Harper’s Magazine

“Then, an invitation arrived in my inbox: BE A CENSUS TAKER…At $25 an hour, the work was a potential lifeline. As a journalist, I was intrigued by the possibility of observing the enterprise—’the federal government’s largest and most complex peacetime operation,’ according to the National Research Council—up close. How, I wondered, could the government safely send hundreds of thousands of people to knock on doors across the country in the midst of a pandemic?”

“Nawabshah, home to more than a million people, has the untidy, nondescript feel of just about any other small Pakistani city: tangled power lines, tacky roundabouts, squat buildings. It has one consistent claim to national fame, however: its dry, punishing heat, the suffering of which residents flaunt with pride and masochistic smugness.”

“Anton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation.”

“The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.”

“A personal history of meat.”

Educating the TikTok generation.

“The psychological risks of meditation.”

“In Zion National Park, crowding is such that one of the most popular trails had to be temporarily closed in 2017 to airlift eight tons of human excrement from public outhouses that a journalist described as an “open sewer.””

“What happens when we talk to animals?”

Martin Scorsese on “content,” the films of Federico Fellini, and the art of cinema.