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March 2025

[Letter from Washington]

Rage Against the Machine

Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy

by ,
[Letter from Greece]

The Ballad of Little Maria

What really happened to a stranded five-year-old refugee?

by ,
[Miscellany]

New World Symphonies

Listening for the future of music

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of children in Gaza who said last year that they “wanted to die” : 49

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who believed they would soon die : 96

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Ukrainians who said in 2022 that their country should keep fighting until it defeats Russia : 73

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage who now favor negotiations to end the war as soon as possible : 52

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage by which the opening of a Walmart Supercenter causes nearby household incomes to decrease : 6

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase over the past year in bankruptcy filings by U.S. retail stores : 104

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated ratio of manufacturing robots to human factory workers in the United States : 1:33

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In South Korea : 1:10

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2000 in cases of adult diabetes in the United States : 111

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In China : 524

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who have experienced chronic pain : 3/5

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which black Americans are more likely than white Americans to suffer from psychosis or schizophrenia : 2

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated percentage of Americans who are incarcerated, on parole, or on probation who have had a traumatic brain injury : 45

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of legally owned gun silencers in the United States in 2011 : 285,000

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In 2024 : 5,000,000

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Number of states that require annual active-shooter trainings for public elementary schools : 34

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

For police departments

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease since 2019 in the number of school-bus drivers in the United States : 12

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of schools that reported having “major difficulties” transporting students in 2024 : 9/10

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an applicant to a 4-year U.S. college will hire an independent admissions consultant this year : 1 in 3

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of non-white Americans who say that U.S. colleges do a very good or excellent job of educating students : 56

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Of white Americans who say so : 31

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase in book sales in the United States over the past year : 1

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In Bible sales : 22

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of square miles of new drylands formed in the past three decades : 2,700,000

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which this exceeds the size of Texas : 10

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. solar-power capacity growth last year accounted for by Texas : 31

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Texas’s new solar-power capacity exceeded California’s last year : 358

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which annual deaths from exposure to cold weather have increased in the United States since 2000 : 3

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Projected factor by which the population of homeless people over the age of 65 in U.S. cities will increase by 2030 : 3

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2010 in divorces among Americans aged 65 and older : 60

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In cases of gonorrhea among that cohort : 592

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase since 2021 in ADHD diagnoses among that cohort : 67

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American believes they have undiagnosed ADHD : 1 in 4

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that they do have ADHD : 1 in 17

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say that keeping their house clean is harder than working a full-time job : 1/4

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of events at nightclubs in New York City that went past 3 am in 2014 : 70

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

That do so today : 53

March 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Average amount of time, in nanoseconds, by which each day on Earth is longer than the last : 47

March 2025

Readings

[Essay]

Something Amis
by ,
[Dictation]

Dream State
[Appraisal]

Johannes’s Veneer
by ,
[Quandaries]

Early Modern Love
[Poem]

Not Against the Rules
by ,
[Vignette]

The Simple Life
by ,
[Fiction]

Is This Real?
by ,
[Poem]

Gaza … Gaza
by ,
The Missing Link 4, a painting by Noah Davis, whose work is on view this month at the Barbican, in London. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy the Estate of Noah Davis, David Zwirner, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds from Art Here and Now: Studio Forum 2013
A photograph by Gregory Halpern from his book King, Queen, Knave, which was published last year by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK
Blues Ship (makes me wanna holla), a mixed-media artwork by Todd Gray, whose work is on view this month at Lehmann Maupin, in New York City. © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin
A collage by Laia Abril from her project On Mass Hysteria, which is on view this month at Le Bal, in Paris. Her monograph of the same title was published last year by Dewi Lewis. This artwork was inspired by an outbreak of a mysterious illness in 2006 that afflicted hundreds of girls at a boarding school in Chalco, Mexico. The illness, which was described by Mexican public-health authorities as a mass psychogenic disorder, was believed to have been an unconscious protest against conditions at the school. Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis
[Letters]

Don’t Stop the Muzak
[Easy Chair]

The Mask of Imperialism
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Letter from Washington]

Rage Against the Machine

Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy

by ,
[From the Archive]

The Bureaucratic Sublime
by ,
[Letter from Greece]

The Ballad of Little Maria

What really happened to a stranded five-year-old refugee?

by ,
[Photo Essay]

Range Life

A heated history of public lands

by , ,
[Miscellany]

New World Symphonies

Listening for the future of music

by ,
[Story]

Why Trees
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

An Unstoppable March

The story of 2 Tone

by ,
[Puzzle]

Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)

See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[Findings]

A skull previously thought to belong to Cleopatra’s sister was found to be that of an Italian boy with a deformed jaw.

[Findings]

Fifty-two experts were consulted to produce a six-criteria test for predicting vasectomy regret.

[Findings]

French archaeologists discovered a Gaulish curse tablet tucked between a skeleton’s legs.

[Findings]

A Viking grave in Norway appeared to contain a vulva stone.

[Findings]

Chinese scientists successfully raised to adulthood, then dissected, mice born of two fathers.

[Findings]

Rabbits are capable of digesting their teeth as they wear down and reusing the calcium to grow new ones.

[Findings]

It is possible that songbirds who migrate at night socialize with one another in flight and speak to other species.

[Findings]

A survey of 1,328 urinary events found that, unlike contagious yawning, the contagious urination of chimpanzees appears to be correlated to social rank rather than social closeness.

[Findings]

Coyotes in dense areas of Chicago die younger if the average human income is high.

[Findings]

Physicists detected negative time.

[Findings]

Excessive tearfulness in the right eye of a fifty-five-year-old Japanese woman was traced to a supernumerary punctum.

[Findings]

Six dead dolphins who washed up in Texas were found to have fentanyl in their blubber.

[Findings]

Archaeologists speculated that, in the largest known Bronze Age massacre in Britain, attackers killed, butchered, and ate men, women, and children as a political statement.

[Findings]

Scientists urged the abandonment of attempts to create mirror life, against which existing life-forms may possess no defenses.

[Findings]

Monkeys are faster at spotting a snake among salamanders than a salamander among snakes.

[Findings]

Medication may treat those who suffer from disorders that make them smooth-brained.

[Findings]

Brain scans corroborated the unpleasant psychoacoustic effects of Aztec death whistles.

[Findings]

Assamese tribesmen were found to identify with elephants through a sense of mutual loss, poverty, and uncertainty.

[Findings]

Scientists suggested that human culture is superior to that of other animals because it can integrate limitless sequences of subgoals.

[Findings]

In Europe, conservatives are outbreeding progressives.

[Findings]

Researchers noted the positive effects of ecstatic epilepsy and synthesized fifty-three theoretical models of delusion.

[Findings]

Witnessing cringeworthy moments improves the observer’s self-perception.

[Findings]

In Japan, erectile function among young men was determined to be low by the first nationwide survey employing the internationally validated Erection Hardness Score.

[Findings]

Pentoxifylline can mitigate the damage caused by subjecting stallions to scrotal heat stress.

[Findings]

Bay Area researchers debuted a Narcissism Interview Scale for Employment.

[Findings]

More than half of U.S. civilians tasked with evaluating a bombing target endorsed killing unidentified bystanders.

[Findings]

Solitary chicks emit fewer anxious peeps if given a mirror for company.

[Findings]

Marine biologists described the Red Sea’s grumpy dwarfgoby.

[Findings]

Bottlenose dolphins, who were found to inhale and exhale microplastics, respond to a smile with a smile one third of the time.

[Findings]

Archaeologists identified the skeleton recovered from the Sverresborg Castle’s well in 1938 as the man described in the Sverris Saga as having been thrown into the well in 1197.

[Findings]

A primatologist, a mammalogist, and a linguist concluded that the jerky, rhythmic dance of sexually mature female black crested gibbons is innate rather than culturally transmitted.

[Findings]

Parmesan researchers found that “benevolently sexist” adults are less likely to own “clit-oriented” sex toys.

[Findings]

Germans under thirty experience more climate distress and have more rough sex.

[Findings]

Mars gained and then lost a second moon in the autumn.

[Findings]

Scientists determined why some aging gray horses turn white faster than others.

[Findings]

The stranger churches of sixteenth-century London extensively spied on their congregants, noting when women accused other women of being “pocked whores.”

[Findings]

Evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Proto­-Indo­-European language was spread by humans on horseback may have overlooked how humans who ride cows, donkeys, and wild asses exhibit the same hip­ -socket deformations, as previously observed in twentieth­-century nuns.

[Findings]

Scientists allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a soft five-limbed robot and a four-wheel vehicle.

[Findings]

Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills.

[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.

Illustration by Timo Lenzen Microfiche

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