Inside the March 2024 Issue
Andrew Cockburn on how Big Tech is losing the wars of the future, a photo essay on Ukraine from Sabiha Çimen, Elizabeth Barber on antinatalism, and more.
March 2024
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • W A S H I N G T O N ]
The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem
How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future
By Andrew Cockburn
“Artificial intelligence may indeed affect the way our military operates. But the notion that bright-eyed visionaries from the tech industry are revolutionizing our military machine promotes a myth that this relationship is not only new, but will fundamentally improve our defense system—one notorious for its insatiable appetite for money, poorly performing weapons, and lost wars. In reality, the change flows in the other direction, as new recruits enter the warm embrace of the imperishable military-industrial complex, eager to learn its ways.”
[ P H O T O • E S S A Y ]
Theater of War
Photographs by Sabiha Çimen
“My philosophy was: Don’t think about war and there will be no war. But this was a misguided perception of reality.”
— Pavlo Aldoshyn, Ukranian actor turned sniper
[ E S S A Y ]
The Case Against Children
Among the antinatalists
By Elizabeth Barber
“People would rather be enthusiastic collaborators in a global project than be skeptics of its fundamental integrity. Antinatalism implies or counts on our eventual extinction, and thinking this way is painful.”
[ F O L I O ]
The Holocaust Angle
How a group of NIMBYs rewrote Alderney’s history
By Rebecca Panovka
“If there is a political utility to conspiracy theories, it’s that they can nudge public attention toward things that have been whitewashed, kept secret, or left unexplained. It took a series of wild allegations—together with the fanatical exertions of a group of second-home owners—to force the U.K. to reevaluate its half-century-long insistence that there had been fewer than four hundred exclusively Russian deaths on Alderney.”
[ R E V I E W ]
Lady Day of the Alhambra
Billie Holiday’s changeable shad
By Ian Penman
“What makes Holiday’s delivery so inimitable? Her most characteristic tone is beguilingly indeterminate: a new kind of song pleasure, mixing distance and intimacy. And within this misting or slurring we might locate a different sort of resistance. One way of hearing her: all the land and space and ease she was denied in life because of her color became in song a dream of leisure, movement, reflection—a place to be that is boundless, utopian, up in the air. This is not the stoicism of the blues or the expansive outreach of gospel; these songs speak more of individual succor, playfulness, abandon. And other qualities that are harder to name. What is the opposite of anxiety?”
D E P A R T M E N T S
[ E A S Y • C H A I R ]
by Hari Kunzru
[ 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 Nicholas Von Hoffman
[ F I C T I O N ]
by Sanaë Lemoine
by Dan Piepenbring
[ P U Z Z L E ]
by Richard E. Maltby Jr.
See the full table of contents