The Harper’s Podcast

Mass demonstrations have swept through Israel since January 4, when Yariv Lenin, Israel’s justice minister, announced proposed changes to the country’s judiciary. If enacted, this so-called “Supreme Court override” bill would limit the Court’s power, as well as the power of government legal counselors; in their place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition would be granted a majority on the committee that appoints judges, thereby limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to rule against the executive and strike down legislation. Why is this happening now, and how much is at stake?

The most common explanation is that Netanyahu is (yet again) under indictment, and this judicial overhaul plan would undermine the people and institutions likely to put him in prison. But Bernard Avishai, a professor at Hebrew University and Dartmouth College, the author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic, and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, explains that this is “only half the truth,” and the full explanation is far more complex, requiring an understanding of a culture war between theocracy and democracy that has persisted since Israel’s founding.

Read Avishai’s past essays for Harper’s: https://harpers.org/author/bernardavishai/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Anne Fadiman unpacks her latest essay, “Frog,” a 6,000-word piece about Bunky, her family’s African clawed frog. Although he was easy to care for, this “unpettable pet” raised a number of philosophical and ethical questions about pet ownership. For nearly two decades, Bunky lived inside a too-small aquarium on Fadiman’s kitchen counter, ribbitting for a mate that could never come. Fadiman probes her continued guilt over whether this animal had lived a decent life—after all, you can’t spay or neuter a pet frog. Suffused with this unease, Fadiman’s essay departs from the typically saccharine or sentimental approach to writing about pets and death, respectively. As she explains in this episode, “Death is hard to face, so it’s interesting to face. It’s a literary challenge. And not all deaths are the same.” Bunky’s departure lends lessons on writing, caretaking, connections, confinement—in a word, relationships.

Read Fadiman’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/frog-what-happens-to-the-pets-that-happen-to-you/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance by Ian Mantgani.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Christian Lorentzen sat through the entirety of United States v. Bertelsmann, et al., an antitrust case taken up by the Department of Justice to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. In this episode, he discusses the industry—born in the 1920s as part of a middlebrow revolution, and consolidating in the 1970s to ultimately become today’s Big Five publishing houses. “This corporate agglomeration seems almost inevitable,” Lorentzen explains. “If we lived under a different intellectual property regime and a different system that wasn’t capitalism, maybe things would be different.”


But does lack of competition between publishing houses really harm authors? This is the question at the heart of the trial and Lorentzen’s argument. Though the government ultimately blocked the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the trial made public some questionable practices of the Big Five, such as how publishers can prevent their imprints from upping bids against one another. For better or worse, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins are here to stay, influencing all parts of the world of books—what readers read, and what writers create for the mass market.

Read Lorentzen’s piece: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/at-random-simon-and-schuster-bertelsmann-merger-trial-penguin-random-house/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Caitlin Chandler talks to Violet Lucca about the nature and purpose of the largely unremarked U.S. military presence in Niger. They discuss the history of the conflict in Niger and the way that U.S., European, and Russian interventions in the region have exacerbated the problems left behind by colonial borders. Chandler explains what the U.S. military’s increased reliance on remote warfare after the Iraq War has meant for Nigeriens. She also shares the difficulties of reporting the piece, including the need to hire an armed guard to travel outside the capital. Chandler’s letter appeared in the December 2022 issue.

Read Chandler’s report: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/niger-the-next-frontier-in-the-war-on-terror/

Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

“Every New Yorker deserves dignity, and we are demonstrating that this is possible,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams in May of 2022, shortly after rolling out an initiative to remove homeless encampments throughout the five boroughs. In the following months, Adams implemented other policies—including involuntary hospitalizations for the mentally ill and/or homeless—that granted more power to police and less to the unhoused. However, as Wes Enzinna reports in the February issue, criminalization isn’t the only solution. In 2020, in Philadelphia, unhoused activists squatted in vacated properties, and eventually created a land trust that provided stable housing to dozens of people in need. This unconventional solution defied conservative-liberal thinking, which for decades has been caught in an impasse over whether to criminalize homelessness or boost public benefits. Enzinna, author of a forthcoming book about an Oakland tent city, discusses the replicability of the Philadelphia experiment—and the current state of homelessness discourse, which has increasingly (and inaccurately) focused on mental illness and addiction over economic factors.

Read Enzinna’s reporting on Philadelphia in the February issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/02/no-vacancy-homelessness-land-trust-homes-philadelphia/

Enzinna on the Minneapolis Sheraton: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/the-sanctuary-sheraton-minneapolis/

Enzinna on shack living: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/gimme-shelter-ghost-ship-fire-san-francisco/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Google’s domination of internet search is a fact of life. What’s less apparent—if you don’t work in publishing or advertising—is Google’s control of internet ad sales. It’s estimated that the company pulls in nearly 30 percent of all digital advertising dollars. The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that it “abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches.” In the past, the determinant for antitrust laws is whether or not anticompetitive practices have raised prices for consumers; here, publishers and advertisers have been harmed, which has led to a different—but arguably more malicious—impact on the public. Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, talks through this landmark case.

Read Lynn’s story from 2020: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/the-big-tech-extortion-racket/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Michael Robbins explores the shape that apocalyptic thought has taken in American Christianity (despite its slim textual basis) and in contemporary secular contexts like climate catastrophe. Robbins also draws on systems analysis to bring out the structural factors that could be pushing us to the edge of apocalypse. He discloses his own attitude, which is neither optimistic nor defeatist, but rather informed by religious and leftist commitments, which in his view share a “structure of feeling.”

Read Robbins’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/apocalypse-nowish/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Violet Lucca talks to Sasha Frere-Jones about the signs and symptoms of audiophilia. Frere-Jones explains how Spotify Wrapped, yearly best-ofs, and other attempts to quantify and rank music have disfigured the listening experience. He criticizes the assumption underlying audiophilia: that there is a Platonic ideal of what an album is supposed to sound like. Instead, Frere-Jones compares audiophilia to addiction in its obsession with re-creating a certain prior experience—in this case, a certain sound—to the detriment of new experiences. The podcast ends on a personal note, as Frere-Jones reflects on his need for vibey spaces during the pandemic.

Read “Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon,” which appears in the December issue: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/corner-club-cathedral-cocoon-audiophilia-and-its-discontents/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: https://harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Kate DiCamillo—the author of Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Beatryce Prophecy, and many other novels—speaks with Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Beha about discovering her vocation in children’s literature. DiCamillo discusses how her writing for children is shaped by a sense of responsibility toward them, and what children’s literature can offer to adults. Rather than trading on double entendres and other devices that enliven children’s stories for the parent reading at the bedside, DiCamillo recovers a child’s sense of magic for adult readers—one that isn’t displaced into a realm of fantasy.

Read “On a Winter’s Night”: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/on-a-winters-night-kate-dicamillo/

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.79: harpers.org/save

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

Clare Bucknell talks to Violet Lucca about Giacomo Casanova, the man whose surname is synonymous with romance. Bucknell discusses the difficulty of separating fact from self-invention in his memoir, Histoire de ma vie. She identifies the novelistic tropes that eighteenth-century readers would have recognized in Casanova’s writing and discusses whether the way the Histoire blurs genres prefigures autofiction. Bucknell does not avoid the “challenge of Casanova” and disentangles the ways that Casanova’s readers have tried to apply ethical judgment to the simultaneously entertaining and alienating narration of his life. Bucknell’s review of Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova by Leo Damrosch appears in the November issue.

Read Bucknell’s review: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/the-thoughtful-prick-adventurer-the-life-and-times-of-giacomo-casanova-leo-damrosch/

Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97: harpers.org/save

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Maddie Crum, with production assistance from Ian Mantgani.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com