Joseph Bernstein, senior reporter at Buzzfeed and 2021 Nieman Fellow, joins Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca to discuss “Bad News,” the cover story of the September issue. Together they explore the misconceptions surrounding disinformation; the mythical power of digital advertising according to Big Tech; the idea that social media itself has the capability to slow the spread of fake news; and the role that preexisting social conditions play in which misinformation goes viral.Read Bernstein’s article here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/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

Andrew Quilty is a photographer and reporter who has lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, since 2013. In “When the Raids Came,” his article for the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, Quilty follows the story of one family in rural Wardak province over nearly twenty years of war, offering a holistic view of the U.S. military’s impact. Quilty joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to survey Afghanistan’s transition to Taliban control; its media ecosystem; the cultural factors that are often ignored by outside analysts; and the role that the international community—not just the U.S. military—has played in reshaping the country and fostering rampant corruption.Read Quilty’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/when-the-raids-came-afghanistan-war-toll-on-one-afghan-family/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 August issue of Harper’s Magazine, Wyatt Mason makes the startling claim that the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Septology, a challenging and experimental work about the chaos of interiority and the fragmented nature of the self, begins a fresh chapter in the development of the novel: “With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.” In this episode of the podcast, Mason and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca unpack what exactly makes Fosse’s work so innovative. They situate Septology within the larger trajectory of literary history, comparing its peculiar narrative structure to the strategies that writers like Woolf and Nabokov developed for representing interiority. Their discussion ranges from Buddhism to Darwin’s little-known contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace as they explore Fosse’s unique approach to concretizing the spiritual aspect of human existence; the mystery of personal identity; and the place of emotions in the reader’s experience of literature.Read Mason’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/jon-fosse-septology/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

No other twentieth-century political philosopher dominated Trump-era discourse like Hannah Arendt. In the mainstream and on the fringe, writers quoted Arendt with abandon, signaling again and again to their baffled readers that she was the thinker best equipped to help us understand Trump’s strange ascent and imminent destruction of democracy. Amid the endless cavalcade of sloppy think pieces, Arendt’s ideas lacked crucial context. “Men in Dark Times,” Rebecca Panovka’s essay in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, argues that these articles obscured “the way his lies operated, and what they were: not totalitarian world-building so much as boardroom b******t.”No essayist has historicized Trump more succinctly than Panovka. This week, she joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to help us understand the great distortion of Arendt. Panovka contends that, though Arendt was not known as the most scrupulous with the facts, twenty-first-century readers should pay close attention to her idiosyncratic word choices and the particular political ethos of her time before making sweeping claims about her relevance today. Of course we should mine great thinkers’ work for insights, Panovka says, but we should also remember what Arendt learned a hard lesson when one of her early mentors, Martin Heidegger, turned to Nazism: the haphazard application of philosophy to politics is always a risky business.Read Panovka’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/men-in-dark-times-hannah-arendt-post-truth/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

Land and sea meet in a dance of littoral literature on this week’s episode, in which two writers train their minds on overlooked expanses. Gillian Osborne considers the American lawn, a private buffer expressing our nostalgia for common spaces. Leanne Shapton takes us into open water, where swimmers find vulnerability, wonder, and a sense of scale. They examine how great writers have drawn inspiration from the outdoors and crafted lyrical prose that unsettles the barriers between humans and nature, past and present, death and life.First, Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Leanne Shapton about the work of the writer, activist, and filmmaker Roger Deakin, which Shapton reviewed in the August issue of Harper’s. Like Deakin, Shapton is an experienced swimmer (she once participated in two Olympic tryouts), and she uses her marine inclinations to understand Deakin’s travel memoir Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, as well as his life and politics. Only a lucky few can swim regularly from a young age, and Shapton discusses her desire that the experience of open-water swimming—as one means of being “with” nature, rather than “in and on it”—might be made available to people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. Next, Lucca speaks with Gillian Osborne. Last month, Nightboat Books published Osborne’s first essay collection, Green Green Green, which was excerpted in the July issue of Harper’s. Osborne declares that the color green’s “layering of possible meanings is uncanny,” then launches into a poetic history of the American lawn. As she testifies in her conversation, she is interested in the lawn’s ability to evoke absence or emptiness—a quality she also finds in great short poetry. For Osborne, who seeks to make space for “responsive” rather than merely “responsible” reading, the experience of literature is always entwined with what writers and readers are not presently looking at—the vibrant vegetal world in which they sit.Read Shapton’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/writ-in-water-roger-deakin-waterlog/Read the excerpt of Osborne’s essay collection: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/green-green-green-gillian-osborne/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

Every presidential campaign is accompanied by news reports that attempt to frame existing realities as new developments or special insights. One prominent recurring story is about the fact that more and more Latinos are voting for Republicans. This realization then leads a journalist—who is usually not Latino—to attempt to pin down why that is, and to explain what exactly the “Latino vote” is. But the term “Latino” is capacious, encompassing people from dozens of countries and territories who don’t necessarily speak Spanish and might have had the border cross them instead of the other way around. How could there possibly be a singular, unchanging Latino vote?In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Héctor Tobar, a novelist and veteran journalist who went on a 9,000-mile road trip across the United States to visit a variety of Latino communities. Tobar’s reporting complicates received wisdom about what it means to be Latino, and revels in the diversity—political and otherwise—of the identity.Read Tobar’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/08/home-country-latino-latinx-hispanic-hispano-united-states/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

This summer marks a jolting return to socializing with friends, family, and seas of strangers. On the street, in museums, in restaurants, and in theaters, many people are faced with a painful contradiction: we want to be around one another more than ever, but months of isolation have made us hostile, exhausted, and even pained—probably more than most of us are willing to admit. Isolation affects the body in a similar way to stress, and in the wake of the pandemic, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two. Yet even before COVID-19, loneliness and stress were epidemic in societies that organized themselves out of interdependence in the name of efficiency and individuality. In the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert writes about her own experiences during the pandemic (a “slow-motion crisis of the self”) and the scientific evidence that supports our need for all forms of human interaction. In this week’s episode of the podcast, Gabbert candidly speaks with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca about her essay and our collective struggle to recover from the lockdown. 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

Perhaps you’ve heard of Jon Meacham, a former editor in chief at Newsweek and author of many popular histories about the United States. His books are ubiquitous and regularly make bestseller lists. Yet the ideas in them are frequently reductive, incorrect, and strangely in thrall to a distinctly American version of the great man theory. Meacham is committed to fetishizing the role of the president and the men who have filled it, arguing that the office ennobles its occupants more than it corrupts them. Meanwhile, he conspicuously ignores the bottom-up social movements and profound economic tensions that historians have long recognized as crucial forces in American history. That is how Thomas Frank sees it, anyway. In his combined review of Meacham’s new book, The Soul of America, and the HBO documentary based on it, Frank skewers a centrist hero who has become expert at whetting the MSNBC crowd’s thirst for neoliberal platitudes. For Meacham, once a staunch Reaganite, the close alliance he enjoys with President Biden is only the latest evidence of a commitment to subordinating matters of policy to a nebulous politics of character and “soul.” This week, Frank explains to web editor Violet Lucca Meacham’s overly romantic approach to history and what it elides, his connections to President Biden, and how his popularity reflects a larger shift away from the projects that once defined American liberalism.Read Frank’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/jon-meacham-thomas-frank-soul-of-america/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

Tales of the harrowing—and often degrading—working conditions at Amazon have spread far and wide. Yet the company has successfully circumvented attempts to change its ways. With the aid of extremely accommodating local, state, and national officials, America’s second-largest company (right after Walmart) has developed an elaborate system of workplace surveillance and anti-union propaganda to prevent its low-wage workers from organizing. In the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Brook relates the concerns of workers in and around the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. The warehouse attracted national attention this spring when it played host to a fierce battle over unionization. Pro-union workers lost by a margin of more than two to one, but Brook shows that the internal deliberations were far more complicated than the results suggest. Both pro- and anti-union workers in the area also struggle with the legacy of Reconstruction, when racist and socioeconomic controls on working class people were codified into law. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Brook unpacks the lessons of his trips to Bessemer with Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. In their conversation, Lucca and Brook speculate on what lies ahead for the Amazon precariat—and for the consumers who depend on their labor.Read Brooks’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/07/hard-bargain-amazon-unionization-bessemer-alabama/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

What if we conceived of the fight against climate change as a “just war”—as both the biggest fight in human history and a global search for meaning? As fires rage, oceans rise, and pandemics ravage, the demands for international solidarity and world-scale deployments of resources are readily apparent. But in the face of ideological divisions wrought by centuries of capitalist and colonial destruction, it’s not always easy to envision what solidarity really is, or what it needs to be.In “Prayer for a Just War,” published in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Greg Jackson urges us to see the “first comprehensive global challenge” as an opportunity to define our global character by our collective grit, humility, and trust. In addition to outlining the many counterattacks we must mount on political and technological fronts, Jackson imbues the mythic concept of the “existential threat” with historical and spiritual meaning. In this episode, Jackson delves into those ideas with web editor Violet Lucca, then gestures toward ways we might help each other step out of the deadly (and dull) alienation we all seem to share.Read Jackson’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/prayer-for-a-just-war-finding-meaning-in-the-climate-fight/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