A Mark Twain Revival

Plus: the best of 175 years of Harper's, James Pogue on the myth of white genocide, and religion in education

Harper’s Magazine

May 23, 2025

Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.

A Mark Twain Revival

Mark Twain on the steps leading up to his study at Quarry Farm, New York, 1903, by T. E. Marr. Courtesy the Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira College, New York

In our 175th anniversary issue, John Jeremiah Sullivan reconsiders Mark Twain’s legacy in American literature. Sullivan references Twain’s essay “Mental Telegraphy,” published in the magazine in December 1891. “Twain was interested all his life in what he called ‘mental telegraphy,’ the capacity of human brains to transmit and receive information to and from other brains, at a distance,” writes Sullivan. “We smile at it now, but this was one of the ways in which Twain was very much of his time—‘unalienated,’ in Leslie Fiedler’s phrase, from the American popular mind.”

Read “Mental Telegraphy”

[March 2019]

The Myth of White Genocide

By James Pogue

View of Diepsloot township, Johannesburg. Photograph by Childa Santrucek. Courtesy Alamy Stock Photo

To the extent that news about land reform in South Africa has reached international audiences at all, it’s been refracted through the lens of a narrative promoted by white conservatives about a supposed “white genocide”—killings of mostly Afrikaner farmers—equating land redistribution with race war. Even though there’s no direct connection between murders of white farmers and land reform, an idea has nonetheless taken hold in the international media of landowners under murderous assault by the black masses, the clearest symbol that in twenty-five years of post-apartheid majority rule whites have become a persecuted minority.