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.
The Tragedies of Zionism As a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, I read Bernard Avishai’s cover story [“Israel’s War Within,” Report, February] with surprise that I was encountering it at all in these pages, along with my usual despair-producing fury at the self-delusion of liberal Western Zionism. In it, Avishai posits a self-comforting idea: that from its establishment in 1948 (and even as late as his time there in the Sixties and Seventies), Israel was a land of enlightened secular democracy dedicated to equality and justice, and that only now is it in a struggle to survive a fundamentalist, anti-democratic, ultra-Zionist turn. But this argument—to the extent that it isn’t rendered beyond trivial by the annihilation of Gaza and the West’s collaboration in that crime—is ludicrous and unsupported by history.…
On the Friday night before New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend and I were in line for the toilets at the techno club Berghain, in Berlin, discussing Buddhism. I’m usually skeptical of Thom’s interest in world religion, but that evening I was open to the world. As Thom was talking, I noticed that the guy in front of us was texting, the angle of his neck more than perpendicular. I empathized with the posture. I can get into a messianic mood at clubs and often feel I need to help liberate my fellow ravers from the absent parties in their phones. “Do you meditate?” I asked him. Conversations attempted in line for the Berghain toilets have a success rate of about 25 percent, some of which must be attributed to one…
By Adam Phillips, from Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, a book co-written with Stephen Greenblatt, which will be published next month by Yale University Press. The idea of the second chance is one of our more familiar self-cures for a certain kind of despair: the despair that comes from seeing ourselves as saboteurs of opportunity, as fundamentally self-destructive, distracted creatures whose hate is far stronger and stranger and more pleasurable than our love. In thinking about second chances, at least to begin with, it may be worth wondering what a life would be like in which there were no such thing, a life in which every act was irredeemable (in which apology would be nonsensical), every transgression unforgiven and unforgivable (in which mercy would be unrealistic), every mistake uncorrectable (in…
From a video statement posted in January by Eli Regalado, the pastor of an online-only Christian church based in Denver. Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, were charged with fraud by the Colorado Division of Securities for selling INDXcoin, a cryptocurrency described by one auditor as “unsafe, unsecure and riddled with serious technical problems.” Hello INDXcoin family. Let me come out first and foremost by saying that Kaitlyn and I are being charged with selling millions of dollars of cryptocurrency deemed worthless by the state. We’re charged with pocketing $1.3 million, and I just want to say that those charges are true. Half a million dollars went to the IRS, and a few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do. How this…
From an interview with the poet Alice Notley conducted by Janique Vigier that was scheduled to appear on the Artforum website in December. Vigier pulled the piece from publication in protest of that magazine’s dismissal of its editor, David Velasco, following the magazine’s publication of a pro-Palestinian open letter. When I was a kid, TV came from Phoenix or Las Vegas, and it was always going in and out. I liked having a gritty screen you couldn’t see very well. I liked not being able to see the story. I can’t stand the big clear image. Growing up in Needles, California, I knew I was the only person in town who had my own thought process. I had to take care of it, because it was probably precious. And I…
From Telegram messages sent in January by Muhammad Sultan, who lives in Gaza, to his sister Enas Sultan, who lives in Norway. Translated from the Arabic by Dalia Taha. Enas, this is Muhammad. All of us are fine. Please answer quickly. Only Telegram doesn’t need to be updated, which allows me to text you. The internet is totally dead. We have lived through very hard days. We have sheltered in every place you can imagine. Thank God we are alive. But we have suffered a tragedy. Aya got sick for two weeks and ended up giving birth. No hospitals, no incubators. She was in her seventh month. We took her babies to Kamal Adwan Hospital five days ago. When I went to get them, they were dead. Twin girls. The…
