HARPER’S MAGAZINE – July 15, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The New Satanic Panic’ – Exorcism in the Age of TikTok; Has Psychology ruined Poetry; America’s Last Granite Carvers; William T. Vollmann reports from Korea’s DMZ, Matthew Karp on the decline of the American left, Jonathan Lethem on museums, Hisham Matar on the dangers of not knowing, Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney, and more.

The Demon Slayers

The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum

The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent. 

Music and Mystery  

Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.

This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.