“I never get to know the heads’ names, nor do I see the heads attached to actual bodies. For all I know, they are floating heads passing by Frank’s old office.” From Are People Out There, by Shane Kowalski, which was published by @futuretensebooks.bsky.social.

“The Score is about the quantification of our achievements and essences—both in real life, where such quantification is soul-sucking, and in games, where it’s soul-expanding.” —Dan Piepenbring

“From a distance, it had seemed only baffling. Up close, though, I could see exactly why they might have done it: because the tree had been special.” Rosa Lyster on the trial of the Sycamore Gap killers.

“Chalma, Mexico,” a photograph by Graciela Iturbide, whose work is on view at ICP through January 12, 2026. Her monograph, Graciela Iturbide, was published by Editorial RM and Fundación MAPFRE last fall © The artist. Courtesy D.A.P. buff.ly/IZbbNOC

“Commitment to memorizing poems, aiming for one per week. Started with W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ and did learn it, but didn’t find time to do any more poems and after a month couldn’t recall much of the Auden poem. (2020)” —Adam Smyth

“Beneath the sector’s undeniable need for new and upgraded infrastructure lies a deeper problem concerning how the industry makes its money.” @nickbowlin.bsky.social on the utility industry’s regulatory failures and the soaring cost of electricity.

BREAKING NEWS! Shane Kowalski has a story in Harper's Magazine. 🪇🎉 This is from @dieddisappointed.bsky.social's spanking new collection, Are People Out There. Check it out here, or read it at your grocery store soon...

“It is not a moral nor even an aesthetic requirement to dazzle, of course. The requirement is to be smart and, for the most part, correct.” Vince Passaro on Malcolm Cowley and the dream of the American canon.

“When LLMs were given the freedom to determine their own target amounts and betting sizes, bankruptcy rates rose substantially alongside instances of irrational behavior.” From a preprint study conducted by the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology.

“When it comes to Israel, there is no doubt that the Republican Party is facing a revolt spearheaded by its young supporters, a shift that has been long in the making.” Andrew Cockburn reports on Charlie Kirk and the GOP’s cracked consensus on Israel. buff.ly/m0Ij69M

“My sole reason for living is the wondrous love that descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend—as though from the lap of God—fructifying new seeds of life within me!” —Richard Wagner harpers.org/archive/2026...

“Why would they come to Mingus, anyway? Which is pretty close to nowhere. Wouldn’t nowhere do as well? Or maybe it does.” From “Aliens in Mingus,” a new story by David Searcy.

“Those with more refined tastes, such as a visiting French diplomat, found the Friend appealingly theatrical: ‘This soul from Heaven has chosen a rather beautiful body for its dwelling place.’” Dan Piepenbring reviews Nina Sankovitch’s Not Your Founding Father.

“The ‘soft’ approaches of the humanities (erudition in languages, history and culture, textual interpretation, philosophical awareness, and so on) were demoted in favor of a set of hardheaded, data-driven theories.” —Jason Blakely

“This complicates a desirable (and marketable) portrait of the Universal Public Friend as a queer torchbearer; the truth feels much more tangled.” Dan Piepenbring reviews Nina Sankovitch’s Not Your Founding Father.

“A museum director may have an easier time scraping together fifty million dollars for a new building than half a million for new toilets. Thus, unnecessary expansion is one of the shrewdest ways of funding necessary repair.”—Jackson Arn

In this week's Top 5: • Midair mayhem @newstatesman1913.bsky.social • Know when to fold 'em @slate.com • For art's sake @Economist.com • Breech of trust @theguardian.com • May it trees the court @harpers.bsky.social longreads.com/2025/12/19/t...

Power bills are sky-high, and data centers are to blame, right? Well, yes, but there's something else, upstream of the AI boom: a utility sector beholden to financial interests, resulting in massive corporate profits. I looked into this dynamic for @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2026...

“Why would they come to Mingus, anyway? Which is pretty close to nowhere. Wouldn’t nowhere do as well? Or maybe it does.” From “Aliens in Mingus,” a new story by David Searcy. harpers.org/archive/2026...

“When utilities earn substantial profits, one might expect customers to see some relief in their monthly bills. But as a result of the ownership model of the utilities that serve most Americans, this is rarely what happens.” —@nickbowlin.bsky.social

“I felt that what I was hearing from the crowd was MAGA youth’s revulsion for America’s disastrous twenty-first-century wars, a seismic shift brought to a head by Gaza.” Andrew Cockburn reports on Charlie Kirk and the GOP’s stance on Israel. harpers.org/archive/2026...

“From the beginning it felt as if Carruthers and Graham were on trial for something other than property damage, but nobody seemed to have a name for what that might be.” Rosa Lyster on the trial of the Sycamore Gap killers. harpers.org/archive/2026...

In our January issue: Andrew Cockburn on Charlie Kirk and the GOP’s stance on Israel, Nick Bowlin (@nickbowlin.bsky.social) on the rising cost of utilities, Rosa Lyster on the trial of the Sycamore Gap killers, a story from David Searcy, and more. harpers.org/archive/2026...

“Returning in January, I found a country that was still coming to grips with the collective nightmare and grief of its civil war.” A photo portfolio from Victor J. Blue following the fall of the Assad regime.

“Our time’s great spiritual affliction is longing without an object. Our salvation may lie in learning to love without one.” Christian Wiman on consciousness, quantum theory, and God.

“There was no sound The only feeling was a powdery scratchiness” From The Fry, by Jacqueline Waters, which will be published in April by Winter Editions.

The magazine was full of lovable weirdos who knew inordinate amounts about cuneiform or animal husbandry and were prone to causing collisions in the hallway because their faces were buried in paper proofs.” —Ismail Ibrahim in “House Arab” from @Bidoun.

From the December Harper’s Index. buff.ly/Ei1Lh9m

“Musk has said he believes ‘we’re headed to a radically different world’ with humanoids, but the extent of the change—and who it will benefit—is far from clear.” @jjvincent.bsky.social on humanoids and the tech-­industry hype machine.

“She says of her creative-writing professor, acidly and perfectly: ‘She had written about degrading sexual experiences with eroticism and intelligence, which is all anyone really wants from a book.’ I’ll cosign.” Dan Piepenbring on Flat Earth.

“I used to have so much anxiety around relationships. But the more people you meet, you realize that people come and go. They’re there to teach you lots of things. The memory and the spirit of a person can carry you for a lifetime and stay with you.”

“The daily logistical lift of raising young children while working comes to chafe against expectations we have of modern parents—the cooking, the enrichment, the importance of the first few years.” —Lauren Hilgers

“No part of the sky displayed any discernible characteristics Land, too, lost its recognizable polygons” From The Fry, by Jacqueline Waters, which will be published in April by Winter Editions.

“This turned me off. I recoiled from him. He terrified me, like one of those South American vampires who fly around at night sucking blood from toes while people sleep. I had the feeling that he would suck me dry.” Carl Jung on Thomas Mann. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“She always seemed to have time to devote to everyone who came to see her. She was a very close friend. Perhaps I knew her better than most of her other friends.” Vita Sackville-West in On Virginia Woolf, published in July by @semiotexte.bsky.social.

“As its survivors squinted in the light of peace, traces of hostilities not long past were everywhere present, scarring the architecture, the bodies of survivors, and even the memory of the lost.” A photo portfolio from Victor J. Blue following the fall of the Assad regime.

“The defense secretary delivered remarks before a misspelled nameplate; the budget director doodled a sketch of mountains, clouds, and trees; and the U.S. president struggled to stay awake.” From Harper’s Weekly Review.

“Beijing, #2, 2014/2016,” a photograph by Daniel Lee Postaer from his book Mother’s Land, which was published in November by Deadbeat Press. buff.ly/Z6xShlf

“It was clear, even before a gulag opened at Guantánamo under the banner of ‘enduring freedom,’ that the cartoonishly cruel and maladroit Soviet enemy had made for a terrible intellectual complacency in the West.” —Pankaj Mishra

“A mystical experience can make all reality seem, for a moment, addressed to you alone—as it is, I believe, to every single one of us.”—Christian Wiman

“If a priest sends a member of the faithful to an exorcist in a hasty and superficial manner (perhaps thinking, he will handle it!), it is almost always a waste of time for everyone.” From a handbook distributed by the International Association of Exorcists.

“If I live long enough, I’ll be able to do shit like watch my nephew have children, watch the rise and fall and rise and fall of the right wing, but mostly find a way to be at peace with every bad thing that has ever happened in my life.” —Brontez Purnell

“In recent years, as robots have become increasingly sophisticated, their makers have gone from kicking them to shoving them, tripping them, and even hitting them with folding chairs.” @jjvincent.bsky.social on humanoids and the tech-­industry hype machine.

“The operating orthodoxy was that police killings, CIA coups, black-site torture, and institutional misogyny were aberrations, deviations from the American norm that would eventually be corrected when the arc of the moral universe finally got around to them.” —Ismail Ibrahim

if you want an overview of where humanoid robots are at right now — what's hype and what's real — then check out my long read for @harpers.bsky.social. here's me teleopping a humanoid, and yes i was told MANY times "do not take off the headset until you've disconnected" harpers.org/archive/2025...

“You’ll never meet the same pedant twice. His identity reflects shifting concerns about the cultural role of the intellectual and the purpose of higher education.” Dan Piepenbring reviews Arnoud S. Q. Visser’s On Pedantry.

“I have to say, if I believed in things like God, this would have been the time I would have asked him to hold me, but I didn’t, and so I had to hold myself again.” A new story from Brontez Purnell.

“Day cares are highly regulated and expensive to operate. Even with tuition rates high and climbing, many providers are barely staying afloat amid increasing costs for insurance and labor, as well as general inflation.” —Lauren Hilgers

General Interest is a monthly interview series between Harper’s writers and editors. This month, Brontez Purnell speaks with Jess Bergman about relationships, recovery, and writing as thinking. buff.ly/5REggRS

“Profit will of course find a way; there will always be shit to watch. But without radical intervention, whether by the government or the workers, the industry will become unrecognizable.” Daniel Bessner on the life and death of Hollywood.