Inside the February 2024 Issue
Bernard Avishai on the battle for a country's soul, Emily Gogolak on the trials of trucking school, Jordan Castro on finding new life in weightlifting, and more.
February 2024
[ R E P O R T ]
Israel’s War Within
On the ruinous history of Religious Zionism
By Bernard Avishai
“Given what Jews endured in the twentieth century, it would be tactless to call these Religious Zionist disciples fascists. Let’s just say they celebrate a nation that is enjoying divine election and frustrated glory, surviving through permanent, agonal war; a nation united by blood and faith, covering up irredentism with a rhetoric of covenanted motherland, educating by indoctrination, devoted to a code of behavior defined by hierarchy, and spreading cynicism about democratic norms, including the very idea of dispassionate truth.”
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • H U T T O ]
Lost Highway
The trials of trucking school
By Emily Gogolak
“To long-haul or not to long-haul was a frequent topic of conversation on the pad, largely due to the money and the allure of the open road. But even long-haul trucking is not what it used to be. Since the Thirties there have been rules about the number of hours truckers can drive at a time, but how those hours are tracked has transformed over the past decade.”
[ M I S C E L L A N Y ]
Getting the Pump
On the resurrection of the body
By Jordan Castro
“When I started, I was perversely insecure about my desire to become stronger, and so I would make jokes: I wanted shoulders so big that I couldn’t fit into my car, or a neck so thick I couldn’t turn my head. Even as lifting became integrated into my daily life, the tone of my thoughts was masked in a voice that was not my normal voice—which still habitually quivered and equivocated, having adopted the typical obsequiousness and timidity that has become synonymous with literary types—but one that was jubilant and dense, thick with burgeoning mirth and vitality.”
[ E S S A Y ]
And It Was So
Creation in Genesis
By Marilynne Robinson
“Something happened, once, so far as we can tell, that eventuated and continues to eventuate in Being as we know it and do not know it, as we will and will not know it, all its consequences borne along in time, which may be, as Einstein said, our stubbornly persistent illusion. The vast cosmos was infinitesimal at its origins, presumably a particle, but this might be supposition, an aid to the imagination, which finds true Nothing inconceivable.”
[ R E V I E W ]
Sometimes Gamesome, Sometimes Sad
The elusive fiction of Phyllis Paul
By Joanna Biggs
“Was it mystery or marketing that would make her books last? She had placed her bets on mystery, and knew she would not live to see the returns. If she was to be remembered, it had to be for her writing.”
D E P A R T M E N T S
[ E A S Y • C H A I R ]
The Palm at the End of the Mind
by Rachel Kushner
[ 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 Lewis Lapham
[ F I C T I O N ]
by Jesse Ball
by Dan Piepenbring
[ P U Z Z L E ]
Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves)
by Richard E. Maltby Jr.
See the full table of contents