“The travelers that interested her were not those seeking plain or ordinary pleasures but those chasing a profound personal cataclysm.” Nicole Flattery on Jane Bowles’s spiritual transformations.

“You are sixty pounds, a little taller than four feet. Above-average weight and height for a seven-year-old girl. You wrestle at the Junior Demons Wrestling Club.” New fiction from Matthew Shen Goodman.

“In a reminder that Trump is not wildly popular with the electorate so much as unopposed by any effective political counterweight, groups of foreign tourists predominated among the parade’s early arrivals.” Seth Harp reports from Trump’s military parade in June.

“I can’t say that Mythopedia deepened my relationship to the land, but it has shaken and shifted it like so many toads in a tornado.” Dan Piepenbring reviews Adrienne Mayor’s Mythopedia.

“Bezos doesn’t say what we would do with all these extra Mozarts. Do we need that much classical music?” By Paul Kingsnorth, from Against the Machine.

“Not only does astrology, like poetry, require complete dedication, but it also requires from you signs of predestination.” André Breton in conversation with Jean Carteret and Roger Knabe. Featured in Cavalier Perspective from City Lights Publishers.

“She was getting married, but she did not want to get married; she did not know why she had done this—it was lunacy, getting married; she wished she was wearing something other than this stupid dress.” From Estate, by Cynthia Zarin.

“When I was in my twenties, I thought I would be successful in my thirties. When I was thirty-five, I gave myself until my late forties. When I turned forty, acquaintances stopped asking if I was working on anything new and started asking if I was seeing anyone.”

“Percentage of Americans under the age of 35 who say they avoid the news because it is ‘too hard to understand’ : 13 Who watched or listened to some portion of The Joe Rogan Experience in the past week : 29” From the October Harper’s Index.

“Medical school in particular is a land of multiple-choice questions, where everything a student must know … is thought to be quantifiable. But when caring for people, doctors confront problems that are complex and subjective.” —Rachel Pearson

“[Candace Owens] promoted the false and defamatory insinuation that President Macron’s family background, childhood, and professional rise were orchestrated by covert mind-control efforts.” From a lawsuit filed in Delaware in July.

“On our evaluations, the model engages in strategic deception more than any other frontier model that we have previously studied. The model is clearly capable of scheming.” From a risk assessment from Anthropic.

“These reissues come at a time when [Jane] Bowles can no longer be said to be a neglected genius or a cult figure; she has become, if not mainstream, then deserving of that most unforgivable label, ‘a writer’s writer.’” Nicole Flattery on Jane Bowles.

“In my view, astrology is a grande dame, exceedingly beautiful and coming from so far away that she can’t help but charm me. In the purely physical world, I see nobody whose attire can rival hers.” harpers.org/archive/2025...

“These children act as if to be alive is something they have not had to earn. They are ready for nothing and never careful. You have noticed that the world has hesitated to punish them.” New fiction from Matthew Shen Goodman.

“Any art that excludes the irreparable excludes the possibility of genuine affirmation, as I’m trying to articulate it here; such art can only ever be propaganda for life, which can’t offer us any help at all.” @garthgreenwell.bsky.social revisits Giovanni’s Room.

“But can empathy really be systematically produced? Or will attempts to do so ultimately cheapen the very thing they seek to create?” Rachel Pearson, @peopledoctor.bsky.social, on empathy’s place in medicine.

“What kind of fascism was this? Rather than the authoritarian spectacle that liberals had anticipated, the festivities seemed to be more a demonstration of political fatigue and civic apathy.” Seth Harp reports from Trump’s military parade.

“Brent led a life fully committed to his values and his pleasures; unlike most people, he didn’t see a contradiction between the two.” @davidmvelasco.bsky.social remembers his friend, Brent Sikkema.

In our October issue: Seth Harp on Trump’s military parade; David Velasco on his friend Brent Sikkema; Rachel Pearson on empathy in medical education; Garth Greenwell on Giovanni’s Room; Nicole Flattery on Jane Bowles; and a story from Matthew Shen Goodman. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“The herons with their silver throats / The star that drives its pulse into the gravel Around the icy stillness of the pool.” From Wickerwork, by Christian Lehnert, which was published in April with @archipelagobooks.bsky.social.

“I feel like hugging my dog while he’s alive. I’m not scared of death; I’m afraid to stay alive when death besieges me.” From diary entries written by Ukrainian college students during Russia’s invasion in 2022 buff.ly/p8wnIRH

“Throughout the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, Jewish socialists, liberals, anarchists, and Zionists all saw their respective political programs as offering a remedy for anti-Semitism.” Daniel May reviews On Antisemitism: A Word in History.

“‘Wannabe’ wasn’t a word back then, but what they want to be is clear. They want to be seen. That’s why they knock on the door of the photographer.” —John Haskell for @fictioncollective2.bsky.social

"In Wyryki-Wola, Poland, a man watched a televised news report on Russian drones’ invasion of Polish airspace as one of the drones crashed into his house, and the Polish prime minister declared that the country was 'the closest … to open conflict since World War II.'" buff.ly/M9p3LGb

“In 1976, I went to work for Alger Hiss, believing I could solve one of the most baffling political mysteries in American history. It took me fifty years, but I can say now with certainty that Whittaker Chambers lied when he claimed that Hiss was a spy.”

“Masochism and apocalypse are deeply interconnected for me, their common denominator anxiety.” Michael Robbins ( @alienvsrobbins.bsky.social ) on kink in dark times. buff.ly/5GKZpez

“The public was demanding more of the schools; inevitably, the schools had to demand more of the public. Here the controversy began, for the people who asked for new courses were under the impression that public education is free.” —Sloan Wilson

“PSEUDONYM. I dream of a world where writers would be required by law to keep their identities secret and to use pseudonyms. The advantages: the strict curtailing of graphomania; the reduction of aggressiveness in the literary world.” —Milan Kundera

“That game of ‘anyway,’ in which the in-between woman can keep volleying, can volley all day: never underestimate a woman’s, especially this woman’s, ability to suffer.” From Weike Wang’s new story, “Girl Talk.” buff.ly/fKz8xB2

“I feel like Gregor Samsa lying on his shell and wanting to be heard, but people only hear an insect chirping. I feel like a cup from an old set that falls apart from sharp touches.” From diary entries written by Ukrainian college students in 2022.

Congratulations to Harper’s Magazine contributors Omar El Akkad, Rabih Alameddine, Susan Choi, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, and Joy Williams on being longlisted for the 2025 National Book Awards (@nationalbook.bsky.social). www.nationalbook.org/category/news/

“Do you want to run to an airport to meet one of our pilots to fly you to an active scene where a suspect is shooting everyone? If your answer is yes, then we have some great news, as all of those opportunities are available on our OSP SWAT team!”

5. "Ecological Warfare," Nathaniel Rich @harpers.bsky.social "Nathaniel Rich’s dispatch from the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo is rich with rewards—unless, of course, you’re the invasive, orange-toothed rodent at its heart." harpers.org/archive/2025...

“The schools have been called godless, their faculty described as cotton-­headed; arguments are started everywhere over the question of whether there should be federal aid to education.” From “Public Schools Are Better Than You Think” (1955) by Sloan Wilson.

“Social deficits can manifest as belligerent or meek. With me, Nini is extremely meek; with Lali, he can be surprisingly aggressive.” Tao Lin ( @taolin2.bsky.social ) on life with his cats.

“I once asked Hobson why anyone should believe his defense of his parents. His answer astonished me: he didn’t love them enough to lie for them.” Jeff Kisseloff revisits Whittaker Chambers’s accusations against Alger Hiss, from Rewriting Hisstory, @univpressofkansas.bsky.social.

“The quest for images and symbols in new combination, for what might be called communal resymbolization, is precarious and threatening—so much so that it can itself be viewed as the cause for the cultural breakdown everyone senses.” Robert Lifton, 1973.

“Ultimately, to challenge the term’s misuse, we need clarity about what its proper use would entail. That, however, requires making a claim about what anti-Semitism actually is—a work of definition that Mazower convincingly shows is likely to fail.” —Daniel May

“I turned off the light and looked through the window while the music was playing and I was thinking about the war and how much I love Lviv. Yesterday, Lviv was bombed; there are many people I love there.” From diary entries by Ukrainian college students in 2022.

“Iran was probably only one or two years away (2009) Iran has the capability now to make one bomb (2009) They will achieve a test device within months and certainly less than a year (2025)” From statements made since 1992 by Benjamin Netanyahu. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“‘We’re not going to break up?’ I remember my girlfriend saying with a small smile. ‘We’re going to get a cat?’” Tao Lin ( @taolin2.bsky.social ) on life with his cats. buff.ly/HCGsZCo

“The nutria’s cardinal sin, however, is gluttony. It eats like it breeds: hellaciously.” Nathaniel Rich reports from a Louisiana swamp-rat rodeo.

“It seems clear that the principle driving the ESA movement is the right of parents to choose the best education for their children. … But it cannot change the fact that the underlying principle of education in a democracy is the right of a student to learn.”

"In the past quarter century alone, the nutria has ingested more than forty square miles of Louisiana." —Nathaniel Rich on the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo for @harpers.bsky.social

“I’ve realized that I wasn’t such a good mother. It’s not enough to love your children, that’s too easy, and I think I’m completely selfish.” Catherine Breillat from I Only Believe in Myself ( @semiotexte.bsky.social ).

“Rather than narrowing the definition of ‘anti-Semitism,’ the history Mazower so artfully tells suggests the possibility of a more capacious understanding.” Daniel May reviews On Antisemitism: A Word in History.

“The in-between woman finds the message of empowerment through sex infinitely confusing. Like a snake eating its own tail.” From “Girl Talk,” a new story by Weike Wang.

“Rather than seeing wisdom as a distinct human aspiration, requiring its own calisthenics and cultivation, there persists a strange belief that intelligence and knowledge alone will lead, through some secret orthogenesis, to moral clarity.” —Meghan O’Gieblyn buff.ly/GzzGVse

“FORSAKEN. Thrown, thrust into solitude. The most expressive word of its class: solitary, abandoned, alone, etc. It brings up the image of a weeping willow.” From Milan Kundera’s “personal dictionary,” which will be released with Harper next month.