Harper’s Notes (10/27/25)

The Harper Review’s weekly newsletter: Dogma, dialect, deputies, and more.

The editors

October 27, 2025

Future wasteland: In the latest contribution to The Harper Review’s fall letter prompt, “we should still believe in progress,” Rowan Smith offers us a cautionary tale. In Smith’s home county of Santa Clara, California, progress is a religion. In Silicon Valley, big tech’s promises for the future loom over life. But this cult of optimism has distracted residents from the consequences of big tech’s creations that they must live with—Santa Clara county boasts the densest concentration of National Priorities List superfund sites in the country. This waste is not an accident but rather a necessary component of the march of progress: “The future arrives sooner when we don’t have to clean up the past.” The dogma of “move fast and break things” is one of adventure and innovation, but perhaps, Smith writes, we ought to pay closer attention to the costs of the fantasies we’ve been sold.

Declan Rexer, managing editor

Apartment speak:In high school during COVID-19, I spent hours scrolling through the US-based renter’s website Zillow to find my “dream home.” Back then, I set no preferences for myself and believed in the quality of every apartment listing. I splurged (in my daydreams and search box) on “French doors,” “original wood floors,” and a whole wall of “exposed brick.” I had no neuroses, and so I arrived at a landscape of unlimited beds, baths, backyards, and square footage. At a moment when the world was placing so many constraints on young people, it felt like an act of rebellion to imagine an alternative future, perhaps especially one that seemed the least practical to attain.

That was all good and indulgent, but the prospect of real apartment hunting looks very different at the other end of four years in college. As Jane Stern’s “Speaking Apartment” in The Paris Review reminded me, even filters can’t defeat deceptive Apartment Speak. In this easily misunderstood dialect, Stern explains, an advertisement with the word “charming” actually means “crooked floors,” “as is” means “a complete wreck,” and “airy” means “broken windows.” For young people lost in the Zillowverse, Stern, an expert with 42 books to her name, is a proven guide, faithfully translating bullshit to English.

Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor

Inside job: Last week, journalist Cerise Castle visited the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression to present her ongoing research into deputy gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Before a packed house, Castle catalogued a network of sheriff’s deputies who she alleges are responsible for dozens of police shootings over the past several decades.

This project is deeply personal to Castle. Older readers of The Harper Review may remember the blockbuster lawsuits and Los Angeles Times reporting that first brought the Lynwood Vikings deputy gang to light back in the early 90s—a native of Lynwood herself, Castle remembers when she first learned that those entrusted with keeping her neighborhood safe were, in fact, tattooed and initiated members of a gang. Working primarily with FOIA-ed police reports, old court filings, and internal LA County documents, Castle documents a culture bereft of accountability, in which costly police misconduct lawsuits have not been enough to spur the county towards serious reform.

For their part, the LA County Sheriff’s Department has taken a variety of stances on deputy gangs, from dismissing them as benign “deputy cliques” to formally banning the gangs. Castle’s original fifteen-part story, titled “A Tradition of Violence,” can be found on Knock LA. She is currently working on a book that will further detail her findings.

William Moursund, contributing editor

Image: Roger Fenton, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, salted paper print, 1855 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).