Harper's Magazine March 2022

Habit for Humanity Meghan O’Gieblyn’s article [“Routine Maintenance,” Essay, January] captures what is unnerving and infuriating about Silicon Valley’s automation boosterism. Turtlenecked executives bloviate about the need to be “flexible” and “creative” in order to compete with machines, while hiring workers on temporary or limited contracts out of which people can hardly make stable lives. For Karl Marx, and the other thinkers O’Gieblyn cites, the independence that comes with financial security is what makes it possible for people to live ethical lives, to mold their habits in accord with an inner purpose. By contrast, existential insecurity—the defining feature of the freelancer or the gig worker’s life—short-circuits that experience. Lives of routine and repetition are lived as lives of dull compulsion. Our insecurity creates a scarcity mentality. When we have less than we…

Once upon a time in a galaxy not far from London, a group called the Association of Autonomous Astronauts was born. The AAA announced a bold “Five Year Plan for establishing a worldwide network of local, community-based groups dedicated to building their own space ships.” It wasn’t an organization, with members or rules or any money to speak of, coming as it did out of an anarchist tradition that abhorred all forms of top-down control. Depending on whom you asked, it was either an emancipatory political project, an elaborate prank, or an artistic avant-garde. No one was in charge—and that was the point. The AAA was an identity. If you wanted to go to space, it was yours to use. A lot of people wanted to go to space. In 1997, two…

Minimum portion of U.S. movie budgets last year spent on pandemic-related expenses : 1/10 Portion of moviegoers who say they are unlikely to return to theaters after the pandemic : 1/10 Percentage decrease between 2019 and 2020 in the value of the wellness industry : 11 Portion of U.S. adults who say their physical health is “excellent” : 1/4 Average amount of soda, in gallons, that an American drinks each year : 36 Average increase in U.S. blood pressure, in millimeters of mercury, since the start of the pandemic : 2 Portion of Americans who have recently skipped medical care because they couldn’t afford it : 3/10 Percentage by which Republicans are less likely to trust a doctor’s advice than they were a decade ago : 18 Percentage increase since 2019 in the number of Americans aged 18…

[Essay] THE WITCHCRAFT WE NEED By Elena Ferrante, adapted from the essay “Histories, I,” included in the collection In the Margins, which will be published this month by Europa. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Anyone with literary ambitions knows that the motivations, both great and small, that impel the hand to write come from “real life”: the yearning to describe the pain of love, the pain of living, the anguish of death; the urgency to give voice to the humble, to strip away power and its atrocities. One morning something may shift inside me, maybe just a wrong that was done to my mother, and the “I” looks out, dying to write, and I start putting down the first lines of a story. Immediately a long tradition made up of others’…

In the early days of the pandemic, I turned thirty and it occurred to me that I didn’t have a retirement account. I had never put any serious thought into investing, or had any real money to invest. I was financially illiterate—I had gotten my first credit card only a year earlier to pay for a flight to a friend’s wedding. I didn’t really own anything, beyond the clothes and books I dragged from one apartment to the next. I had begun to feel pathetic, with no prospects for accruing the kind of wealth that would allow someone to one day buy a house or start a family. What little money I had managed to save sat languishing in a savings account, where it earned an annual percentage yield so…

The entrance to Castle Garden was blocked up with vehicles, peddlers of cheap cigars, apple stands, and runners from the boarding houses and intelligence offices that abound in the neighborhood near the Battery. However, I succeeded in getting through after encountering an outpouring stream of new arrivals. I presented my passport to the officer on guard and was ushered inside, amidst a crowd of passengers, children, and baggage of all kinds. Into this yard open the different offices connected with the Garden. The desks of the exchange brokers are at present occupied by four firms, each working in its own interest. A blackboard announces the current rates at which foreign and domestic coin are exchanged—a rate that is but a trifle below the Wall Street quotation. Whenever a change takes place…