Subterranean phonesick blues: Waking up in what was once a trendy part of Brooklyn as the dying sun turns pale blue, you will consider joining a run club, check Slack notifications, and take a ginger shot. This is your life, huddled away in the catastrophic, spooling tepidity of the unwitting party. Responding to this issue’s letters prompt, Harper Review editors Sarah Peter and Zoë Feigelson show us the limitations of undirected living.
For Peter, algorithmic social life keeps us plugged into a panopticon of desires among an anxious, “mimetic” generation keen on chasing change without bucking its convention-craving inertia. Feigelson solves this crisis with Gabriel Tarde’s “microsociology,” moving the party out of crowded, expiring metropoles and into the intimacy of the underground. Tarde’s society, founded on networks of individual wishes, cuts off conformist pressures and returns creativity to sociality. Unshackled from Peter’s “Pandora’s box of mimetic rivalries,” Feigelson’s “utopian romp” of a party isn’t over but continually being reborn.
Brady Santoro, senior editor
Highly agentic: In “Child’s Play,” the cover story of Harper’s Magazine’s February issue, writer Sam Kriss turns his gaze toward the world of artificial intelligence and the “agentic” individuals in its thrall. Because AI platforms have rendered programming near-obsolete, there is a growing fear that the next generation of startups will be headed by those whose radical self-belief and ability to talk up investors more than make up for the absence of genius traditionally associated with Silicon Valley unicorns. The agentic will thrive; the rest of us “will be meat for the coltan mines.”
Along the way, Kriss introduces the reader to a litany of characters, from a megalomaniacal Twitter (sorry, X) raconteur introduced over cheesecake to a vapid clout chaser whose AI-assisted-cheating startup staffed by gym bros seems unlikely to ever turn a profit. “Child’s Play” does not reshape the reader’s perception of AI. Nor does it offer a particularly illuminating or novel perspective on the strange logics that guide venture capital investment in the Bay. It is, however, a rollicking bit of gonzo journalism, a postcard from the most absurd corner of the tech world that claims to hold the future of our working lives. And for that, it is worth reading.
William Moursund, contributing editor
Poison apples: The Moment (2026), A24’s much-anticipated mockumentary of Charli XCX’s sixth studio album and tour, Brat (2024), recently arrived in theaters. The work follows an alternative version of the British singer as she struggles with creative control and personal agency in the months following “brat summer”. Capitalizing on the album’s ethos of partygirl exuberance, hedonism, and unapologetic campiness, Johannes Godwin, Charli XCX’s creative director and the film’s antagonist, threatens to upend brat summer by remaking the project in his own, patently lame image. What follows from Godwin’s repulsively adulterated version is the antithesis of the “brat” moment, a family-friendly, trite production that leaves its star demeaned and drained.
What, then, do we identify as the moment? What aesthetic categories or public expressions satisfy us, and from which do we recoil? Often, what makes a cultural object salient—trendy, cool—is its fortuitous place in the zeitgeist. No stranger to this, the mockumentary repeatedly toys with time and transition, be it through countdown intertitles, sporadic vacations, and a plot bent on revolutionizing a moment whose end is already visible. “Brat summer” is at once a fleeting instance and a lasting marker, and the real Charli XCX succeeds by straddling that divide, avoiding exile into the “khia asylum” of irrelevance—for the moment.
Maximiliano Mendoza, contributing editor
Image: Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti, The Walnut Tree in Benevento (The Witches’ Sabbath), watercolor on paper, circa 1816 (private collection).