Lapham's Quarterly

From Antikythera to AI — tracking the labyrinthine path of technology’s progress.

Could the everyday wonder of technology save us soon?

What can we learn from ancient tales of technology?

How the world started to take up smoking.

The alternative roots of the origins of modern nation-states.

Analysing the differences between 'presentisim' and 'eternalism'.

Can bridging the divide between animals and humans bring about lasting happiness?

What happens when private grief becomes common experience?

H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds feels more relevant and unsettling now than ever.

Understanding the volcanic eruption that set an ominous stage for the death throes of the Roman Republic.

Commonplace books and the illusions of memory.

The last judicial duel in France hinged on whether a woman could be believed — this is her story.

If you have a boat, and piece by piece replace it entirely, is it still the same boat?

Our past on the internet is disappearing before we can make it history.

Revisit 19th century Paris, when the city attempted to design out rebellion, but ended up encouraging it.

Depending on your interpretation of happiness, it can save or destroy a society.

Jimmy Carter said the “view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief” so where did these ideas stem from? Asks Francine Prose, writing in Lapham’s Quaterly, and why, then, is misogyny so pervasive and enduring in our society?

Olivia Rutigliano writing in Lapham’s Quarterly traces the Victorian trend of detective novels - but with women as the detectives.

Saudi oil has been attacked but how did this natural resource become an essential commodity?

We know different countries - sometimes cities - adhere to differing time zones but did you know this has often been used as a means of political authoritarianism? Elena Goukassian writing in Lapham’s Quarterly unfolds some of the most precarious time changes throughout history.

The CIA’s first attempt at regime change was in Iran. Bridey Heing writing in Lapham’s Quarterly tells us the story and how the attempt nearly failed.

Jayne Anne Phillips writing in Lapham’s Quarterly describes the resolution of America’s best-known feud – the Hatfield-McCoy feud – that has entered the American folklore lexicon as a metonym for any bitterly feuding rival parties.

Pablo Maurette, writing in Lapham's Quarterly, asks and then explores: are hands what distinguish us from animals and make us human?

Shelley Puhak writes in Lapham’s Quarterly about the legendary feud between two women who ruled the Frankish empire in the 6th century.

It takes a lot of work, but the internet helps.

In Renaissance Florence, the law was king—that is, until the House of Medici rose to prominence. Erica Banner, writing in Lapham's Quarterly, chronicles the struggle for power and law between the Medicis and the anti-Medici republic, with Niccolo Machiavelli at its forefront.

They are our fellow “great apes”: orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. More than animals, less than humans. Ferris Jabr, writing in Lapham's Quarterly, chronicles our complex and tumultuous relationship with the great apes and our attempts to come to terms with just how alike we are.

Samuel Johnson is described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as ‘arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history’. But what if he had made it as a lawyer? Richard Cohen, writing in Lapham's Quarterly, considers an alternative reading of the life of a literary great.

The well-informed used to know not to trust everything they read or heard. Lewis Lapham, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, reminds his readers that, on a level, all news has always been fake news.

Will we ever be able to see and understand the thoughts of others? Noga Arikha, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, looks at the history of brain imaging and the fantasy of a truly visible mind.

Many of us will have come across the notion of personality types, be it through the Briggs-Myers test or elsewhere, but establishing these in the early 20th Century was no easy feat. Damion Searls, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, traces the psychologist Carl Jung’s fight to categorise human minds.

How power in America has turned the rule of law into a mere myth.

Zack Herold, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, traces the tale of a West Virginian island Eden which, in 1805, played host to a military plot, far-flung fortunes and a former US Vice President. This is the story of the Blennerhassetts.

Cristiano Ronaldo? Serena Williams? LeBron James? Relative paupers compared to their athletic forefathers. Peter T. Struck, writing in Lapham's Quarterly, considers the wealth of the richest sportspeople of all time, the Roman charioteers.

Uncle Vincent’s body never rotted, so the locals think that he never found peace. While his soul lingers in purgatory, his mummified body has become a shrine. Elizabeth Harper, writing in Lapham's Quarterly, looks at a very vivid manifestation of religious belief in Southern Italy.

The Yezidi were little known to most of the world until news broke that ISIS was looking to eradicate them. Alex Cuadros looks at the rituals and history of the ancient Middle Eastern religion.

Beneath the glass office buildings and sandwich shops of New York’s Tribeca, lies a huge graveyard filled with the bodies of twenty thousand dead African Slaves. But their final resting place was often disturbed. Bess Lovejoy looks at New York’s grisly and racially-charged history of bodysnatching.

The motives behind the El Paso shootings may seem obvious - but can we trace back the ideas?

Duke Ellington was one of the 20th century’s most revered pianists and composers, but one of his most ambitious works, written for Queen Elizabeth II, went unreleased during his lifetime. Christopher Carroll looks at the story of The Queen’s Suite.

Around 1846, the writer, environmentalist and abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau, was living near Walden Pond. Here he looks on as two ant colonies go to war and reflects on strife and struggle.

“Through these portals pass the most beautiful uniforms in the world.”

Was Vladimir Nabokov a bad Samaritan? Did he ignore the groans of a dying man in order to continue chasing a butterfly? Levi Stahl recounts a potentially revealing anecdote from the illustrious novelist’s life.

He recorded his own voice but could never play it back, and in silence it remained for almost two centuries. Emma Jacobs looks for the man who invented the sound recording before Edison but was never taken seriously—until now.

If a divine entity is always watching you, why should you worry about security cameras?

Real estate, Jane Austen–style.

What is it like to become Queen? Why not hear from Queen Victoria herself who wrote in her journal on the day of her ascension in in 1837, republished by Lapham’s Quarterly.

When you tip toe along a tight rope strung between two skyscrapers, it is natural to be scared; what is exceptional is to then rise above it and achieve the unthinkable. The world-renowned high-wire artist Philippe Petit , writing in Lapham's Quarterly, provides a guide-line to coping with fear.

An investigation of the fear-filled mythology of ancient Greece and why its most memorable monster still turns us to stone today.

He was the nation’s best-known showman and ran the hugely popular American museum. Here, he explores deceit and fraud.

Being a witch was expensive in the medieval age, in more ways than one.

Often the hallucinations lead the sufferer to believe he was crawling with insects or engulfed in flames. Laurent Merceron, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, explores the origins of LSD in the botanical roots of medieval madness.

Compound interest could bankrupt the world.

Palmyra has graced the world’s news screens for all the wrong reasons.

Drone technology spans a century's worth of science fiction and military research.

The French philosopher outsmarts the lottery.

It was 1816 and Lord Byron and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley were writing in the dark about the dark. Byron wrote jealously of those who lived in the light of volcanoes, unaware of the disaster that had triggered the unusual climate. Writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, Nina Martyris, tells of the Year Without a Summer. ​

Do you need to have an intermediary between the heavens and earth? Does God need a representative amongst men? Could that one person ever unite a religion with hundreds of millions of very different followers? Hugh Kennedy, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly brings us the frought history of caliphs throughout the history of Islam.

Despite detailing infanticide, abuse and sexual depravity, 1836’s The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk became the most-read book in the country.

Scientists from Newton to Einstein and Stephen Hawking have tried hard to understand time. In his meditation on time in Lapham’s Quarterly, Jim Holt explores the evolution of our understanding of time and wonders whether time has a future. Yes, he says, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be.

In 1666, Margaret Cavendish gave the world a science-fiction fantasy novel the likes of which they'd never seen before. Here is an extract.

Eating other people is not the first thing that comes to mind when you fall ill.

Do all words have clear origins? Frank Bures writing in Lapham’s Quaterly speaks to one man who has made it his life’s work to investigate the histories of words whose origins are said to be unknown.

In the year 1770, the last of the Habsburgs and one time Holy Roman Empress, Maria Theresa, wrote to her daughter Marie Antoinette about her new status as a married woman.

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Clancy Martin writes in Lapham’s Quarterly to provide us with a fascinating insight into the con-filled world of jewellery exchange. As he tells us of his own experience on the shop floor of a jewellery exchange shop, he asks the question why a wealthy diamond merchant in a three-thousand-dollar suit would want to cheat someone out of a hundred bucks’ worth of gold?

Princess Der Ling was the daughter of a mixed-heritage Chinese nobleman who was the lady-in-waiting to the Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi. She was not a true princess—the title was conferred by Cixi, who had been effectively deposed in 1898—and was valid only at the palace, which Der Ling left in 1905. We listen to her account of how the Empress prepared for an American visitor.

Nikita Khruschev had written his memoirs, and especially after losing power, they were considered by the Russians to be too sensitive to ever be published. Ross Ufberg writes in Lapham’s Quarterly about how how those memoirs were smuggled out of the USSR.

James Joyce catalogues the many voices in the playground, big and small. ​

Sylvester Stein, a white South African, spent time at the helm of a magazine which existed at the forefront of the cultural battle against apartheid.

Brent Cunningham writing in Lapham’s Quarterly provides us a fascinating insight into the tradition of the last meal that is offered to a condemned prisoner before his execution. And while doing so, he provides us with a little nugget of information about the Japanese system of execution.

A sensuous reading of a romantic encounter from Edith Wharton's 'Beatrice Palmato' (1919).

Andrea Pitzer writes in Lapham’s Quarterly about the life of Austrian painter Paul Cohen-Portheim, the author of the seminal book “Time Stood Still”, and provides us a glimpse into the now forgotten World War I internment camps.

“What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous”, wrote Voltaire in 1723. And what happens when someone becomes famous at a very young age? Paul Collins writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, takes us through the (known) life of Barbara Newell Follett, the child prodigy who transfixed the literary world – and then vanished.

What is spontaneous human combustion? Does the consumption alcohol cause human bodies to burst into flames? Colin Dickey writing in Lapham’s Quarterly throws light on the debate that raged a couple of centuries ago.

Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery to become one of his eras leading authors and orators. In 1846, he spoke in London at a public meeting hosted by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. This is Frederick Douglass’ ‘Answering to the Charge of Infidelity’ republished in Lapham’s Quarterly. ​

Hear what H G Wells had to say about the sensation of time travel.

In an excerpt from his 16th Century work of political philosophy, Utopia, Thomas More bemoans the unfair spread of wealth in so-called republics.

There really is no place like home. So wrote G.K. Chesterton in celebration of man’s true kingdom.

In 1879, Mark Twain announced his candidacy for the US presidency, and published his satirical sketch “Campaign Promises”. As extracted in and noted by Lapham’s Quarterly, this sketch was published a year before the election of 1880, in which Republican James A. Garfield beat Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock with 214 of the 369 electoral college votes but only by a 0.9% margin of the popular vote—the smallest in American history till then. In 1906 he observed in “What Is Man?” that “fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.”

Foreplay, oral sex, homosexuality and masturbation – what Darwinian purpose do they serve? Bonobos, our closest animal relative, also exhibit all of these behaviours. Writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, Jack Hitt suggests that this sex drive may have been one of the key evolutionary developments that set us apart as a species. ​

Writing in 1625, Francis Bacon compared marriage with the single life.

A naval scene from 1812 Anglo-American War.

In the summer of 1887, Henry James, Lord Alfred Douglas, and one of England’s most well-connected families converged upon the same weekend house party. Emma Garman, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, recounts the luxury and influence of the time. ​