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July 2021

[Essay]

History As End

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past

by ,
[Letter from Alabama]

Hard Bargain

How Amazon turned a generation against labor

by ,
[Essay]

A Complicating Energy

Notes on a year without strangers

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase last year in UFO sightings nationwide : 16

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Maximum percentage by which satellite traffic has been observed to brighten the night sky : 10

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of states in which a majority of residents support daylight saving time

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of complaints the BBC received for excessive coverage of Prince Philip’s death : 110,000

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of that coverage among the most complained-about programming in BBC history : 1

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of regular videoconference attendees who report experiencing Zoom fatigue : 53

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of women with Zoom fatigue who ascribe it partly to an increased focus on their own image : 57

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of men with Zoom fatigue who do so : 35

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of emoji users who wish they had more options to reflect their personal appearance and identity : 3/5

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Who think emojis are an important tool for creating “unity, respect, and understanding” : 3/4

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 1953 in the frequency with which the Supreme Court rules in favor of religious rights : +76

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of judges who have ruled in federal cases to allow religious gatherings despite COVID-19 restrictions : 38

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of Republican-appointed judges who have done so : 66

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Of Democratic-appointed judges

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of adults with seasonal allergies who experience fewer symptoms if they regularly wear a surgical mask : 36

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of face masks that entered the ocean last year : 1,560,000,000

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the amount of energy polar bears must expend to survive has increased because of the loss of arctic ice : 4

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Wisconsin’s wolf population that was killed during a sixty-hour hunting period this year : 1/5

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of the earth’s land on which humans have not caused species loss : 3

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of trees lost each year as a result of the consumption habits of the average person in China : 0.5

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

In the United States : 5

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

In Sweden : 22

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of commercial air travel emissions caused by the most frequent 1 percent of fliers : 1/2

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Average portion of the global population that does not fly in a given year : 9/10

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who believe that climate change is causing home values in their area to decline : 21

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of homes for sale in the United States this spring : 1,070,000

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of real estate agents in the United States this spring : 1,463,806

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of professors at top-ranked universities whose parents earned PhDs : 30

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated factor by which a professor is more likely than a member of the general public to have a parent with a PhD : 25

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which liberals are more likely than conservatives to participate in medical research : 16

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage by which the UberX service has increased binge drinking among Americans aged 21 to 34 : 10

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum portion of the U.S. rental-car fleet that has been sold off during the pandemic : 1/4

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of federal tax revenue accounted for by corporate taxes in 1969 : 22

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

In 2019 : 8

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Number of Fortune 500 companies that paid no federal taxes last year : 40

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of earnings that the top 1 percent of U.S. earners do not disclose to the IRS : 21

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Amount of lost revenue this represents each year : $175,000,000

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who think life is fair : 1/3

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of conversations that end when both parties want them to : 2

July 2021
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which the length of the average conversation differs from the desired length : 50

July 2021

Readings

[Essay]

Breaking Points
by ,
[Poem]

Psalm Under Siege
by ,
[Clarification]

Song of Despair
by ,
[Adaptation]

Compose Yourself
by , ,
[Theory]

Verde Requiem
by ,
[Exit Interview]

Dank U, Next
by ,
[Complaint]

The Sound of Vibrance
Translated by ,
[Reports]

Chow Hounds
by ,
[Fiction]

The Permitted Prohibited
by ,Translated by ,
[Chat]

Working Blue
“Ali and Frisbee, 1995,” a photograph by Vinca Petersen, from her monograph No System, which was reissued last year. Petersen’s work is on view this month at Edel Assanti, in London, and at the V&A Dundee, in Scotland.
© The artist
“Mom Dances with a Dollar on Her Forehead, NY, 1976,” a photograph by Meryl Meisler, whose work is on view this month at the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery, in Syracuse, New York.
© The artist. Courtesy Light Work, Syracuse, New York
Frog, a painting by Michael Cline, whose work was on view in March at Nino Mier Gallery, in Los Angeles.
© The artist. Courtesy Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles
Unforeseen Journey of Self Discovery, embroidered fabric by Kimathi Mafafo, whose work will be on view in October at Kristin Hjellegjerde, in London.
© The artist. Courtesy Kristin Hjellegjerde, London
[Letters]

Letters
by ,
[Easy Chair]

Attention
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Essay]

History As End

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past

by ,
[From the Archive]

Radical Nostalgia
by ,
[Letter from Alabama]

Hard Bargain

How Amazon turned a generation against labor

by ,
[Poetry]

Reasons for Staying
by ,
[Essay]

A Complicating Energy

Notes on a year without strangers

by ,
[Letter from Belfast]

Getting On With It

Art as civic repair

by ,
[Story]

Greensleeves
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

The Man Who Loved Presidents

On Jon Meacham

by ,
[Puzzle]

Crazy Quilt
by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[Findings]

EEG experts disagreed on whether, in the future, brain waves could be used to read dreams and long-­term memories.

[Findings]

Turkish doctors reported a case of penile autoamputation with religious delusion.

[Findings]

AI researchers determined that large language models pose no existential threat to humanity and created an AI algorithm that can detect scientific articles written by other AI algorithms.

[Findings]

Mammoths may have been killed with planted pikes rather than with thrown spears.

[Findings]

The birth of a white buffalo fulfilled a Lakota prophecy portending better times.

[Findings]

Wildfires near Canadian mines were found to have released unprecedented levels of arsenic, and wildfires in Maui were making residents unhappy.

[Findings]

Living near oil and gas development sites depresses people who are trying to get pregnant.

[Findings]

The Journal of Pediatric Genetics retracted a study on Islamic beliefs concerning the possible supernatural causes of birth defects on the grounds that the research lacked a scientific basis.

[Findings]

A researcher noticed that a Tartessian slate tablet depicting battle scenes also contains a previously unknown alphabet.

[Findings]

The royal swan marker reported that the depression of the Thames population, previously noted during the late queen’s reign, continues under the king.

[Findings]

Researchers claimed that researchers have been underreporting same-­sex sexual activity among animals.

[Findings]

Cocaine trafficking was found to threaten the golden­-cheeked warbler.

[Findings]

A survey of 7 million parliamentary speeches across eight countries and several decades found that politicians use less complex language as it gets hotter.

[Findings]

The diet of Japanese youth is growing more confectionary, and Americans are poisoning themselves more severely.

[Findings]

Unaffiliated voters are growing more spiteful toward both Democrats and Republicans.

[Findings]

Researchers debuted an 88 percent accurate hate­-speech detector and a superior sarcasm detector and may be able to send messages back in time.

[Findings]

Increased border­-wall height was tentatively linked to a thirtyfold increase in the rate of migrant drowning deaths off San Diego.

[Findings]

Women bond more closely with therapy bulls than men do.

[Findings]

The perceived onset of old age increases by approximately one year for every four to five years a person ages.

[Findings]

A study of brain­-injured but not brain­-dead patients found that many would have survived had their families not chosen to withdraw life support.

[Findings]

Sets of both fraternal and identical twins exhibit internally similar metacognitive abilities, suggesting that metacognition is environmental rather than heritable.

[Findings]

Southern California beach erosion is expected to increase by 50 percent by 2050.

[Findings]

Archaeologists translated cuneiform tablets recording shareholder agreements for the first company in Anatolia.

[Findings]

The melting of the poles is making Earth’s days longer.

[Findings]

The hatching season of a male spear squid (Heterololigo bleekeri) determines whether he will pursue bold or sneaky mating tactics.

[Findings]

A bionic eye deciphered a scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that reveals the burial place of Plato, who was found to have complained about the musical abilities of the enslaved Thracian girl who played the flute for him as he lay dying.

[Findings]

Humans are losing their ability to digest cellulose.

[Findings]

Toxicity has remained a consistent feature of online interactions since 1989.

[Findings]

Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas.

[Findings]

A metal scar on the surface of the white dwarf WD 0816-310 indicated that it has cannibalized other bodies in its orbit.

[Findings]

An orca acting alone killed a great white shark and ate its liver.

[Findings]

Genomic analysis indicated that psychedelic mushrooms emerged around the time of the Mesozoic–Cenozoic mass extinction.

[Findings]

The playing speed of a metal guitarist directly correlates with his intrasexual competitiveness but not his mating success.

[Findings]

Depression in humans is correlated with higher body temperature, and cold-water swimming mitigates menopause symptoms.

[Findings]

Researchers warned that, as temperatures rise, humans should prepare for more diarrhea.

[Findings]

A mother is 4.6 percent more likely to give birth in the same month she was born, and adjacent siblings are 12.1 percent more likely to be born in the same month as one another.

[Findings]

Electric eel discharge transforms the DNA of zebrafish larvae.

[Findings]

An AI that was fed the employment and health data of six million Danes turned out to be more accurate than existing sociological methods at predicting if a given person was about to die.

[Findings]

Onshore wind turbines severely deter German bats from foraging.

[Findings]

Astrophysicists argued that the development of advanced alien technology requires an atmosphere composed of at least 18 percent oxygen.

[Findings]

Off the Five Finger Islands, a team of cetologists aboard the Glacier Seal conducted an extended conversation with a female humpback named Twain.

[Findings]

True crabs independently evolved to live out of the ocean up to seventeen times.

[Findings]

The average American girl born in 2019 will take prescription drugs for more than half her life.

[Findings]

The U.S. municipal bond market penalizes communities in proportion to the percentage of their population that is black but generally ignores their vulnerability to climate change.

[Findings]

Somalis, surveyed as proxies for earlier inhabitants of the Cradle of Humankind, were found to fear spiders less than scorpions but snakes to the expected degree.

[Findings]

The collapse of the Qing Dynasty was driven by the quadrupling of its population and consequent rural impoverishment, an overabundance of qualified applicants for elite academic degrees, rising costs and trade deficits, and falling productivity, which were variously associated with internal unrest, opium imports, and the depletion of silver reserves.

[Findings]

Geoscientists were confident that, given access to the oldest barnacles on the flaperon of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, they could help pinpoint its crash site.

[Findings]

Scientists were not certain whether the globally synchronized waves observed in the brains of wakeful rats on ketamine or LSD were a cause or a symptom of hallucinations.

[Findings]

Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test for children with shorter attention spans.

[Findings]

The depression-prone are less attracted to the political right.

[Findings]

The nocturnal heart rate of young men can be predicted by their female partners’ daytime feelings of intimacy or annoyance.

[Findings]

Men who pose for photos with cats are seen as less datable.

[Findings]

Men can rate the facial attractiveness of women without paying attention, but women cannot do the same for men; gay men find the faces of purportedly fertile women and men more attractive; adolescents and adults both rate the faces of children younger than 4.6 years old as more appealing than those of older children; and body odors associated with fear quicken the visual processing of others’ facial expressions of fear.

[Findings]

Beak covering and nape-feather ruffling indicate calmness in sulfur-crested cockatoos.

[Findings]

Repetitive negative thinking was associated with an increased risk of dementia, and self-harm in female adolescents may prevent suicide.

[Findings]

Psychopaths recommend harsher punishments for homicides, whether accidental or motivated by profit, but exhibit relatively low concern about killing in general.

[Findings]

Online murder-for-hire advertisements seek to convey professionalism yet tend not to provide references up front.

[Findings]

Convalescent plasma helps Syrian hamsters fight SARS-CoV-2.

[Findings]

Plastic surgeons suggested that Botox could reduce the expression of negative emotions by masked faces.

[Findings]

The presence of a professional sports team increases a city’s seasonal flu deaths.

[Findings]

A psycholinguistic analysis of posts on Twitter and Weibo during COVID-19 lockdowns found that residents of Lombardy grew increasingly focused on leisure and residents of Wuhan grew increasingly focused on religion.

[Findings]

Recent toilet-­paper hoarding was more prevalent among Americans than Europeans and more prevalent among the old than the young.

[Findings]

Gerontologists cautioned that it would be difficult to predict individual Holocaust survivors’ trauma or resilience in response to the pandemic, which was expected to strengthen the market for laboratory mouse-suffocation chambers.

[Findings]

Researchers proposed replacing the paradigm of extinction with that of evanescence.

[Findings]

Climate change was expected to drive American lobsters to seek deeper waters, beavers to colonize new parts of Canada, and wolf spiders in the high Arctic to produce a second annual brood.

[Findings]

Humboldt penguins who nest in the open have more pollutant metabolites in their blood than do penguins who nest in guano-rich burrows.

[Findings]

The tiger snakes of Perth have heavy metals in their livers.

[Findings]

Satellite imagery captured ecosystem damage from fog loss, and aerial photography confirmed the existence of Roman military camps revealed by the 2018 Welsh drought.

[Findings]

A young woman in a Vilnius plague pit was found to have been coinfected with yaws.

[Findings]

A man buried at Newgrange passage tomb was found to be the product of first-degree incest, indicating that he was a member of the elite.

[Findings]

Scientists trained subjects to exercise control over a single neuron, linked the hippocampus to regret, and concluded that humans smell in stereo.

[Findings]

Straight Slovakians assume that a woman in high heels will inspire more intense mate-guarding.

[Findings]

Women who receive continuous rather than interrupted sutures for perineal repair after vaginal delivery report higher sexual levels of arousal and orgasmic function.

[Findings]

Pinkness predicts aggression in flamingos.

[Findings]

Chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts.

[Findings]

Rising population density, poor hygiene, and cold, moist weather led to a spike in ear infections in the Levant around 4000 bc, and postwar atmospheric nuclear testing led to increased cloud thickness and rainfall in the Shetland Islands.

[Findings]

A period of global coolness 4,200 years ago accelerated the diversification of japonica rice.

[Findings]

Ostrich-­shell beads indicating the onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 bc, and strontium isotope levels revealed the social exchange of ostrich-­shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the Karoo Supergroup.

[Findings]

Interviews with reptile poachers in southwestern Balochistan indicated that the Caspian cobra, the desert monitor, the Iranian mastigure, Maynard’s longnose sand snake, the Persian spider gecko, and the Tartar sand boa were being captured for use by snake charmers.

[Findings]

Herpetologists inventoried the scars of snakes found in the Danube Gorge.

[Findings]

Half of Algeria’s marine turtle strandings are inexplicable.

[Findings]

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-­­metal chelator.

[Findings]

The mating calls of male Panama cross-­banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

[Findings]

Arson dogs’ noses remain better than lab equipment at detecting certain accelerants.

[Findings]

CBD improves quality of life in arthritic elderly dogs.

[Findings]

Finnish scientists identified the genomic region associated with fearfulness in Great Danes.

[Findings]

The decreasing transpiration of plants, a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, was partly to blame for recent heat waves in northern latitudes.

[Findings]

Peatlands, which now store roughly as much carbon as Earth’s forests or its atmosphere, can hold more carbon if exposed to low-­intensity fires.

[Findings]

Inland waters are emitting previously unaccounted-for levels of carbon dioxide, and freshwater insects are flourishing even as terrestrial insects are dying off.

[Findings]

Ocean acidity can now be predicted five years ahead of time.

[Findings]

Green snow is spreading across Antarctica.

[Findings]

The deepest octopus observed to date was photographed in the Java Trench.

[Findings]

Terrestrial bacteria can grow on extraterrestrial nutrients; the black hole nearest Earth was discovered in the constellation Telescopium; and X-­ray experiments conducted at the European Synchrotron indicated that moisture is destroying The Scream.

[Findings]

A fungal parasite that afflicts the reproductive organs of millipedes was named in honor of Twitter.

[Findings]

In Maine, a loon stabbed a bald eagle through the heart.

[Findings]

Six new coronaviruses were discovered in bats.

[Findings]

Falling levels of tourist trash during pandemic lockdowns was found to have caused rat infighting, and macaques were reported to have attacked a lab assistant in Delhi and stolen vials of COVID-­19-­infected blood, which at least one monkey then tried to eat.

[Findings]

Vampire bats who are strangers will groom one another before sharing blood via regurgitation.

[Findings]

Skin swabs are three times as accurate as fecal samples at predicting a person’s age.

[Findings]

Young burglars are driven first by thrills, then by skills.

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