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July 2025

[Report]

Shadow of a Doubt

How OCD came to haunt American life

by ,
[Essay]

The Geological Sublime

Butterflies, deep time, and climate change

by ,
[Letter from Oceania]

Lost Tribes of the South Pacific

How a band of island nations became Israel’s staunchest defenders

by ,

Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Email us about articles in the magazine.

[Harper’s Index]

Chance that FEMA declared a major disaster in the United States on any given day last year : 1 in 6

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who experienced at least one of these disasters : 34

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that an American who was displaced by a disaster last year has not returned home : 1 in 9

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who fear that they or a loved one will be deported : 19

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say they have recently delayed a major purchase because of tariffs : 1/3

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who say they have canceled such a purchase entirely : 1/4

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who said last year that foreign trade represented an opportunity to grow the U.S. economy : 60

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who say so now : 81

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage increase over the past year in incidents of maritime piracy : 35

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans who say that the country would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing : 4/5

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Who say they themselves would be better off working in manufacturing : 1/4

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the number of American lawyers per capita has increased since 1970 : 4

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of instruction hours that it takes to become a lawyer in the United States : 1,250

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

To become a licensed hairdresser : 1,500

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease since 2022 in jobs in the film and television industry in Los Angeles : 23

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Total number of “shooting days” on Los Angeles film sets in 2022 : 52,837

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In 2024 : 30,574

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage decrease since 2020 in the number of computer programmers employed in the United States : 38

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of U.S. math teachers who use AI in their work : 1/5

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Of English teachers : 2/5

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Of school principals : 3/5

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Factor by which the prevalence of the word “kiss” in English-language publications has increased since 2000 : 7

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

The word “orgasm” : 5

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage by which Pornhub users under the age of 25 are more likely than others to search for foot-related pornography : 28

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

By which they are more likely to search for virtual-reality pornography : 136

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of violent attacks committed by “pedophile hunters” in the United States since 2023 : 170

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage change since 2023 in the portion of Democrats who say the government should restrict false information online : –17

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

In the portion of Republicans who say so : +10

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of remaining phone battery life at which the average American says they begin to “panic” : 38

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Portion of Americans in relationships who have looked at their partner’s text messages without permission : 1/2

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Number of ceasefires that occurred worldwide between 1989 and 2020 : 2,203

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of these that were sustained for the agreed-upon time period : 40

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated minimum amount that the average American taxpayer spent on weapons for Israel last year : $112.12

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Estimated number of children worldwide who will lose access to malnutrition treatment as a result of cuts to USAID : 6,500,000

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a malnourished child who loses access to such treatment will die within three months : 1 in 2

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Number of excess deaths projected to occur by 2040 if cuts to foreign aid remain in place : 25,300,000

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Democrats who believe that Republicans are “downright evil” : 48

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Republicans who believe this of Democrats : 53

July 2025
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Americans who say that Donald Trump should be the pope : 6

July 2025

Readings

[Essay]

Libel to do Anything
by ,
[Internal Affairs]

Shitty Boss
[Story]

Goggles
by ,
[Collectibles]

Gotta Respect ’Em All
[Travelogue]

New England Is China
by ,
[Psych Ops]

Holy See
[Ethology]

The Battle of Waterloo
[Fiction]

Spool of Thought
by ,
[Poem]

Rain Yet to Come
by ,

Hundredth Repetition, After High Noon, a painting by Dianna Settles, whose work was on view last month at MARCH, in New York City. Courtesy the artist and MARCH, New York City

Cascading Roses (parian body, copper, and terra-cotta) and Tulip Stems (soft-paste porcelain, glazes, overglaze, and copper), sculptures by Vladimir Kanevsky, whose work is on view at the Frick Collection, in New York City. The sculptures pay homage to flowers selected by Helen Clay Frick for the collection’s opening in 1935. Courtesy the artist

A week of Sundays, a painting by Radu Oreian, whose work was on view last month at 1969 Gallery, in New York City. Courtesy the artist and 1969 Gallery, New York City

I’m for the birds, a painting by Hulda Guzmán, whose work is on view at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Courtesy the artist, Alexander Berggruen, New York City, and Stephen Friedman Gallery

Photographs by Kevin Cooley from his book The Wizard of Awe, which was published in March by the Eriskay Connection. Cooley created these images of and in collaboration with the pyrotechnist Kenneth Ray Miller, who, as a result of the publication of some of the images in Popular Science, was indicted in 2020 on federal charges of illegally manufacturing, dealing, transporting, and possessing explosives. Miller served nearly two years in prison. Cooley’s work from this series is on view this month at Park Life, in San Francisco. © The artist

Photograph by Kevin Cooley from his book The Wizard of Awe, which was published in March by the Eriskay Connection. Cooley created these images of and in collaboration with the pyrotechnist Kenneth Ray Miller, who, as a result of the publication of some of the images in Popular Science, was indicted in 2020 on federal charges of illegally manufacturing, dealing, transporting, and possessing explosives. Miller served nearly two years in prison. Cooley’s work from this series is on view this month at Park Life, in San Francisco. © The artist
[Letters]

Letters
[Easy Chair]

Trump’s Darwinian America
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s Index
[Report]

Shadow of a Doubt

How OCD came to haunt American life

by ,
[From the Archive]

Doctored Results
by ,
[Essay]

The Geological Sublime

Butterflies, deep time, and climate change

by ,
[Letter from Oceania]

Lost Tribes of the South Pacific

How a band of island nations became Israel’s staunchest defenders

by ,
[Annotation]

Forbidden Outputs

Jailbreaking Grok’s secret bias

by ,
[Essay]

Demanding Pleasures

On the art of observation

by ,
[Fiction]

A Dog in a Thunderstorm
by ,
[Reviews]

New Books
by ,
[Reviews]

“My Malformed Bones”

Harry Crews’s counterlives

by ,
[Puzzle]

Plus Fours

See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[Findings]

Hot water circulating in the pants improves older adults’ cardiovascular health.

[Findings]

Among Israeli irritable bowel syndrome sufferers, Jews have more diarrhea, whereas Arabs have more constipation.

[Findings]

Life expectancy in Gaza fell by 34.9 years between October 2023 and September 2024, and the probability of death in childhood increased sixfold from 2022 to 2023.

[Findings]

Macaque mothers who lose an infant exhibit a period of protest but, unlike human mothers, do not subsequently exhibit despair.

[Findings]

The Antarctic midge, the continent’s sole native insect, was found to be the only organism to undergo both quiescence and obligate diapause.

[Findings]

A helicopter crash in South Africa was determined to have been caused by an unsecured penguin from Bird Island falling onto the cyclic-­pitch controller.

[Findings]

An Egyptologist who examined depictions of the sky goddess Nut bending over her brother and father, drawn from 555 ancient coffins, theorized that the version on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a chantress to Amun­-Re, represents the Great Rift that runs through the Milky Way as a dark line running through Nut’s starry body.

[Findings]

The universe may rotate at a rate of two turns every trillion years.

[Findings]

Danish scientists suggested that adults abstaining from all other meat can eat nine tenths of two chicken breasts a week without exceeding planetary boundaries.

[Findings]

Robot elephants are becoming increasingly popular at Indian temples.

[Findings]

Early Bronze Age burials in the Upper Tigris may have accorded special favor to dead adolescents, whereas after the emergence of social hierarchy burial privilege shifted to dead elites.

[Findings]

The dismembered skeletons in a pit at Bayanbulak, possibly the site Emperor Wu of Han’s chief historian termed the Fortification for Receiving Surrender, were likely farmers from northern China conscripted during the Han–Xiongnu Wars.

[Findings]

The first antique instance of cinnabar-stained teeth was documented in a Subeshi woman in Grave M11 at Shengjindian Cemetery.

[Findings]

Greco-Roman sculpture was perfumed.

[Findings]

Dogs act more jealous when their owners interact with robots than when they read magazines.

[Findings]

The foreheads of teddy bears grew significantly taller between 1900 and 1980, though the bears did not become appreciably cuter over the same period.

[Findings]

Across racial categories women’s eyelash length is perceived as increasingly healthy up to one third of the width of the eye, past which further elongation becomes perceived as less healthy but increasingly indicative of sexual receptivity.

[Findings]

Male fruit flies seek out alcohol because it makes them more attractive to female flies and more successful at mating, not, as was previously theorized, because they are depressed about not yet having mated.

[Findings]

Male bluelined octopuses inject poison into the aortas of their female partners at the start of copulation, likely to avoid being eaten afterward.

[Findings]

Chemists grew gold in total darkness.

[Findings]

Five zebra fish per liter of tank water can be collectively euthanized by electric shock.

[Findings]

Rats can distinguish between Riesling and sauvignon blanc.

[Findings]

A literature review enumerated cases of envenomation by dead snakes, including those of a Chinese chef killed by the severed head of a spitting cobra, a child in Minnesota injured by a freeze-dried prairie-rattlesnake head worn as a tie tack, and two drunk Indians hospitalized after they chewed on the head of a dead krait.

[Findings]

Americans with open personalities are less likely to express end-of-life regret about how much they spent on food, whereas agreeable people are disposed to regret spending money on food, clothing, leisure, and financial help to others.

[Findings]

Polish doctors urged further investigation into compulsive frotteurs.

[Findings]

Scottish hen parties were deemed to contain ritualistic profanation.

[Findings]

The mummy of the Mysterious Lady was not pregnant.

[Findings]

A skull previously thought to belong to Cleopatra’s sister was found to be that of an Italian boy with a deformed jaw.

[Findings]

Fifty-two experts were consulted to produce a six-criteria test for predicting vasectomy regret.

[Findings]

French archaeologists discovered a Gaulish curse tablet tucked between a skeleton’s legs.

[Findings]

A Viking grave in Norway appeared to contain a vulva stone.

[Findings]

Chinese scientists successfully raised to adulthood, then dissected, mice born of two fathers.

[Findings]

Rabbits are capable of digesting their teeth as they wear down and reusing the calcium to grow new ones.

[Findings]

It is possible that songbirds who migrate at night socialize with one another in flight and speak to other species.

[Findings]

A survey of 1,328 urinary events found that, unlike contagious yawning, the contagious urination of chimpanzees appears to be correlated to social rank rather than social closeness.

[Findings]

Coyotes in dense areas of Chicago die younger if the average human income is high.

[Findings]

Physicists detected negative time.

[Findings]

Excessive tearfulness in the right eye of a fifty-five-year-old Japanese woman was traced to a supernumerary punctum.

[Findings]

Six dead dolphins who washed up in Texas were found to have fentanyl in their blubber.

[Findings]

Archaeologists speculated that, in the largest known Bronze Age massacre in Britain, attackers killed, butchered, and ate men, women, and children as a political statement.

[Findings]

Scientists urged the abandonment of attempts to create mirror life, against which existing life-forms may possess no defenses.

[Findings]

Monkeys are faster at spotting a snake among salamanders than a salamander among snakes.

[Findings]

Medication may treat those who suffer from disorders that make them smooth-brained.

[Findings]

Brain scans corroborated the unpleasant psychoacoustic effects of Aztec death whistles.

[Findings]

Assamese tribesmen were found to identify with elephants through a sense of mutual loss, poverty, and uncertainty.

[Findings]

Scientists suggested that human culture is superior to that of other animals because it can integrate limitless sequences of subgoals.

[Findings]

In Europe, conservatives are outbreeding progressives.

[Findings]

Researchers noted the positive effects of ecstatic epilepsy and synthesized fifty-three theoretical models of delusion.

[Findings]

Witnessing cringeworthy moments improves the observer’s self-perception.

[Findings]

In Japan, erectile function among young men was determined to be low by the first nationwide survey employing the internationally validated Erection Hardness Score.

[Findings]

Pentoxifylline can mitigate the damage caused by subjecting stallions to scrotal heat stress.

[Findings]

Bay Area researchers debuted a Narcissism Interview Scale for Employment.

[Findings]

More than half of U.S. civilians tasked with evaluating a bombing target endorsed killing unidentified bystanders.

[Findings]

Solitary chicks emit fewer anxious peeps if given a mirror for company.

[Findings]

Marine biologists described the Red Sea’s grumpy dwarfgoby.

[Findings]

Bottlenose dolphins, who were found to inhale and exhale microplastics, respond to a smile with a smile one third of the time.

[Findings]

Archaeologists identified the skeleton recovered from the Sverresborg Castle’s well in 1938 as the man described in the Sverris Saga as having been thrown into the well in 1197.

[Findings]

A primatologist, a mammalogist, and a linguist concluded that the jerky, rhythmic dance of sexually mature female black crested gibbons is innate rather than culturally transmitted.

[Findings]

Parmesan researchers found that “benevolently sexist” adults are less likely to own “clit-oriented” sex toys.

[Findings]

Germans under thirty experience more climate distress and have more rough sex.

[Findings]

Mars gained and then lost a second moon in the autumn.

[Findings]

Scientists determined why some aging gray horses turn white faster than others.

[Findings]

The stranger churches of sixteenth-century London extensively spied on their congregants, noting when women accused other women of being “pocked whores.”

[Findings]

Evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Proto­-Indo­-European language was spread by humans on horseback may have overlooked how humans who ride cows, donkeys, and wild asses exhibit the same hip­ -socket deformations, as previously observed in twentieth­-century nuns.

[Findings]

Scientists allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a soft five-limbed robot and a four-wheel vehicle.

[Findings]

Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills.

[Findings]

EEG experts disagreed on whether, in the future, brain waves could be used to read dreams and long-­term memories.

[Findings]

Turkish doctors reported a case of penile autoamputation with religious delusion.

[Findings]

AI researchers determined that large language models pose no existential threat to humanity and created an AI algorithm that can detect scientific articles written by other AI algorithms.

[Findings]

Mammoths may have been killed with planted pikes rather than with thrown spears.

[Findings]

The birth of a white buffalo fulfilled a Lakota prophecy portending better times.

[Findings]

Wildfires near Canadian mines were found to have released unprecedented levels of arsenic, and wildfires in Maui were making residents unhappy.

[Findings]

Living near oil and gas development sites depresses people who are trying to get pregnant.

[Findings]

The Journal of Pediatric Genetics retracted a study on Islamic beliefs concerning the possible supernatural causes of birth defects on the grounds that the research lacked a scientific basis.

[Findings]

A researcher noticed that a Tartessian slate tablet depicting battle scenes also contains a previously unknown alphabet.

[Findings]

The royal swan marker reported that the depression of the Thames population, previously noted during the late queen’s reign, continues under the king.

[Findings]

Researchers claimed that researchers have been underreporting same-­sex sexual activity among animals.

[Findings]

Cocaine trafficking was found to threaten the golden­-cheeked warbler.

[Findings]

A survey of 7 million parliamentary speeches across eight countries and several decades found that politicians use less complex language as it gets hotter.

[Findings]

The diet of Japanese youth is growing more confectionary, and Americans are poisoning themselves more severely.

[Findings]

Unaffiliated voters are growing more spiteful toward both Democrats and Republicans.

[Findings]

Researchers debuted an 88 percent accurate hate­-speech detector and a superior sarcasm detector and may be able to send messages back in time.

[Findings]

Increased border­-wall height was tentatively linked to a thirtyfold increase in the rate of migrant drowning deaths off San Diego.

[Findings]

Women bond more closely with therapy bulls than men do.

[Findings]

The perceived onset of old age increases by approximately one year for every four to five years a person ages.

[Findings]

A study of brain­-injured but not brain­-dead patients found that many would have survived had their families not chosen to withdraw life support.

[Findings]

Sets of both fraternal and identical twins exhibit internally similar metacognitive abilities, suggesting that metacognition is environmental rather than heritable.

[Findings]

Southern California beach erosion is expected to increase by 50 percent by 2050.

[Findings]

Archaeologists translated cuneiform tablets recording shareholder agreements for the first company in Anatolia.

[Findings]

The melting of the poles is making Earth’s days longer.

[Findings]

The hatching season of a male spear squid (Heterololigo bleekeri) determines whether he will pursue bold or sneaky mating tactics.

[Findings]

A bionic eye deciphered a scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that reveals the burial place of Plato, who was found to have complained about the musical abilities of the enslaved Thracian girl who played the flute for him as he lay dying.

[Findings]

Humans are losing their ability to digest cellulose.

[Findings]

Toxicity has remained a consistent feature of online interactions since 1989.

[Findings]

Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas.

[Findings]

A metal scar on the surface of the white dwarf WD 0816-310 indicated that it has cannibalized other bodies in its orbit.

[Findings]

An orca acting alone killed a great white shark and ate its liver.

[Findings]

Genomic analysis indicated that psychedelic mushrooms emerged around the time of the Mesozoic–Cenozoic mass extinction.

[Findings]

The playing speed of a metal guitarist directly correlates with his intrasexual competitiveness but not his mating success.

[Findings]

Depression in humans is correlated with higher body temperature, and cold-water swimming mitigates menopause symptoms.

Je tombai à terre et j’entendis une voix (detail), a painting by Dhewadi Hadjab © Dhewadi Hadjab, ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris. Photograph courtesy Archives Mennour Microfiche

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