HARPER’S MAGAZINE – August 19, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Rise Of The Rent-A-Cop” – Undercover with America’s private police forces…

The Thin Purple Line

The dubious rise of the private-security industry by Jasper Craven

For millennia, the figure of the guard has inspired as much derision as demand. An early antecedent to the modern security guard can be found in ancient Egypt. Nobles employed “doorkeepers” to protect palaces and tombs. The performance of such duties was accorded a measure of reverence even as guards were often cast as apathetic or incompetent. Some hieroglyphs depict doorkeepers as those “who ward off all evil ones”; others show them as sleepy, drunk, or blind.

Many still believe in this image of guards as feckless agents in spaces not in need of protecting. And yet, in a moment of peculiarly American volatility, certain places that guards patrol—like schools, bars, grocery stores, and retail outlets—are increasingly prone to seeing outbursts of violence. These trends might justify a guard’s usefulness if not for the fact that most guards lack the training or legal authority to do much of anything.

Poison Ivy

From Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis, which will be published this month by Dey Street. by Ryann Liebenthal

The Instant Monet Enters the Studio

From L’instant précis où Monet entre dans l’atelier, which was published in 2022 by Éditions de Minuit. Translated from the French in May by Pauline Cochran. by Jean-Philippe Toussaint