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In our October issue: Kyle Paoletta on prairie populism, Hari Kunzru on art and censorship after 9/11, Belén Fernández on rise and fall of immigration boomtowns, J. B. MacKinnon on poultry and paranoia in Canada, a new story by Tom Drury, and more.
harpers.org/archive/2026/10/
ALT Cover: Members of the Crawford County Democrats participate in a Fourth of July parade celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, in Pittsburg, Kansas © Victor J. Blue
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"flickering in the shrubs,
a color beyond belief"
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"In brightest sunshine bask; this nipping air,
Sent from some distant clime where Winter wields
His icy scymitar, a foretaste yields
Of bitter change, and bids the flowers beware"
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“The catalyst for my own emotional involvement with baseball was the same sort of thing that caught Marianne Moore.” —George Plimpton
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“Years of propaganda had prepared Americans to accept invasive state surveillance as a necessary evil. Since the jihadis were so widely hated, it was easy to manufacture consent.”
Hari Kunzru on art and censorship after 9/11.
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“Suffocation
Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition
Cattle Decapitation
Cancer Bats
Castle Rat”
Bands that have appeared on the lineup at Hellfest, an annual heavy-metal-focused music festival in Clisson, France, since 2023.
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“Before a town hall in Rock Rapids, Sand described feeling hemmed in by a ‘stupid, broken, two-choice political system that forces you to join a private club to participate.’”
Kyle Paoletta reports on the populist resurgence in the heartland.
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“Until recently, the town had little connection to the rest of Panama, much less to the rest of the world, but things began to drastically change back in 2021.”
Belén Fernández (@MariaBelen_Fdez) on migration boom towns in the Darién Gap.
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“Zionism has proved to be no exception to the dismal rule that political idealism born of extreme suffering contains the seed of its own perversion and decay, and that, driven by fear and vengeful hatred, victims of historical calamities can very quickly turn into executioners.”
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“Brothers don’t wait for an order / they get on their uniforms
Boom / always precise and fatal”
From lyrics of songs by the Israeli rappers the Shadow and Subliminal. Itamar Ben-Gvir, attended the rappers’ joint birthday party in December.
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“By intervening too readily, the artist risked appropriating the tragedy, tastelessly centering personal experience or style. Better not to add a last line and let the facts speak for themselves.”
Hari Kunzru on art after 9/11.
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“Although politicians from the United States have made noise over the past few decades about completing the Pan-American Highway and thereby connecting Panama to Colombia, the present arrangement, with the Darién Gap as a formidable and naturally occurring barrier, better serves imperial purposes.”
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“Monkeys with a computer, a search that never ends (8)”
From Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s October cryptic.
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“The Ostrich Army spoke of the impending incursion as the advent of jackboot autocracy, but plans to resist it seemed more equivocal.”
J. B. MacKinnon reports the movement that arose to protest the culling of hundreds of ostriches.
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“Other kids would ask Rocky if he was mad at his parents for leaving him alone, as if anger would be natural and fun to hear about, but they hadn’t left him alone, they’d left him with Helen, and Rocky didn’t see why he should be mad at someone he didn’t know.”
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“When she was adding a capful of Flor, she saw a dark fluid in the softener compartment. She thought it was dirty water. It didn’t cross her mind that the rust-colored liquid was blood.”
From Blood Is Dripping onto the Courtyard, by Elvira Navarro.
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“This experience of ineffable trauma gave rise to a kind of mental absolutism, an impatience with anything but the most extreme moral simplicity. Hawkish commentators divided the world into childish binaries.” —Hari Kunzru
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“Sold. Give me an entire novel of simultaneous decapitations.”
Dan Piepenbring reviews Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments.
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“We’ve made our own history, too. It’s been just as bloody and complicated. And we’re not strictly, or only, the victims of it.”
From The Savage Mind: An American Legacy, by David Treuer, out next month with Little, Brown.
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“It was the assault on Iran that exposed to broader public scrutiny a strange aberration in the international community: a rapidly surging number of citizens in Europe and North America now marvel at the imprimatur their elites bestowed on Israel.” —Pankaj Mishra
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