For those who make, or might once have made, a living as artists, the pandemic and the economic depression that followed it took away two vital sources of revenue: in-person events and day jobs that sustained creative endeavors. Yet, as William Deresiewicz describes in the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, all sectors of the arts economy were already vulnerable for collapse: years of declining public arts funding and education, as well as the rise of “free content,” had fundamentally destabilized the ability for expression. The ways in which COVID-19 sharpened and highlighted existing social failures harkens back to another global health crisis: the AIDS epidemic. Writer, activist, and historian Sarah Schulman’s newest book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, tells the story of activists who waged some of the most effective political campaigns of the century to force politicians, the populace, and drug companies into acknowledging and addressing AIDS. An excerpt of Let the Record Show also appears in the June issue. In this episode of the podcast, web editor Violet Lucca moderates a conversation between Sarah Schulman and William Deresiewicz, author of The Death of the Artist, exploring links between the two crises. Among other topics, they discuss the aesthetic and societal costs of confining art making to the margins of the workday, the new challenges of organizing against Big Tech, and the value of artists to social movements.Read Deresiewicz’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/stages-of-grief-what-the-pandemic-has-done-to-the-arts/Read the excerpt of Schulman’s book: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/blood-ties-sarah-schulman-let-the-record-show/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

According to Hollywood legend, director Mervyn LeRoy “discovered” Lana Turner when she was sixteen, at the soda counter of Schwab’s Pharmacy in Los Angeles. While the tale is apocryphal, the notion that anyone could be a star motivated untold hordes of youths to go west for decades afterward. (Let’s be honest: most of them turned out like the “grotesques” of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.) So is it so surprising that, according to a 2019 poll, 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight say they would become social-media influencers if given the chance? For the June issue of Harper’s Magazine, Barrett Swanson spent five days at a TikTok collab house: a plush Los Angeles mansion, funded by two Silicon Valley investors, where a group of conventionally beautiful, college-aged influencers lived rent-free, tasked only with posting videos of themselves for their millions of followers. Yet, as sultry as this sounds, Swanson found that these young men struggled with anxiety, depression, and an inability to think critically about the forces driving them to generate content. The pressure to please, gain followers, and get good ratings is creeping into all of our lives, regardless of industry. (Even doctors get star ratings now.) In this episode, Swanson joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss the alternately surreal and sad reality of life inside of the collab house; the pressures of the “passion economy”; algorithms; and the critical thinking and digital literacy that everyone—not just the young—are sorely lacking.Read Swanson’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-house-the-anxiety-of-influencers/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

Shortly before he left office, Donald Trump reactivated the federal death penalty—putting an end to a seventeen-year hiatus and executing an unprecedented thirteen people in less than a year. While the brutality of this killing spree is well-documented, the byzantine legal process through which it was authorized has received little attention. For the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Caroline Lester traveled to the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the execution of Dustin Higgs, illuminating the brutishness of state power. As an appeals lawyer put it: “I’ve never been more afraid of the government than I was after those seven months.” The story she tells of Higgs’s attempts to negotiate with a government bent on killing its citizens implicates the entire legal system, from the Supreme Court to Obama’s attorney general. In this episode, Lester joins Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss her harrowing reporting process, the long and bipartisan history of state violence, and the inequity of the death penalty. 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

Whether or not you remember anything from high school biology, the word “species” seems fairly self-explanatory: a kitten isn’t the same thing as a crab. Yet what distinguishes a particular species from its subspecies is a far trickier determination to make than “cat ≠ crustacean.” The act of taxonomic classification has befuddled biologists regardless of specialization or era. “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience,” wrote Charles Darwin. In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, Zach St. George tracks the saga of the California gnatcatcher, a gray bird that sits at the center of a dispute between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which decides which species merit Endangered Species Act protection, and the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm arguing that the bird is functionally indistinct from any number of other gnatcatchers. Even if Pacific Legal’s motives are less than purely scientific, its case highlights legitimate criticisms—echoed by many biologists—about the imprecise way the Endangered Species Act codifies what counts as a species. St. George explains how this argument has led to further questions about the bill, such as how it might be changed to better suit an era in which the environment is deteriorating faster than ever.In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca talks with St. George about the ESA, the philosophical and scientific questions prompted by the practice of taxonomy, and the more proactive ways we might approach the likely irreversible damage of climate change.Read St. George’s piece here: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/birds-of-a-feather-endangered-species-list-revision/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 work subsumes leisure time, worldwide anxieties mount, and a pandemic reshapes comfort and togetherness, meditation has been touted as a panacea. People who are stressed out (are there any other kind?) can take a meditation course, read an article, go on a retreat, or use an app; the hope is to gain from meditation peace, health, productivity, focus, or a good night’s sleep. It comes almost universally recommended and has precious few public detractors.David Kortava’s article “Lost in Thought,” from the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, is an investigation into the possible negative side effects of meditation. Kortava reports on a practitioner’s bout with psychosis during an extended stay at a vipassana meditation center that had her wishing for death. Kortava presents evidence of meditation’s potential to distress and harm. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca speaks with Kortava about the experiential gap filled by meditation, the perils of a one-size-fits-all approach, and the gulf between the origins of meditative practice and its modern-day deployment.Read Kortava’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/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 photographer Richard Rothman spent more than a decade taking pictures in a small town along the Front Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The resulting monograph, Town of C, was published by Stanley/Barker, and a selection of the photographs appears in the March issue of Harper’s Magazine. The book’s scope is comprehensive, documenting the grandeur and the despoliation of the region’s geography and the lives and spaces of its poorest—and richest—residents. “Through portraits and landscapes,” the critic and curator Lyle Rexer writes in his introduction, “Rothman presents the paradox of expansiveness and confinement, of possibility and crushing limitation.” In this episode of the podcast, Violet Lucca brings Richard Rothman and Lyle Rexer together for a conversation about Rothman’s new work and the current state of art photography. They discuss how the focus and narrative structure of Town of C changed over time, the role of art photography in a culture oversaturated with images, and the hundreds of minute decisions that go into composing a photograph.Look at photographs from Town of C and read Rexer’s introduction: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/town-of-c-richard-rothman/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

“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the pavement, the beach!”) was the rallying cry of the May 1968 protests in France. As demonstrators tore up paving stones in order to build barricades or to hurl at the police, they discovered that there was sand beneath the streets. Though this was a typical building practice, it reinforced the protesters’ belief that everyday life wasn’t quite what it appeared to be, but was rather an illusion manufactured by modernity, capitalism, and consumerism. During the early months of the pandemic, we were all confronted with the same truth. The levels of noise, garbage, and greenhouse-gas emissions pumped into the environment were drastically reduced because so many schools, workplaces, and restaurants were shuttered. Just as people abruptly changed where and how they spent their days, all sorts of wildlife began venturing into public places they’d previously avoided: deer roamed the streets of Paris while coyotes wandered around San Francisco. But these incursions weren’t really incursions at all: the natural world had been there all along. It became clear that animals, rather than living apart from human society, had always been living alongside us—our belief in absolute anthropocentric control was an illusion.In “The Crow Whisperer,” which appeared in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Lauren Markham writes about the ways we might rethink our relationship with the environment. Following an incident involving some friends, their dog, and a murder of dive-bombing crows, Markham delves into the world of animal whisperers—specialists who serve as translators, negotiators, or arbiters between members of different species. In this episode of the podcast, Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca talks with Markham about the complexity of animal psychology, epigenetics, climate change, and a crow’s talent for nursing a grudge.Read Markham’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/the-crow-whisperer-animal-communicators/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 month will see the release of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography—the authorized biography of the famous novelist, who died in 2018. Roth himself selected Bailey to write his life story. In addition to many long conversations, Roth granted Bailey complete access to his personal archives and helped set up interviews with many of his friends, lovers, and colleagues. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, the novelist and Harper’s contributing editor Joshua Cohen imagines how Bailey’s book might be received by Roth himself. From the comfort of his writing studio beyond the grave, Cohen’s Roth ruminates on the strange, perhaps self-destructive decision to commission his own biography, and proceeds to lament the result, which, he argues, downplays the literary production that made up most of his days (“MY BIOGRAPHER HAS NO INTEREST IN MY WRITING!!!!”) in favor of “interminable chapters and decades of reputation management, alternating with, if not relieved by, sexual transgressions.” Cohen’s ventriloquism of Roth is a gambit one has to think the author would have admired. As Cohen points out in this interview, Roth, too, had a penchant for throwing his voice. In this episode of the podcast, Violet Lucca talks with Cohen about Philip Roth’s long career and his unclear legacy. Among other things, they discuss Roth’s late decree that “the book can’t compete with the screen”; his often unacknowledged influence on today’s American immigrant writers, as well as writers of autofiction; and an afterlife—or do we find ourselves there now?—in which everything will be as it is, just a little different.Read Cohen’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/the-possessed-philip-roth-the-biography-blake-bailey/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

“Sometime in late 1991,” Don DeLillo told a Paris Review interviewer in 1993, “I started writing something new and didn’t know what it would be—a novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing, and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing I’ve done.” The result was the novella “Pafko at the Wall,” first published as a Folio in the October 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine, making up a third of the issue’s length. “Wherein the Giants clinch the pennant, Bruegel descends, a bomb explodes, Sinatra sulks, and a Harlem boy plays his own game,” read that month’s cover. A slightly revised version would later become the prologue to Underworld, a novel often described as DeLillo’s masterpiece.The story takes place during the National League playoff game of October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a pennant-winning home run over the head of Brooklyn Dodgers left fielder Andy Pafko—an event known to baseball fans as the “Shot Heard ’Round the World.” Here, though, the famous game serves mostly as background, its action serving to repeatedly bounce the reader’s attention back into the stands. DeLillo, a writer who has always been fascinated by the mechanics of spectacle, wants us to watch the watchers—some of whom, such as Frank Sinatra, the radio announcer Russ Hodges, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, are spectacle makers (and manipulators) themselves. Hovering over the proceedings, meanwhile, are suggestions of darker energy: the secret knowledge, possessed by only the paranoid Hoover, that the Soviets have just performed a successful nuclear-weapons test, and racial tensions, briefly transcended by fandom, that are unloosed in the scramble over a suddenly famous ball.In this episode of the podcast, we bring you excerpts of “Pafko at the Wall,” which was performed live at the 92nd Street Y by Billy Crudup, Zachary Levi, and Tony Shalhoub, interspersed with commentary by the novelist Jennifer Egan and the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips. The full recording of the performance will be released on March 30 by Simon & Schuster Audio. A video of the performance will be available for two days at 92y.org/pafko beginning on Sunday, March 28, in anticipation of the audiobook’s release.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 2002, a new crop of Dead Sea Scroll fragments that were said to have come from the Swiss vault of the late antiquities dealer Khalil Iskander Shahin went up for sale. These fragments were bought by a number of evangelical institutions, including the Museum of the Bible, which was founded by the family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and-crafts stores. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, Madeleine Schwartz describes the odd provenance of the fragments and evaluates whether they could be forgeries. In this episode, Schwartz and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca discuss the tendency for self-delusion in the antiquities market, as well as the slow process by which counterfeit goods can be distinguished from genuine artifacts. They also consider the complex issue of ownership, given the colonial violence that has historically allowed Western countries to acquire relics. “[Knowing where objects came from] is hugely important for the ethical implications,” Schwartz says. “It’s also really important for the financial implications, because, in general, no one wants to think that what they own is either fake or going to lead them to having to deal with a lawsuit.”Read Schwartz’s annotation: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/03/false-prophets-forged-dead-sea-scrolls/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