“Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality.” —@danielkolitz.bsky.social

“‘To grieve in peace’ is a common phrase but it’s a peculiar one, is it not? A contradiction, a demanding, even unachievable stasis state.” Joy Williams on Gene Hackman’s last days. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“More than 80 percent of the world’s population is exposed to light pollution, and with each passing year, fewer and fewer of us have ever known anything else. In abolishing the terror of night, we may have flattened the beauty of day.” —Rowan Jacobsen

“Something has gone awry when a paid propagandist, working on behalf of a corporation or a trade union, earns more than the man whose job it is to tell the truth.” David Boroff on the state of media in “What Ails the Journalism Schools,” from 1965.

“The simple reality is that legacy media organizations are struggling, and they want readership, especially when they’re looking at younger journalists. They want people who can bring in younger audiences.” — @taylorlorenz.bsky.social

“Sometimes, I think, it’s to assuage existential terror. Because if you’re doing the violence, at that moment anyway, it’s not being done to you.” —Mary Gaitskill harpers.org/archive/2025...

“We have to meet people where they are, which is on social media and on video, and try our best to get good at communicating with people in the spaces where they are engaged.” @maxtani.bsky.social in a forum on the media’s credibility crisis.

“The 80.55 million pounds of gunpowder exported by the British in the eighteenth century to Africa, Asia, and the Americas was enough charge for 1.3 to 4.6 billion shots.” Clifton Crais in The Killing Age, which will be published this month by @uchicagopress.bsky.social.

“These experiments, led most often by women in their own homes, revealed the domestic as a laboratory for testing enchantment.” Anna Della Subin in a talk delivered at the conference Enchanting Wor(l)ds.

“Ferrara’s arrival in New York City and subsequent entry into the movie business is presented as something like a case of recidivism, a dive from suburban gentility into the cauldron of steaming garbage that was Fun City–era Manhattan.” —Nick Pinkerton

“‘The universe is made of love,’ Daedone told her employees. ‘Sales is love. Therefore the universe is made of sales.’” Dan Piepenbring reviews Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult.

“I don’t know how my father found out about the trip. We hadn’t spoken in almost a year when he emailed, saying that he’d like to get back to North Cyprus himself.” A new story from David Wingrave. harpers.org/archive/2025/11/aytac-david-wingrave-cyprus-friendship/

“He made sixty-six movies, sixty-seven if you count his uncredited voice of God in the forgettable Two of a Kind. (God had nothing meaningful to say.) He didn’t do death in most of them, but in the ones he did, his end was very awful.” Joy Williams on Gene Hackman. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“That’s the trouble with dreams of power. It stimulates anxiety about a catastrophe that has yet to happen. ” @hernyfreebland.bsky.social in a collage essay which was published by @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.

“I’m all for getting off without telos, but, as a rule of thumb (or whichever finger[s] you stroke with), anyone who takes a well-known word, capitalizes the first letter, and insists that it’s something new has an axe to grind.” —Dan Piepenbring

Harper’s Magazine is hiring an editor to run its Readings section. Each month, the editor will be responsible for overseeing the section’s creation and assembly. The position is full-time and based in New York City. More details here: harpers.org/careers/

“About one in three American adults gets less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night. The costs are staggering: by one estimate, up to $411 billion per year in disease, accidents, and lost productivity.” —Rowan Jacobsen

“I do think that the corporate media—having worked in it myself—has done things to erode trust, whether it’s kowtowing to power or simply failing to represent the truth.” @taylorlorenz.bsky.social on establishment media’s crisis of trust.

“Can clothes be evil? The libertines will begin the film in suits. At the end, they’ll wear dressing gowns.” Olivia Laing from The Silver Book, which will be published this month by @fsgbooks.bsky.social.

General Interest is a new interview series between Harper’s writers and editors. This month, Daniel Kolitz speaks with Matthew Sherrill about his harrowing journey into the “Goonverse,” and Joy Williams speaks with Will Stephenson about Night Moves, dogs, and Rilke. buff.ly/QTwDEM4

Every month in our Findings column, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi presents a constellation of the most—and least—important scientific discoveries.

From the November Harper’s Index. buff.ly/Hen1y6H

1. “Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?” @jelaniya.bsky.social, @taylorlorenz.bsky.social, @jackshafer.bsky.social, @maxtani.bsky.social "The journalists here differ in . . . how they interpret threats against press freedom in the US . . ." harpers.org/archive/2025...

“What happens when—whether through fatigue, indifference, or inability—the transmission of reading culture as we’ve known it comes to an end?” Christopher Carroll on American reading habits. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“The war against journalism education has been long and relentless. Though the idiom of abuse has changed, the critics are as hostile as ever, while their targets react only with curious torpor.” David Boroff in “What Ails the Journalism Schools,” from 1965. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“If you look at the decline of trust in American institutions, it is overwhelmingly connected to the dynamics of local relationships.” @jelaniya.bsky.social in the Harper’s Forum on establishment media’s crisis of trust.

“I’ve come for a monthlong intervention. No light after dark. I picked this place online because of the location and the stargazing, and because it was the closest I could get to the Great Rift Valley on a budget.” —Rowan Jacobsen

“The odds of recovering from chemical dependencies as crippling as Ferrara’s are infinitesimal; the odds of getting a steady stream of projects off the ground for almost fifty years as an independent filmmaker are not much better.” —Nick Pinkerton

“After a short lull following the end of the Atlantic slave trade, Afriacn imports of powder from Britain took off: more than 4 million pounds in 1865, nearly twice the record annual amount during the external slave trade.” —Clifton Crais

“As a visitor, I felt a temptation to fixate on this romance of twentieth-century stasis. But there had been diplomatic successes. The border was porous now. There were crossing points; Leonie and I had done it ourselves several times.” —David Wingrave buff.ly/2oTF0Fh

“Because of my bodily experience, I’ve become attuned to subtle social cues of possible violence: a look in the eyes, a tightening of the jaw, a way of moving or of speaking that precedes rage or cold, deliberate cruelty.” —Mary Gaitskill

“Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends.”—@danielkolitz.bsky.social

"What worries me more is the lack of outrage, the lack of interest, and the lack of pushback by the general public." —@maxtani.bsky.social, with @jelaniya.bsky.social @taylorlorenz.bsky.social & @jackshafer.bsky.social for @harpers.bsky.social

“Each suite has a cushy bed, ports in the wall for various diagnostic devices, cameras and intercoms, and futuristic light panels … It feels like a cross between a Comfort Inn and a panic room.” Rowan Jacobsen chases good sleep in the Sonoran Desert.

“Anyone with a Classmates.com account can see a phenomenally dopey picture of my dad, along with his ‘favorites’ (‘pizza…girls…’) and his class’s prom theme (‘Oriental Evening’).” Dan Piepenbring reviews Kate Eichhorn's School Yearbook. buff.ly/EV9QiUY

“Motility is a defining quality of the soul, which has often been seen, since the pre-Socratics, as the starting point of motion in the body. Souls can move; they migrate; perhaps they are arrivants, the French term Warner uses for refugees.” —@annadella.bsky.social

“The more I’m in such plant-based lightscapes, the more LED bulbs seem fit only for asylums and nightmares. I haven’t used mine in weeks.” Rowan Jacobsen on artificial light and the pursuit of a good night’s sleep.

“It’s not the media’s job to protect the public from information that very well could be true.” @maxtani.bsky.social on mainstream reporting on COVID in a forum on the media’s credibility crisis.

“The clothes Dani has made for his films over the past decade are more like sculpture than something to wear. Definitively strange, they have the function of dissolving the present, of creating a rent in time.” Olivia Laing from The Silver Book.

“On the news they’re talking about names and legacies and who the next pope will be. God chooses the pope, not cardinals, my barista says.” By Jamie Quatro, from the Sewanee School of Letters Summer Reading Series.

“Substance abuse was forbidden, though late in her tenure Daedone was alleged to have thrown some LSD into the mix. When you’re a charismatic leader, it’s never a bad idea to keep a few tabs in your back pocket.” —Dan Piepenbring

“Violence is for getting your way; for asserting your existence as an individual or a group; for venting torrential feeling; for sadistic pleasure.” Mary Gaitskill in an essay that first appeared in @thepointmag.bsky.social.

“As far as I knew, Abdi wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t anything. All he did, all day long, was drink coffee with Aytaç. He didn’t even play chess.” A new story from David Wingrave. buff.ly/2oTF0Fh

“Every once in a while, however, news of Death’s particular methods and attention to detail seizes our attention like the cougar does the clueless rabbit, and we suffer some serious confusion and fright.” —Joy Williams

“To be a successful independent filmmaker—that is, one who is even sporadically employed—is, in essence, to be a bit of a con man.” Nick Pinkerton on Abel Ferrara’s memoir, Scene.

“God the Mother—maybe, but not my mother— and certainly not yours” From a manuscript in progress by Rae Armantrout.

“Some part of me, I’m saying, was convinced that these gooners were human. Almost certainly they had, in their lives, hugged grandparents, cuddled pets.” @danielkolitz.bsky.social on loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation.

“Corporate media in particular has spent years selling people out and getting things wrong. Look at mainstream coverage of the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the genocide in Palestine. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.” —@taylorlorenz.bsky.social

“Without guns, the Industrial Revolution would not have unfolded the way it did, if it even happened at all, for weapons were what made environmental destruction, the expropriation of land, and the expansion of slavery possible.” —Clifton Crais

“Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages abuse of it in all spheres.” C.S. Lewis in a letter to a reader, from Letters on Living the Faith, which will be published in March.