the difficulty of writing about abortion in an authoritative but not impersonal tone. “The Right to Not Be Pregnant” appears in the October issue; read it here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/10/the-right-to-not-be-pregnant-asserting-an-essential-right/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.Get an entire year of Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save 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

Claire-Louise Bennett speaks to Violet Lucca about Louise Bourgeois’s work and the process of free association she chose to document her experience of it. Bennett discusses what it means to regiment pain—the persistent subject of Bourgeois’s work, her “business”—to the demands of form in writing. She follows other threads of association that weave together the artist’s life and her own. Bennett’s review of Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child and The Artist’s Studio: A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020 appears in the September issue.Read it here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/louise-bourgeois-the-artists-studio-a-formal-feeling/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Madeleine Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani. 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 are many monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate and politician who founded the DeBeers Company, around Cape Town, South Africa. These statues have been vandalized and reconstituted, respectively, by his detractors and supporters—the latter camp embedded a GPS device inside concrete within a replacement for a Rhodes statue’s decapitated head. In the December 2021 issue, Hedley Twidle, a professor at the University of Cape Town who teaches Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose” every semester, adopted a unique approach to this ongoing battle. In this episode, Twidle discusses the physical and political landscape that remains from Rhodes’s era, the frustrations of a long-unresolved history, and new approaches to writing and thinking about intergenerational traumas.Read Twidle’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/to-spite-his-face-what-happened-to-cecil-rhodes-statue-nose/Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/saveThis 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

Only 13 percent of Americans receive treatment for substance abuse disorder. The reasons for this alarming gap are, like the causes of addiction itself, multifarious. In West Virginia, the state hardest-hit by the opioid epidemic—where the number of deaths outpaces births—four people who struggled with long-term addiction underwent an experimental procedure in which a microchip was implanted to deliver electrical shocks to the part of the brain involved with processing desire, motivation, and reinforcement. For the September issue, Zachary Siegel, himself a recovered opioid addict, spoke with two participants from the surgical trial. In this episode, Siegel and host Violet Lucca discuss the shortcomings of abstinence-only treatment, received wisdom about sobriety and relapse, issues raised by deep-brain stimulation, the lack of urgency around the opioid crisis, and much more.Read Siegel’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/can-a-brain-implant-treat-drug-addiction-neurostimulation/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani. 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

“Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, a man whose afterlife on YouTube has come to define the entirety of his decades-long career. Though Hitchens always pilloried the existence of a higher power and those who believed in one, his earlier output—defined by his elite education, Marxism, and savvy deployments of Beltway gossip—seems at odds with his later years as a road-show atheist. In this episode, Christian Lorentzen, a freelance critic who reviewed a collection of Hitchens’s writings from the Nineties for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Maureen Tkacik, a Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, and Luke Savage, a staff writer at Jacobin and the author of The Dead Center, reflect on the evolution of Hitchens’s style as a writer, thinker, and speaker.Read Lorentzen’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/the-enemy-of-promise-christopher-hitchens/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Ian Mantgani 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 August 2021, Fred Bahnson accompanied Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk dedicated to preserving religious texts in zones of conflict, to Gao, Mali. One year later, Bahnson and Stewart reflect on their journey in terms both spiritual and tangible. Stewart tells the story of his life’s work and details the importance of digitizing texts—regardless of faith—and of forming human connections across religious boundaries to overcome historical bias and inaccuracy. Bahnson and Stewart delve into their shared interest in the role of memory in a digital world and the dangers that arise when we undervalue listening.Read Bahnson’s story here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/the-quest-to-save-ancient-manuscripts-gao-mali/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum. 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

Daniel Bessner, author and professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington, sits down with web editor Violet Lucca to discuss his Harper’s Magazine cover story about the future of the United States and its place in the world during an era of shrinking economic and material might. Bessner suggests a path forward that aims to be practical at the cost of optimism, at a moment when the individual seems to lack any semblance of political agency. Adopting the language of Marx, he posits that “we might be in the era of mutual ruin,” and that a shift toward military and political restraint—rather than misguided liberal interventionism—must begin with a brutally honest diagnosis of the state of the world before any solutions can take shape. Read Bessner’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/07/what-comes-after-the-american-century/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani. 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 “tree poaching” sounds like a niche, victimless crime, this multibillion-dollar illicit trade contributes to climate change in vulnerable parts of the world and, more often than not, harms humans and animals alike. Environmental scientists and advocates have long understood the potential that lies in tree DNA but have lacked the resources to utilize it. Now, with the assistance of volunteers, researchers are assembling a database that can match stolen wood to stumps. Lauren Markham joins Violet Lucca to discuss her report on black market lumber, the perils of viewing human life as separate from the rest of the natural world, and the dire economic conditions that motivate tree thieves. Read Markham’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/tree-sleuths-how-dna-is-transforming-the-fight-against-illegal-logging/This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, Maddie Crum, and Ian Mantgani. 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