Harper's Magazine

On Jean Strouse and the art of biography by Ruth Franklin

A small town faces down climate disaster by Gary Greenberg Collages by Vanessa Saba.

The past and future of hot-rodding in America by Rachel Kushner

O n the first of June, 1901, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, a doctor and writer of short stories and plays, a famous man who also suffered from tuberculosis

How politics destroyed contemporary art by Dean Kissick Illustrations by Franz Lang

[Weekly Review] Weekly Review In Tromsø, Norway, fishermen trawling for halibut caught the USS Virginia, a nuclear-powered submarine armed with cruise missiles.

H ow does History move? A generation ago, in the Nineties, it seemed to have forgotten how: perhaps, as Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, History was on a journey, or it was sleeping and not to be awoken.

O nce, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

132 hamsters broke free of their cages in the cargo hull of a Portuguese commercial airplane and stormed the cabin, grounding the craft for four days; about 200 monkeys in Thailand who had been caged by Lopburi police escaped and attacked the station, forcing officers to barricade themselves inside; and three men in Michigan were reported to have died in a 48-hour period from heart attacks suffered while deer-hunting, two of which occurred while trying to haul away the bodies of animals they killed.

A version of this column originally ran in Le Devoir on November 4, 2024. Translated from the French by Elettra Pauletto.