In the October issue, the journalist Belén Fernández, who has visited the Darién several times between 2023 and 2026, documents the whipsawing transformations that those villagers have experienced ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

Just consider, at the end of this short novel, how the bodies have fallen. David, our narrator, is passing what he calls the worst night of his life, standing vigil in an empty rented house in the ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton. 416 pages. $45. There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French ...

I’m a garbageman. Day after day, I heave and haul the detritus of the most polluting civilization in history. In two decades, I’ve handled tens of thousands of tons of trash, and the looks I get along ...

David Foster Wallace was a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. Wallace’s work first appeared in the September 1989 issue of the magazine with the story “Everything Is Green,” from Girl with ...

All contributions to the Harper’s Magazine Foundation directly support the production, protection, and dissemination of independent journalism. Whether you are a longtime subscriber or a new reader, ...

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32. By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with ...

Three springs ago, I lost the better part of my mind. I remember it starting with my feet. I woke up one February morning in the South Bronx apartment I’d just moved into with my husband, and my feet ...

While it’s true that other publications are also caving in to the power of “artificial intelligence,” we’re particularly distressed by the submission of our historical rival, once a great voice of ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...