Features from Harper's Magazine, the award-winning journal of opinion, are available in the UK and Ireland through Knight Features.

Newspaper clients receive a selected article from Harper's every week. At the beginning of the month, clients get the acclaimed "Harper's Index," a collection of about 40 one-line statistics collected from diverse sources, providing a sounding of the spirit of the times. The following week's selections come from the other sections of the magazine: "New Books," a round-up of short reviews by acclaimed book critic John Leonard; "Weekly Review," a helpful overview of the week's biggest news stories; and "Findings," a compendium of medical, scientific, and environmental absurdities drawn from recent reports. Clients will also periodically receive "Readings," a medley of notable shorter works, including letters, poems and artwork and "Essays," full-length explorations of contemporary subjects by well-known, highly regarded writers.

Harper's is known for balancing coverage of political, social, economic and cultural themes with essays and fiction by distinguished writers and promising new voices.

Founded in 1850, Harper's Magazine today boasts a monthly circulation of over 225,000. Over the years, Harper's has published the writings of such notables as Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Jack London, Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. Among the many honors Harper's has received are 13 National Magazine Awards, the O. Henry Award, the Thomas Paine Journalism Award, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and Best American Magazine Writing.

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February 25th, 2009

Findings
By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
A gay penguin couple in China's Polar Land zoo were ostracized by other penguins and then placed in a separate enclosure after they made repeated attempts to steal the eggs of straight penguin couples and replace them with stones. Men who have more brothers than sisters are more likely to have sons, and men who have more sisters than brothers are more likely to have daughters. Babies who ride in forward-facing buggies may be more stressed and develop more slowly than babies in parent-facing buggies, and babies who are carried in slings cry less than babies who are transported in buggies. Researchers may have identified a genetic variant that undermasculinizes the fetal brain and thereby contributes to male-to-female transgenderism. Light drinking during pregnancy, said scientists, does not harm babies and seems to produce smarter, better-behaved children, though this effect c ...

February 18th, 2009

Harper's Weekly
By Christopher R. Beha
The House and Senate reached agreement on a $789 billion economic-stimulus plan, which President Obama is expected to sign into law despite a lack of support from Republicans.
" When Roosevelt did this," said Rep. Steve Austria (R-Ohio), "he put our country into a Great Depression. That's just history."
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin both turned 200. Anglican hymns were sung at Darwin's tomb in Westminster Abbey. A poll showed that 43 percent of Britons believe in creationism. In a speech at the Capitol, President Obama called Lincoln a "singular figure who in so many ways made my own story possible -- and who in so many ways made America's story possible."
Stocks fell sharply after Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, whom Obama called "the chief economic spokesman for my administration," announced his plans for further bailouts of the financial sec ...

February 11th, 2009

Harper's Weekly
By Claire Gutierrez
The Senate passed an $827 billion stimulus package with the help of three Republicans who forced Democrats to cut billions of dollars that would have provided aid to states and education programs. Economists said the cuts were "outrageous" and "disastrous." "The point is to keep lots of extra Americans from being unemployed for the next two years and have them, instead, do useful things for the country," said Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong. "(Sens. Ben) Nelson and (Susan) Collins, well, it's not clear what their objective is."
The House and the Senate were negotiating differences in their packages in the hopes of presenting President Obama with a final bill by Friday. "If this is a harbinger of the future, God save us," said Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "Here we are shoveling out th ...

January 28th, 2009
For immediate release United Feature Syndicate
HARPER'S MAGAZINE
Findings
By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
Studies found that obese women have as many sex partners as non-obese women, that obese men have fewer sex partners than non-obese men, and that men will spend more money on a date with a lady in red. Researchers discovered that handsome fathers pass on pretty faces to daughters but not to sons, and that facial scars make men more appealing to women for short-term but not long-term relationships, with women preferring scars that suggest violence or trauma rather than acne or chicken pox. Roosters that have had sex recently make more noise at dawn, and male antelopes click their knees loudly to demonstrate sexual prowess. Entomologists found that sex between male flour beetles may allow the males, by dribbling semen onto their partners, to impregnate the females those males later have sex with. San Francisco scientists grew a new prostate in a mouse from a single stem cell. Mo ...

January 21st, 2009

Harper's weekly
By Gemma Sieff
Israel and Hamas agreed to a one-week cease-fire in Gaza, where Gazan officials estimated that 1,300 Palestinians had died. "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow," said Sir Gerald Kaufman, a British MP who was raised as an Orthodox Jew. "A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers." A Berlin court ruled to allow the display of Hamas flags and paraphernalia at anti-Israel protests, while at a pro-Hamas rally in the city of Duisburg, German police stormed an apartment to tear down an Israeli flag hanging from its balcony.

South Korea put its military on alert after North Korea announced it had "weaponized" enough plutonium for four to five nuclear weapons and threatened "an all-out confrontational posture." Tom Cruise, visiting Seoul, s ...

January 14th, 2009

Harper's index
By the Staff of Harper's Magazine
Number of news stories from 1998 to Election Day 2000 containing "George W. Bush" and "aura of inevitability": 206
Amount for which Bush successfully sued Enterprise Rent-a-Car in 1999: $2,500
Year in which a political candidate first sued Palm Beach County over problems with hanging chads: 1984
Total amount the Bush campaign paid Enron and Halliburton for use of corporate jets during the 2000 recount: $15,400
Percentage of Bush's first 189 appointees who also served in his father's administration: 42
Minimum number of Bush appointees who have regulated industries they used to represent as lobbyists: 98
Years before becoming energy secretary that Spencer Abraham co-sponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy: 2
Number of Chevron oil tankers named after Condoleezza Rice, at the time she became foreign-policy adviser: 1
Date on which ...

January 7th, 2009

Harper's weekly
By Gemma Sieff
Israel extended its occupation of the Gaza strip, sending in ground forces and cutting the territory in two. Hamas fired 32 missiles at Israel. The Palestinian health ministry reported that more than 500 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including 21 children, have been killed so far; the Israeli military stated that 80 percent of the Palestinian dead were members of Hamas. "We don't intend neither to occupy Gaza nor to crush Hamas, but to crush terror," explained Israeli President Shimon Peres. "And Hamas needs a real and serious lesson." "We have restrained ourselves for a long time," said Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
A female suicide bomber in Baghdad blew herself up in front of a Shia shrine, killing 37 pilgrims. Earthquakes struck the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, killing no one, and the West Papua province of Indonesia, killing four people. Twenty-two Ch ...

December 31st, 2008

Harper's weekly
By Christopher R. Beha
Israel bombed Hamas targets in Gaza for three days, killing at least 300 people, 50 of them civilians, and blowing up a mosque and a television station. Palestinians seeking to flee into Egypt were turned back; a doctor at a Gaza hospital said that after 18 months of Israeli sanctions the lack of medical facilities made it better for a patient "to be brought in dead." Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the bombing, ordered in retaliation for ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas, would be "widened and deepened as is necessary," and an area around Gaza was declared a "closed military zone," with access forbidden to civilians, including journalists. "No one," explained an Israeli government representative, "is trying to hide anything." Anti-Israeli protests and demonstrations erupted throughout the Arab world, and UFO cultists in Tel Aviv canceled a "mega-orgy" for w ...

December 24th, 2008

Findings
By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
High testosterone levels were correlated with financial risk-taking in men, were found to make men prefer feminine women and make women prefer masculine men, and were induced in both men and women by the revving engines of high-performance cars. An Austrian study found that people prefer cars that look angry, dominant, hostile and masculine (and can easily agree on whether a car appears so but have difficulty reaching consensus on whether a car is conscientious, disgusted, extroverted or neurotic). Canadian scientists found that hockey players with wider faces are more aggressive and accrue more penalty time, and sexologists determined that a Belgian woman's capacity to experience orgasm from vaginal intercourse is predicted by the way she walks. Women's voices rise by an average of 15.6Hz two days before ovulation, but the increase in pitch occurs only when a woman speaks in co ...