Harper's Magazine March 2026

System Diagnostics Jason Blakely’s essay on political science in the age of Trump [“In the Land of the Data Blind,” Revision, January] misleadingly associates pundits like Nate Silver and Nate Cohn—who are not academics—with the field of political science. He overlooks the work of contemporary political scientists who have traced the contours of MAGA politics: Eunji Kim’s experimental research, for instance, illuminates how reality television and celebrity culture elevated Trump to prominence; Miles Armaly’s and Adam Enders’s surveys chronicle the influence of Christian nationalist thought; and Robert Mickey has advanced an entire research program tracing past and present authoritarianism in America. Blakely’s suggestion that interpretive research might be better suited to the unique threat posed by MAGA is likewise unpersuasive. Trump-era ethnographies of rural conservatism by Katherine Cramer and Arlie…

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is an enormous complex in Washington, just south of the Watergate and almost completely surrounded by highways. It is an unmistakable artifact of Cold War modernism, with its expansive façade of white marble, narrow columns, and broad terraces. The country that constructed this majestic temple to the arts was evidently a land of reason, progress, ideals, and faith in the future. America’s appreciation for the arts, this edifice announced, was responsible, mature. We could be trusted to lead the world. Now that those days are over, the Kennedy Center has become the latest battleground in America’s never ending culture war. In February of last year, President Trump fired most members of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and then was himself…

By Josh Ireland, from The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy, which was published last month by Dutton. Leon Trotsky’s whitewashed study, which abutted his simply furnished bedroom, was bright, high-ceilinged, and unadorned, though its floor was painted a striking deep red. In its stern elegance, the study was in many ways a reflection of its occupant. Light streamed through a balcony window to which Trotsky usually turned his back as he worked. He spent so much of his time here that there was even a couch for his siestas. There were no ornaments, no photos, no paintings. The chairs were plain and cane-bottomed. What decoration there was came from a map of Mexico. Trotsky sat down in his armchair. Ramón Mercader,…

From “An Orbital House of Cards,” a preprint study conducted by researchers at Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Regina that was submitted in December to the Cornell University open-access archive arXiv. The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite-constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground-casualty risks, optical and radio-spectrum pollution, and the alteration of Earth’s upper atmosphere through rocket emissions and reentry ablation. There is potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to…

By Wayne Koestenbaum, from My Lover, the Rabbi, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. My lover, the rabbi, developed an anal ailment, not life-threatening, not connected to digestion, not caused by sexual activity, not contagious, not within the purview of most medical practitioners he consulted, until he found one kindly doctor, who specialized in anal ailments and who was happy to engage with the rabbi in extended conversation about his symptoms. There were almost no visible signs of this pestering affliction, which interfered with the rabbi’s sleep and therefore with his mental competence and his negotiation of daytime duties and professional matters. For no clear reason, the rabbi hesitated to tell me the explicit diagnosis of his ailment and of the treatment recommended by the…

From the transcript of testimony, in 1956, by Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee, as collected in A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare, by Marjorie Garber, which will be published this month by Yale University Press. PAUL ROBESON: To whom am I talking? FRANCIS E. WALTER: You are speaking to the chairman of this committee. ROBESON: Mr. Walter? WALTER: Yes. ROBESON: The Pennsylvania Walter? WALTER: That is right. ROBESON: Representative of the steelworkers? WALTER: That is right. ROBESON:x Of the coal-mining workers and not United States Steel, by any chance? A great patriot. WALTER: That is right. ROBESON: You are the author of all the bills that are going to keep all kinds of decent people out of the country.…