Inside the April 2025 Issue
Lily Scherlis on the social-skills crisis in the American workplace; a never-before-published story by Charles Portis; Kent Russell on patrol with the Guardian Angels, and more.
April 2025
[ E S S A Y ]
Going Soft
Future-proofing the American worker
By Lily Scherlis
“But even as soft skills claim to be a solution to automation, they also help you automate yourself, reducing human interaction to an arsenal of techniques programmed into the mind. Soft skills will apparently rescue us from redundancy even as they render human interaction a little more mechanical. Oddly, the crisis is not about how we will operate or control machines. It’s about how we will operate and control one another.”
[ F I C T I O N ]
The Keys to Veracruz
From the unfinished novel The Woman from Nowhere
By Charles Portis
In a 2023 essay for Harper’s Magazine coinciding with the Library of America's publication of Charles Portis’s Collected Works, deputy editor Will Stephenson wrote that Portis’s brother Richard had many years before “spoken of another novel that was never published,” set in Veracruz, Mexico. “What became of it?” Stephenson asked. Following Portis’s death, a number of significant discoveries were made. In 2022, in the basement of a Little Rock, Arkansas, home that Portis had originally purchased for his parents, workers repairing the house’s HVAC system found a trove of his manuscripts, notes, and correspondence. And in his own apartment, the family recovered what remained of his efforts to begin the sixth novel, The Woman from Nowhere, excerpted here for the first time.
[ M I S C E L L A N Y ]
The Last Detail
On patrol with the Guardian Angels
By Kent Russell
“What we were doing was performing a ritual of sympathetic magic. We donned the vestments and we projected intentionality into the universe. We dared to care, and we hoped that, like shamans going through the motions of a rain dance, our ceremonial observance would bring down from heaven the absent phenomenon: civic spirit.”
[ R E P O R T ]
The Social Turn
Psychoanalysis at an inflection point
By Maggie Doherty
“The social turn had its problems, but it had drawn an influx of clinicians and researchers to a profession in desperate need of new blood. Without them, the American psychoanalytic community might well remain a homogeneous group of aging professionals talking among themselves.”
[ M E M O I R ]
Ganny
Truer words at a funeral
By Joseph Earl Thomas
“I needed a response that others could tolerate, not a truer expression of thought or feeling, but a stock phrase or platitude, some out-of-context quote, something that would allow me to be part of a community, basking in the purity of our own innocence, never to dwell on our collective abandonment of this woman, never to raise a question whose answer might prove difficult; we needed a distraction, a button to press, a symbol to point to or look away from at our convenience, and in this we were all so grossly American.”
[ R E V I E W ]
The Passive Trickster
Katie Kitamura's anti-expressive fiction
By Lidija Haas
“Kitamura’s deliberate self-confinement within novelistic conventions—a single narrative in a realistic setting; a minute focus on the thoughts and feelings and everyday interactions of characters who gradually change over time—highlights her restriction of the reader’s access to the customary depths of the form. Her passive, watchful, alienated protagonists narrate in an uncannily restrained first person, marked by what they don’t know or can’t express about themselves and those around them.”
D E P A R T M E N T S
[ E A S Y • C H A I R ]
By Matthew Karp
[ T H E • H A R P E R ‘ S • I N D E X ]
[ R E A D I N G S ]
and more...
[ F R O M • T H E • A R C H I V E ]
By Ann Hulbert
By Dan Piepenbring
[ P U Z Z L E ]
By Richard E. Maltby Jr.
See the full table of contents
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