Inside the June 2024 Issue
Andrew Lipstein on the rise and risk of passive investing, Thomas Meaney in search of the new world order in Munich, the cult that survived the end times, and more.
June 2024
[ R E P O R T ]
What Goes Up
Does the rise of index funds spell catastrophe?
by Andrew Lipstein
“Against a backdrop of recent financial hubris—including meme stocks, crypto, NFTs, SPACs, SPARCs, and alternative private-public investments—index funds are the safe bet, the old standby, a choice so sound your employer makes it for you. The question is whether this is proof that passive investing can’t be a bubble—or only a sign we need to rethink what a bubble can be.”
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • G E R M A N Y ]
Masters of War
In search of the new world order in Munich
By Thomas Meaney
“It may be that Washington’s plans for Europe worked only in a world in which Russia decisively lost the Ukraine war, or hung on in a stalemate but suffered the kind of economic collapse that the sanctioneers believed they were inflicting. But a Russia that’s a nuclear-armed Chinese resource colony capable of churning out millions of rounds of 152mm shells is likely to put paid to American illusions about a war that was initially greeted as a welcome chance to deliver a body blow.”
[M I S C E L L A N Y ]
The Prophet Who Failed
After the apocalypse that wasn’t
By Emily Harnett
“On March 15, 1990, hundreds of followers waited for the nuclear strike that Elizabeth had prophesied in a series of increasingly impassioned public addresses over the course of several years. Over three days, they hunkered underground, surrounded by gold coins and assault rifles, only to emerge into the sunlight of a bitterly ordinary day.”
[ S T O R Y ]
The Pleasure of a Working Life
By Michael Deagler
“At the time of the adman’s death, Gary Minihan had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years. He spent the first thirty as a letter carrier in Abington, Pennsylvania, where his pragmatic father, who also carried mail, had persuaded him to take what was meant to be a temporary job at the age of twenty-two, after Gary had quit junior college for the second time.”
[ R E V I E W S ]
The Scavenger of History
On Eliot Weinberger
By Wyatt Mason
“Translation is not a cloistered but a cosmopolitan activity: one must have lived in the world, not merely in the book, in order not to mismanage it. It is an act of reportage, a documenting of the events of the lived world, one that demands of the reporter that they listen to a text as they would to the voice of another person, the breath behind it, its quaverings.”
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 ]
A Suit with an Extra Pair of Pants
and more...
[ F R O M • T H E • A R C H I V E ]
by L. J. Davis
by Dan Piepenbring
[ P U Z Z L E ]
by Richard E. Maltby Jr.
See the full table of contents