Harper's Magazine

Foul Is Fair Kyle Paoletta’s article [“The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday,” Criticism, April] tracks the shifting rhetoric of climate reporting in recent years from extreme pessimism to timid optimism. Is either view correct? Only time will tell, although the idea that journalists missed a Goldilocks middle path between doom and hope benefits greatly from hindsight and exaggerates the substantive discrepancy between earlier and later accounts. The central article in the story, David Wallace-Wells’s “Beyond Catastrophe,” would strike only the most despairing Cassandra as upbeat. Paoletta says little has changed. But with each year, the ranks of climate denialists have thinned, the will to political action has grown, green technology has improved and cheapened, and the pace of its adoption has accelerated. Perhaps the most profound change—apparently, mystifyingly, known to scientists for a decade—is…

Brian T. Watson is an architect and cultural critic. For twenty-three years, he has been a columnist with the Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts, focused primarily on current affairs and the forces that were and are shaping societies both here and abroad. btwatson20@gmail.com (781) 367-2008 Paper, $13.00 e-Book, $9.99 Available on Amazon Independent of the pandemic and war, we are beset by a range of unprecedented developments that together, in this century, threaten the very existence of civilization. The current states of just ten forces — capitalism, technology, the internet, politics, media, education, human nature, the environment, population, and transportation — are driving society in predominantly negative ways. These forces are powerful and interconnected and their combined dynamics will carry us into any number of disasters well before 2100. We have the knowledge and solutions to address…

In the fall of 2014 I began attending hearings, some of them banal and procedural, others more emotional, for a Los Angeles murder trial that was cranking its way through the system. The case went on for five years and involved long hours on the ninth floor of the downtown criminal courts, where high-profile murder cases are heard. When I could not make a trial date, I hired a researcher to go in my stead. By early 2015, even as I knew I would see this case all the way to the end—and I did—I had decided that while the observations I was gathering might constitute a personal experience, a set of thoughts, I would never present them as reported journalism—and I didn’t. This was a “special circumstances” case involving four…

[Essay] THE POWER OF THE DOG By Jackson Lears, from Animal Spirits, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Soon after he graduated in 1909, Aldo Leopold headed to the Southwest to take a job with the U.S. Forest Service—the new federal agency charged with the equally new task of “wildlife management.” For Leopold and his colleagues, managing wildlife meant, among other things, killing creatures deemed undesirable by ranchers, farmers, and hunters. Few were deemed more undesirable—or made for more exciting targets for young men with guns—than wolves. “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold remembered some decades later in his book A Sand County Almanac. So when Leopold and a companion spotted an old she-wolf and her half-dozen pups…

From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia. Washington’s rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russia’s forces in the field; indirectly and otherwise,…

At stake was more than some Caribbean island. America itself, one elder statesman informed the president, faced a crucial test “in the great struggle between liberty and despotism.” Would the Russians and their allies be permitted to take over Latin America? Or would we stop them? The president, for the moment, kept his own counsel, but the intelligence community had made its judgment. The Caribbean was only the beginning. The general expectation, the president’s chief military adviser warned, was that Russia was plotting to employ force against South America as well. We must fight for the hemisphere’s freedom, one House leader urged the secretary of state. But the secretary of state turned out to be a dove. The Russian menace, he argued, was more an American fantasy than a political…