Harper's Magazine

HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.

Harper’s Magazine

Schoolhouse Rot

Liberal Totalitarianism

HOLY UNIMPORTANT • By Geoff Dyer, from his introduction to a new edition of Lives of the Saints, a novel by Nancy Lemann, which will be published in April by New York Review Books.

RICH PAP, POOR PAP • From the encrypted diaries of William Thomas Prestwood, a man who lived in Appalachia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of the decryptions are collected in Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Diaries, by Jeremy B. Jones, which was published in September by Blair.

SPIRIT GUIDE • From a handbook distributed by the International Association of Exorcists, a group of more than two hundred Catholic priests that trains exorcists and raises awareness about demonic possession.

PORTRAITS OF A LADY • From a series of interviews conducted by Sylvère Lotringer with the principals of the Bloomsbury Group in 1961, collected in On Virginia Woolf, which was published in July by Semiotext(e). In separate conversations, the respondents replied to versions of Lotringer’s prompt to recall an instance of Woolf.

JUNG AND THE RESTLESS • By Carl Jung, from an interview with Aniela Jaffé that appears in Jung’s Life and Work: Interviews for “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” which will be published this month by Princeton University Press.

FACTS AND FIGURES • By Ismail Ibrahim, from “House Arab,” which was published in September in Bidoun.

WHEN THE GEOGRAPHY WAS NEW • By Jacqueline Waters, from The Fry, which will be published in April by Winter Editions.

KICKING ROBOTS • Humanoids and the tech-industry hype machine

WORK STOPPAGE

THE TUNE OF THINGS • Is consciousness God?

GRIEVOUS COUNTRY

GROWING PAINS • Day care’s affordability crisis

YOU MIGHT LIVE LONGER THAN YOU THINK

NEW BOOKS

RAW MATERIAL • Chris Kraus’s frank confessions

SOLUTION TO THE NOVEMBER PUZZLE

A HOLLYWOOD CHRISTMAS CAROL

FINDINGS

HARPER’S MAGAZINE • THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, SHOW YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY JUST HOW MUCH YOU LOVE THEM.