Inside the March 2025 Issue
Andrew Cockburn on Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy; Lauren Markham investigates the story of a child refugee; Matthew Sherrill listens for the future of music, and more.
March 2025
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • W A S H I N G T O N ]
Rage Against the Machine
Trump’s second attempt at dismantling the bureaucracy
By Andrew Cockburn
“In so many areas, the system does not deliver—from multibillion-dollar weapons projects that don’t work to welfare benefits that don’t arrive and a health system that denies care. The most tangible result of Trump’s depredations will likely be the further enrichment of his ultra-wealthy supporters…Meanwhile, ordinary Americans will grow ever more enraged by the system’s ongoing failures, creating bountiful opportunities for someone who caters to their rage—someone like Donald Trump.”
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • G R E E C E ]
The Ballad of Little Maria
What really happened to a stranded five-year-old refugee?
By Lauren Markham
“There is perhaps no figure more rhetorically powerful than that of the dead or imperiled child. Governments know this; human-rights activists know this; and people in desperate circumstances know this, too…Little Maria, stiff and blue on European soil, became the perfect symbol of the Greek government’s violent border practices…Now that same government was casting doubt on Maria’s death—on Maria’s very existence.”
[ P H O T O • E S S A Y ]
Range Life
A heated history of public lands
By Matt Black
Introduction by James Pogue
“Black’s thermal photography shows us, in a literal sense, the rising heat signature of our presence on public lands across the West. It has recently become common on the right to regard just about any government effort to regulate our use of these lands as the handiwork of an out-of- control bureaucracy bent on driving rural communities out of existence. Meanwhile, it has become common on the left to assume that anyone who works on these lands cares for nothing other than extracting as much value from them as they can, as quickly as possible. Neither of these stories is fully false. Neither of them is fully true.”
[ M I S C E L L A N Y ]
New World Symphonies
Listening for the future of music
By Matthew Sherrill
“The variations on keyboards or guitars that tend to dominate the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition don’t seem likely to herald a wholesale musical sea change any time soon. Aspiring young musicians aren’t exactly lining up to take Infinitone lessons, as far as I know, and I didn’t happen to notice any Segulharpae the last time I wandered into a Guitar Center. But this didn’t necessarily mean that I wouldn’t behold some kind of complete upending of the musical world as we know it. After all, who could have foreseen the coming of the saxhorns?”
[ S T O R Y ]
Why Trees
By Hannah Gold
“Over the following weeks, several of Laura and Mark’s mutual friends began to realize something was up. And who or what had tipped them off? Possibly it was Laura, operating on a minimum of sleep and crossing one bridge too many to attend several casual weekend gatherings in a state of mean intoxication, telling anyone who would listen that there was someone running around the city with her exact same life.”
[ R E V I E W ]
An Unstoppable March
The story of 2 Tone
By Ian Penman
“Ska as rendered by the 2 Tone crew was a protest-any-hegemony template that took root in the most improbable places…What was it about this intensely local phenomenon that allowed it to become a musical Esperanto? This is a ghost story of sorts, written in cycles and loops, loafers and suits, ornery protest and wired-to-the-skies dance weekends.”
D E P A R T M E N T S
[ L E T T E R S ]
Andy Cush, Robert Rankin
[ E A S Y • C H A I R ]
By Anatol Lieven
[ 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 Marquis W. Childs
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
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