“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.

Pafko at the Wall

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.

The Anxiety of Influencers

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

Seven Steps to Heaven

Memoirist and critic Vivian Gornick joins Violet Lucca to discuss Gornick’s essay “Put on the Diamonds” with novelist Sigrid Nunez, whose review of Italo Svevo’s A Very Old Man also runs in the October issue. Together Gornick and Nunez consider the inescapable evil that is humiliation; the unevenness of power; its connections to vulnerability and vengefulness; and the dire need to think well of ourselves. Later they unpack the concept of “sturdiness” in one’s voice and discover the lines in storytelling through a surrogated versus an unsurrogated self. 

Read Gornick’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/put-on-the-diamonds-notes-on-humiliation-vivian-gornick/

Read Nunez’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/a-very-old-man-italo-svevo/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

“Put on the Diamonds”

Will Self, author of Umbrella, How the Dead Live, and a new memoir, Will, discusses his provocative argument that trauma—in literary, historical, and cultural criticism—is wildly overused and misapplied. Rather than it being a phenomenon that has persisted throughout human history, Self contends that it is a product of modernity; while past injustices and injurious experience (war, slavery, abuse) may seem to have produced trauma-like symptoms, we have no way of judging whether they resemble trauma as we now conceive of it. Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca talks through the finer points of Self’s thesis.

Read Self’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/a-posthumous-shock-trauma-studies-modernity-how-everything-became-trauma/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

A Posthumous Shock

Critic and novelist Lauren Oyler discusses her conflicted feelings about the work of W. G. Sebald, an author whose influence and place in the canon is well established. Harper’s Magazine web editor Violet Lucca and Oyler talk through Sebald’s similarities to contemporary novelists, his feather-ruffling academic career, and what Carole Angier missed in her new Sebald biography, Speak, Silence.

Read Oyler’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/desperately-seeking-sebald-lauren-oyler-speak-silence-carole-angier/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

Desperately Seeking Sebald

Of all the manifestations of love described in philosophy, eros—the sensual, the passionate—is often the most exalted. But in its power to override rational and ethical impulses, eros can become monstrous, throwing you into a cycle of misery in which you’re impervious to common sense. Philosopher Agnes Callard, author of Aspiration, joins web editor Violet Lucca for a cathartic conversation about her own encounters with eros and the feasibility of ethical erotic relationships. Callard and Lucca trace depictions of eros through history, from Plato to modern novels, and reevaluate the concepts of civility and loneliness. They also explore the possibilities and strictures of writing about eros: the space it creates for reflection, the illusory fulfillment of depictions of sex, and whether it’s ever possible to treat the topic with anything approaching objectivity. 

Read Callard’s essay here: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/03/the-eros-monster-agnes-callard/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

The Eros Monster

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.

Empire Burlesque

“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

Christopher Hitchens

A complete recording of Leonard Cohen’s performance at 92Y in New York City, February 14, 1966. Courtesy 92Y

Leonard Cohen at 92Y, February 14, 1966

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

Animal Rights

Ryan Ruby talks to Violet Lucca about Vladimir Nabokov’s Berlin period. He describes seeing Berlin through Nabokov’s eyes and noticing the quotidian texture of the city in the author’s novels from this period. He recalls the birth of his own son, in the same neighborhood where Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, was born, and learning to appreciate Nabokov’s non-linear notion of time, a notion that Ruby believes can help us consecrate everyday life, not just life’s “milestones.” The conversation ends with Ruby’s defense of Lolita, which he argues intentionally re-creates the way art can seduce the reader into excusing immorality. 

Read Ruby’s memoir: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/

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This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

Nabokov’s Berlin

Internet culture has made different types of neurodivergence—particularly anxiety—more visible than it has ever been. Michael W. Clune, author of White Out, offers an account of how difficult it was to understand what a panic attack was before mental illness was instantly diagnosable with Dr. Google. More remarkably, his essay eloquently and accurately expresses what the experience of a panic attack is like. He speaks about the process of writing this memoir, discovering Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and creating types of narratives about anxiety.

Read Clune’s memoir: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-anatomy-of-panic/

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Take a survey about the podcast: harpers.org/survey

Panic Attack

“The reason it’s so hard to write a cruise piece is because of David Foster Wallace,” explains Lauren Oyler, a critic and the author of the novel Fake Accounts. In her recent Harper’s Magazine cover story, she takes on Wallace’s 1997 cruise essay, also published in Harper’s, as she describes her experience aboard the Goop cruise. “But I didn’t want it to just be a work of criticism reckoning with David Foster Wallace’s reputation,” Oyler adds. So her essay goes beyond reputation to discuss “male feminists,” class dynamics on cruise ships, and the tired nature of materialist critiques of wellness in order to—as she puts it in her essay—“unite irony and sincerity once and for all.” 

Oyler’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/
Wallace’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/01/shipping-out/

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● [3:16] Some problems Oyler takes with David Foster Wallace

● [10:08] How the public understanding of David Foster Wallace reflects on the popular understanding of the essay as well as contemporary women’s literature

● [15:41] “The male feminist” and women’s writing in relation to David Foster Wallace

● [24:05] The confusing economic class of people who goes on cruises

● [31:51] On the tired nature of materialist critique of wellness (Goop) 

● [46:40] Oyler’s unification of irony and sincerity

● [55:35] “Didn’t anything good happen to you on this cruise?”

On David Foster Wallace

Do non-indigenous people have a right to perform or practice indigenous rituals? There’s no single answer, as Native Americans are not a monolithic group with a single opinion on the matter. Sierra Crane Murdoch reports on a group of religious organizations that purportedly offer “authentic” ceremonies—run by people with dubious claims to indigenous heritage—and give their participants peyote, a medicinal plant considered a sacrament by many Native Americans.

Read Murdoch’s story: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/a-native-american-church-without-native-americans-take-the-medicine-to-the-white-man/

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A “Native American Church” Without Native Americans

It’s a familiar story, but one no less tragic because of its familiarity: a female author makes a huge splash with her debut novel, but despite her promise, the doors slam shut and she fades from view. Nancy Lemann, author of the cult novel Lives of the Saints (1985), discusses the experience of that career trajectory, as well as the recent, renewed enthusiasm for her writing in the pages of Harper’s, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. With candor and her distinctive sensibility, Lemann also lays out her myriad influences, from Walker Percy to Evelyn Waugh.

Read Lemann’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/lion-and-daughters/

Nancy Lemann

Only the good die young—no, really. The historian and Harper’s Magazine contributor Daniel Bessner joins Violet Lucca to discuss the series of love fests for Henry Kissinger, and Christopher Hitchens’s “The Case Against Henry Kissinger,” an iconic two-part takedown of the statesman published in early 2001. 

You can read this masterwork—and everything else Harper’s has published since 1850—for only $16.97 a year: harpers.org/save

The first part: https://harpers.org/archive/2001/02/the-case-against-henry-kissinger-part-one/
The second part: https://harpers.org/archive/2001/03/the-case-against-henry-kissinger-part-two/

The Kissinger Centennial

Braucherei, a form of healing used in Amish and Mennonite communities, might seem like an appropriately antiquated practice for a traditional culture. But the writer Rachel Yoder returned to her Mennonite roots to investigate the practice’s modern uses. Embodying all the contradictions and complexities of the much-discussed Amish community overall, Braucherei might be most significant because of its commitment to an ancient practice: someone honoring your pain. “What could be more valuable?”

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“In the Glimmer,” Rachel Yoder’s essay in the July issue of Harper’s
The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts and Remedies

1:36: The origins of Braucherei
4:25: The “flattening” of Amish and Mennonite communities in media
14:20: An alternative solution to chronic pain: “pain itself can be so mysterious to modern medicine”
19:33: The power of it: “Being two bodies together in a place and caring for each other.”
26:59: The “evolution” of these communities
33:40: Being interested in “the mysterious” as a direct link to being a writer
35:52: Writers as a “secular clergy”
37:17: Goop-mystics on the Upper West Side and the Amish healer
43:04: Returning home

The Good Witches of Pennsylvania

Christopher Carroll, the reviews editor at Harper’s, sits down with the former New Books columnist, Claire Messud, and her successor, Dan Piepenbring, to discuss the history, challenges, and pleasures of the storied column. The three critics go over their influences, the changes in publishing today, and, above all else, the great opportunity the column has given each writer to “go on a walk through your own mind.”

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
Claire Messud’s “New Books” columns: https://harpers.org/author/clairemessud/
Claire Messud’s “New Books” column on Kurt Wolff, Phillipe Sands, and Tom Stoppard: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/02/reviews-endpapers-the-ratline-tom-stoppard-wolff-hermione-lee-phillippe-sands/
Chris Carroll’s “New Books” column for July: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/new-books-harvey-sachs-henry-bean-martin-cruz-smith/
Dan Piepenbring’s premier “New Books” column for August: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/dan-piepenbring-new-books/
Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 “The Decline of Book Reviewing” essay in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/1959/10/the-decline-of-book-reviewing/
Claire Messud’s novel, The Emperor’s Children: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-emperor-s-children-claire-messud/8718221?ean=9780307276667&gclid=CjwKCAjwhdWkBhBZEiwA1ibLmNLXWamvWO_e0R14ztZIVsKTiCbUXZ1kfgM81EXmTzIizusWfIz4ChoC2tgQAvD_BwE
Dan Piepenbring’s book CHAOS: https://bookshop.org/p/books/chaos-charles-manson-the-cia-and-the-secret-history-of-the-sixties-tom-o-neill/113666
“New Books” columns, including Zadie Smith, Joshua Cohen, and John Leonard: https://harpers.org/sections/new-books/
Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Perchance to Dream” from April, 1996: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/04/perchance-to-dream/

0:49: History of “New Books” coverage
3:38: What goes into choosing a book
7:36: Writing fiction as a critic
9:10: Changes in publishing today, “gone are those days”
13:59: “Centripetal vs. centrifugal forces” in book criticism
15:45: “If you care enough about what happens, then the book has already won you over.”
17:16: The critical pan, and why they’re less necessary now
29:10: The pleasure of connecting different titles, “serendipitously”

New Books

An estimated one out of every four Nigerians is a silent carrier of sickle cell disease, a hemoglobin disorder that can cause serious health problems and even death. With recent advancements in genetic testing, many Nigerians won’t take the risk of reproducing with other silent carriers or people with the disease. But, as Krithika Varagur reports, love doesn’t always accord with the Punnett square. Providing a snapshot of what our “genetic responsibility” could be as prenatal tests proliferate, Varagur sat down with Harper’s Magazine senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to discuss one couple’s story of public health, family, and most of all love in Lagos. 

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease,” Krithika Varagur’s story in the August edition of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/love-in-the-time-of-sickle-cell-disease/
Krithika Varagur’s book, “The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project”: https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-s-poetics-hippocrates-g-apostle/17272634?ean=9781950071036
Larissa MacFarquhar on the family court system: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/when-should-a-child-be-taken-from-his-parents
Katherine Boo’s piece, “After Welfare”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/after-welfare
Aristotle’s Poetics: https://bookshop.org/p/books/aristotle-s-poetics-hippocrates-g-apostle/17272634?ean=9781950071036

3:35: The story started as “an aside my friend in Nigeria made”
8:10: “I am a romantic, and I don’t think I would write this story about people who don’t choose love”
13:25: “In a lot of traditions, unlimited choice is not the one way route to a good life”
14:52: There’s been a “revolution” in sickle cell treatment over a single generation
17:35: “Sickle cell is no longer a death sentence,” which complicates responsibility
22:30: A range of possibilities is “closer to our reality with genetic testing” than a yes/no
26:00: “Genetic responsibility shouldn’t turn into a genetic blame game”
34:25: The best story is one that would be powerful at the dinner table
37:55: To quote Carl Sagan, “If you want to invent an apple pie from scratch, you have to create the universe”

Genetic Responsibility in Nigeria

In his August cover story for Harper’s Magazine, Jason Blakely argues that an overreliance on scientific authority, or “scientism,” only furthered the divide between those who adhered to and those who disobeyed public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of engendering legitimacy through dialogue, Blakely says, policymakers passed down “neutral” doctrines in the name of science and often at the expense of other social values. Blakely sat down with Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss his piece and its implications as we’ve gained hindsight on the pandemic.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
Read “Doctor’s Orders,” Jason Blakely’s piece in the August edition of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/
Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: https://bookshop.org/p/books/we-built-reality-how-social-science-infiltrated-culture-politics-and-power-jason-blakely/13834194?ean=9780190087388&gclid=CjwKCAjwt52mBhB5EiwA05YKo3uXmyJK8wby9dq8EZ2OL-QjWDi1IHNN9iiqOVTd9recWt0-_anIkBoCKfgQAvD_BwE
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism-max-weber/11609371?ean=9780486427034
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: https://bookshop.org/p/books/homo-sacer-sovereign-power-and-bare-life-giorgio-agamben/10913759?ean=9780804732185

4:32: How could these two opposite positions “shed light on our situation”
8:12: “Some very extreme human experiences happened at that time”
15:11: It’s the economy, stupid!
17:02: “Humans are a weird animal; we can become like the things that describe us”
23:20: “People have to be listened to in order to understand what’s guiding their life”
27:26: RFK Jr., and the blurred lines between anti-scientism and anti-science
37:09: “As daunting as it is to say politics must start from the bottom up, there’s no other way”

Scientism and COVID-19

In “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s story for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, a woman visits an old friend whose husband has recently died, only to discover that the nature of her friend’s grief is more chilling than she could have imagined. Oates is joined by her former student Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s, to discuss the connections between writing and teaching, and between writing and time. Revisiting stories by Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, and more, they consider the ghosts that haunt Oates’s story, the ghosts that haunt fiction, and the ghosts we would argue with if given one more chance. 

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s short story in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/joyce-carol-oates-the-return/?logged_in=true
A complete collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories
Short stories by John Updike: https://bookshop.org/p/books/trust-me-short-stories-john-updike/11077187?ean=9780449912171
Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Borges and I”: https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-gabriel-garcia-marquez/286337?ean=9780060883287
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: https://bookshop.org/p/books/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/581281?ean=9780679723424
John Gardner and William Gass’s debate over literature: https://medium.com/the-william-h-gass-interviews/william-h-gass-interviewed-by-thomas-leclair-with-john-gardner-1979-e6de4d424107
Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School”
A Void by Georges Perec: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-void-georges-perec/623575?ean=9781567922967
James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.: https://bookshop.org/p/books/ulysses-james-joyce/1408797?ean=9780679722762 https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce/17762276?ean=9780142437346

4:00: Teaching allowed you to “open a door, step into that other world of people”
7:01: “It’s such a pleasure to read with other people”
10:38: On being a “puppet-like dummy”
14:06: “Not everyone is reading autofiction”
23:00: “I find myself going into a surreal world, because the lost person is still real to the deeper self”
25:21: Even in postmodernism, “there’s always that core of the lone beating heart”
31:03: “If I’m writing a novel, it stretches out to the horizon”
41:31: “If people came back from the dead, they would be the same people they were before”

Joyce Carol Oates

In the spring of 2001, Benjamin Hale’s six-year-old cousin went missing in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting one of the largest search-and-rescue missions in Arkansas history. Her miraculous discovery is a story in itself, but in a long Folio for the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hale also tells of the loss of another young girl in the same woods, decades prior, that seems eerily connected to his cousin’s. In conversation with Harper’s editor, Christopher Beha, Hale tackles questions of belief raised by a sequence of events so uncanny that they have prompted listeners—as well as those intimately involved—to search for other explanations.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“Who Walks Always Beside You?” Benjamin Hale’s essay in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/who-walks-always-beside-you/
“The Last Distinction?” Benjamin Hale’s piece from August 2012 about monkeys: https://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/the-last-distinction-talking-to-the-animals/

2:10: “I try to give the nutshell version and end up giving a story for an hour”
10:50: Having to live in order to save another
13:51: “My militant atheism was more informed by Carl Sagan” than Richard Dawkins
17:00: There are certain things I don’t understand, I will never understand, and I’m okay with that.”
20:54: The ethos of Arkansas
25:16: “Go to the water, go to the river”
30:42: On the 5,000 words that didn’t make the cut

The Lost Child

Stephen Sondheim may have brought the cryptic crossword to America, but Richard E. Maltby Jr. brought it to Harper’s Magazine. The lyricist, director, and cryptic creator sat down with Harper’s and one of his checkers, Roddy Howland Jackson, to talk about the history of the puzzle, the declining use of dictionaries, and the rise in word puzzle fascination. After all, “What holds the country together is the diversity of different nerd populations.”

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s puzzles in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/sections/puzzle/
A link to uploads of Stephen Sondheim’s Crossword Puzzles: http://blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/putting-it-together.html
Christopher Tayler on T.S. Eliot’s legacy: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/t-s-eliot-legacy-an-hallucinated-man-the-wasteland/
Ryan Ruby on Nabokov: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/

4:01: Stephen Sondheim’s cryptic crossword legacy
7:51: The musicality of the cryptic
14:14: “If you’re going to do something that is tricky, you have to be fair.”
17:44: There’s no such thing as the English language.”
26:26: On getting stumped by your own puzzle
33:56: Modernist poetry’s puzzles and contemporary poetry’s…plain prose
38:09: Clues are “designed to be read wrong.”
39:56: Nabokov’s crossword legacy
47:06: The dictionary as Bildungsroman
55:26: Wordle! Spelling Bee! “As the language gets more and more debased, people seem to be more interested in language.”
1:02:41: A cryptic proposal

Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s Cryptics

In his September cover story for Harper’s, Justin E. H. Smith sets out to define Generation X, that nameless cohort wedged between boomers and millennials whose members, in midlife, now face “an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us.” Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious.

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“My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/
“Permanent Pandemic” Justin E. H. Smith’s piece from June 2022 about the endurance and overextension of COVID-19 digital infrastructure: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/permanent-pandemic-will-covid-controls-keep-controlling-us/

2:24: “my ideal audience is Harper’s readers”
3:22: the relationship between art and politics
19:07: “as a teenager in the 1980s, there was a widespread sense that our era was kind of a weak aftershock of what our parents had experienced.”
27:04: “I think one way to think about this generation is a generation that came of age intellectually and emotionally and perhaps politically before the September 11 attacks.”
37:06: “If we think that the state of emergency requires of us that we stop thinking about art as an autonomous sphere of creation … once you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

Generation X

Reviewing Zadie Smith’s The Fraud for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Kirsch takes stock of Generation X as a literary phenomenon. He finds “Gen X lit” to be composed of two distinct waves, between which Smith is caught. The younger wave, including writers Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, and Tao Lin, has formed its ideas about art, culture, and society partly in opposition to predecessors like David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Dave Eggers—who claimed a great moral power for art—and partly in response to the younger millennials, who question whether art has any value at all. Kirsch is joined in this episode by Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss how Smith’s historical fiction operates within this literary lineage, why autofiction came to succeed the confessional memoirs of the Nineties, and what the novel form can do for us.

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“Come as You Are” Adam Kirsch’s review in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/come-as-you-are-kirsch/
“My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/

6:01: “Instead of rushing up to the reader and giving them a bear hug and saying, ‘This is who I am, please love me,’ which I think is a sense that I often get from David Foster Wallace, these younger writers are a lot more complex and ironic and elusive.”
8:46: “Autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide.”
14:21: “Smith is writing about things that have come up in her fiction since the beginning—things like: Is it my job to be politically virtuous as a writer? Or am I supposed to be telling some other kind of truth? Is there some sort of artistic mission that is somehow removed from political virtue?”
18:44: “If you step back and make it an alternative reality—in this case, something in the past—you can make more of an effort to see all the way around the subject. And that’s something that Smith does very well in The Fraud.”
31:06: “So much of it is about this sort of solidness and resistance to getting involved in things … As we get older and assume different roles in life, something of that remains, the desire to be a sort of Bartleby and say no rather than yes—maybe that’s what Gen X will be remembered for.”

The Gen X Novel

Isolated for years by strict censorship laws, community infighting, and language barriers, the writer Amir Ahmadi Arian often turned to Hamed Esmaeilion’s work for solace. In addition to authoring short stories and two novels, Esmaeilion chronicled mundane moments with his family on a blog that resonated deeply with Arian, someone of the same generation also working and living in the Iranian diaspora. Following the tragic death of Esmaeilion’s wife and daughter in the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, Arian witnessed his friend publicly mourn his family and transform his fury into action. Arian sat down with Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, to discuss Esmaeilion’s journey into activism and the responsibility of Iranian diasporic artists.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save 
“Waiting for the Lights,” Amir Ahmadi Arian’s report in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/waiting-for-the-lights/
Arian’s English-language debut novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him  
Esmaeilion on his memoir, It Snows in This House: https://bookshop.org/p/books/then-the-fish-swallowed-him-amir-ahmadi-arian/8025040 
Canada’s response to the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 tragedy: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/flight-vol-ps752.aspx?lang=eng

7:24: “Before thinking about how to develop your characters, or how you structure the story, or the themes you want to focus on, the first thing you had to consider was: Will the book I am writing survive the censorship office” 
9:01: “I think it’s kind of a miracle we still have a literary culture, given the circumstances.” 
13:00: “The whole process is made to intimidate you, to show you that they know more about you than you would think and actually use it against you.” 
13:29: “He was being interrogated when his father-in-law passed away.” 
26:52: “So you go through all this difficulty, all this trouble, to just have an ordinary life.” 
28:31: “It’s not so much a decision that he made to pursue justice, it’s just an inevitable turn of events. There’s nothing else left to do.” 
33:12: “There was this hunger for any figure outside of Iran that could bring people together.”
37:52: “All walks of life, all stripes, they were there, they were together shouting the same thing.” 
40:05: “The thing about the government in Iran is they have mastered the art, if you can call it the art, of containing any kind of revolutionary mass protest.” 
44:43: “The way out of Iran has been pretty much a one-way road.” 
47:17: “I have the freedom to tell what I want to tell, to tell the stories that I think are untold and unknown, while carrying the life that I had in my chest.”

Hamed Esmaeilion

Today we’re rerunning an episode from 2018 featuring two interviews with Harper’s Magazine’s former New Books columnist, Lidija Haas, and with our current Easy Chair columnist Rachel Kushner. Listen in advance of our event tonight at the Center for Fiction, “What Happened to Gen X?,” which will see Harper’s editor Christopher Beha in conversation with his generational peers Rachel Kushner and Ethan Hawke as they explore the question at the center of our September issue.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, the event illustrated how we are socialized to perform and understand gender, race, and class. In this episode, New Books columnist Lidija Haas joined Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss a handful of recent publications that deal with these issues: Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, and Kristen M. Ghoddsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. In the second segment, Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and Telex From Cuba joined Lucca to discuss an essay she wrote that was included in the October 2018 issue’s Readings section, pulled from her memories of the late Nineties New York art world.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“Learning to Wait,” Rachel Kushner’s latest column for the October issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/learning-to-wait/
Rachel Kushner’s latest book, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Hard-Crowd/Rachel-Kushner/9781982157708
Lidija Haas in the Harper’s archive: https://harpers.org/author/lidijahaas/
Lidija Haas’s review of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad for Bookforum: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2503/rebecca-traister-s-case-for-feminist-rage-20155
“Red Letter Days,” Rachel Kushner’s 2018 essay on the late Nineties New York art world: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/red-letter-days/
“What Happened to Gen X?”, our event tonight at the Center for Fiction: https://centerforfiction.org/event/the-center-for-fiction-and-harpers-magazine-present-what-happened-to-gen-x/

From the Audio Archive: Rachel Kushner

With Trump as the forerunning Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party appears to be falling back on the same familiar logic: better than the alternative. But certain progressive candidates are still looking to disrupt the status quo, however unlikely support from the establishment left may be. In this week’s episode, Harper’s Magazine’s Washington editor, Andrew Cockburn, joins senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to survey the landscape of the 2024 election with a focus on three insurgent candidates: Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West. 

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save 

Andrew Cockburn’s article “Against the Current”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/against-the-current
 
3:03: “Popping up on the picket line is actually a very hard turn for him as a president.” 
4:08: “It’s Trump all over, fake populism as usual.” 
5:40: “It’s only when the DNC decided to throw its full weight behind him … then Biden was popular for a while.”
7:42: “He’s really not that old.” 
12:10: “I can’t think of any example where a president nominates a strong alternative. Instinctively no leader wants to be encouraging a potential rival.”
14:39: “You don’t get anywhere by promising to make people’s lives better. The only thing you can do is convince people the alternative is worse, which is an infinitely depressing point of view.” 
17:30: “Obviously the candidate who has gotten the most attention has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he has evoked a hysterical response.” 
19:14: “Marianne Williamson, who has gotten much less attention, has detailed proposals on everything.” 
19:53: “Cornel West has the most straightforwardly progressive agenda.” 
26:58: “She said the Republicans were like the dog who caught the car, and it was a car full of angry women.” 
28:44: “When people are asked why they don’t support Biden, they always cite the economy. The economy seems to be doing well, and yet, people are hurting.” 
31:38: “It’s getting late now for any kind of insurgency.” 
39:40: “The other fear is that people who would never vote for Trump can’t be bothered to vote for Biden or stay home.”

Party Fouls

Inspired by the pulp collectors Gary Lovisi and Lucille Cali, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Joe Kloc embarked on a freewheeling search for a magazine lost to time: the inaugural issue of Golden Fleece Historical Adventure. In this week’s episode, Kloc joins Violet Lucca to discuss his adventures exploring the world of pulp magazines, the act of collecting, and Lost at Sea, a book based on a previous feature Kloc wrote for Harper’s, slated for release in 2025. 


Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“The Golden Fleece”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/the-golden-fleece-kloc/
“Empathy, My Dear Sherlock”: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/empathy-my-dear-watson-netflix/
“Lost at Sea”: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/lost-at-sea-richardson-bay/

3:55 “What appealed to me about Gary and pulp collecting in general is, this is really for the love of the game.”
4:06 “I was interested in the idea that people would be so passionate about those objects when it didn’t have that same monetary incentive.” 
16:20 “Pulps technically mean only the magazines, not the paperbacks.” 
19:00 “These pulp writers became those comic book writers. Those comic books become comic book movies, and these comic book movies are constantly competing for your attention.” 
25:52 “It gives you a feeling of being a child and remembering a time when all was before you and anything could happen.” 
27:28 “These objects carry a deeper meaning, even if they’ve been destroyed or lost.” 
37:18 “It’s hard to describe the power of Sherlock Holmes in the pulp collecting world.” 
41:02 “I’m not going to let go of my imagination. It always has been fun to think like this and it always will be fun to think like this.” 
44:40 “It’s a form of vernacular creativity.”

Pulp Fiction

Each year, the City of David, the archaeological site believed to be the ancient core of Jerusalem, attracts some six hundred thousand tourists, who come to see the place where King David may have ruled in the 10th century BC. The problem is that, as Harper’s Magazine senior editor Rachel Poser explains in our September issue, the City of David is no scientific operation. Elad, the organization that manages it, is in fact “a right­wing settler group that employs archaeology as part of a long-term effort to strengthen Israeli control over Jerusalem,” and the City of David is only one of many such projects that, taken together, constitute a threat to the legitimacy of archaeological research throughout the region. Poser, who once trained as an archaeologist herself, charts the uneasy history of archaeology as a “national vocation” in Israel, from the country’s founding to the current use of excavations as both justification and method for evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.

In this episode, Poser speaks with Israeli archaeologist Rafi Greenberg—a vocal critic of Elad, a professor at Tel Aviv University, a cofounder of the nonprofit Emek Shaveh, and a subject in the article—about his political disillusionment, the possibilities and limitations of the archaeological record, and an experiment in decolonized excavation.

Read Poser’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/09/common-ground-archeology-israel-palestine/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins

Common Ground

Since 1850, Harper’s Magazine has provided its readers with a unique perspective on the issues that drive our national conversation, featuring writing from some of the most promising to most distinguished names in literature—from Barbara Ehrenreich to Rachel Kushner. Every week, host Violet Lucca joins her colleagues and contributing writers to provide listeners with a deep dive into these topics and the craft of long-form narrative journalism.

Popular tracks by Harper’s Magazine