Harper’s Magazine

In our November issue: a Harper’s Forum on media’s crisis of trust, Rowan Jacobsen on a good night’s sleep, Daniel Kolitz on porn’s new frontier, Joy Williams on Gene Hackman’s last days, Nick Pinkerton on Abel Ferrara and a new story by David Wingrave. harpers.org/archive/2025...

From the September Harper’s Index. buff.ly/Q06fGEm

“Ten billion snow crabs have disappeared from the Bering Sea. Oceans have never been this hot in recorded history. The one torture method G proposed that I shut down immediately was cold-water immersion. Researchers say the ocean is suffocating.” —@alienvsrobbins.bsky.social buff.ly/AL2A8j0

“When we met for the first time a couple weeks later, she pissed on my socks and beat me until I bruised with the copy of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior I’d brought her, stupidly thinking she was soliciting a gift when she told me to bring a book I loved.”

From the November Harper’s Index. buff.ly/Hen1y6H

“What happens when—whether through fatigue, indifference, or inability—the transmission of reading culture as we’ve known it comes to an end?” Christopher Carroll on American reading habits. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“The war against journalism education has been long and relentless. Though the idiom of abuse has changed, the critics are as hostile as ever, while their targets react only with curious torpor.” David Boroff in “What Ails the Journalism Schools,” from 1965. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“If you look at the decline of trust in American institutions, it is overwhelmingly connected to the dynamics of local relationships.” @jelaniya.bsky.social in the Harper’s Forum on establishment media’s crisis of trust.

“I’ve come for a monthlong intervention. No light after dark. I picked this place online because of the location and the stargazing, and because it was the closest I could get to the Great Rift Valley on a budget.” —Rowan Jacobsen

“The odds of recovering from chemical dependencies as crippling as Ferrara’s are infinitesimal; the odds of getting a steady stream of projects off the ground for almost fifty years as an independent filmmaker are not much better.” —Nick Pinkerton

“After a short lull following the end of the Atlantic slave trade, Afriacn imports of powder from Britain took off: more than 4 million pounds in 1865, nearly twice the record annual amount during the external slave trade.” —Clifton Crais

“As a visitor, I felt a temptation to fixate on this romance of twentieth-century stasis. But there had been diplomatic successes. The border was porous now. There were crossing points; Leonie and I had done it ourselves several times.” —David Wingrave buff.ly/2oTF0Fh

“Because of my bodily experience, I’ve become attuned to subtle social cues of possible violence: a look in the eyes, a tightening of the jaw, a way of moving or of speaking that precedes rage or cold, deliberate cruelty.” —Mary Gaitskill

“Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends.”—@danielkolitz.bsky.social