The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), by Thomas Eakins, 1871. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund and George D. Pratt Gift, 1934.

Sports & Games

Volume III, Number 3 | summer 2010

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Preamble

Field of Dreams

By Lewis H. Lapham

Play is the making of civilization—how one plays the game more to the point than whether the game is won or lost.

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Black game board with circular gold pattern.

Blossom and Fade

By John Crowley

Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is an experience with the pathos and wonder of all games—the game that is the universe.

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Map

Playing Grounds

On the track, in the ring, around the table, and at the target.

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212 BC | Olympia

Underdog

How to win the crowd.More

27 | Fidenae

Low Overhead

Tragedy at the stadium.More

c. 100 | Alexandria

The Drug of Folly

Sports’ culture of intoxication.More

Charts & Graphs

Tricks of the Trade

Innovative ways of breaking the rules.

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Portrait of British poet Lord Byron.

Black and white image of American writer Herman Melville.

American poet William Carlos Williams.

Black and white photograph of Ryszard Kapuściński holding a book.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

Missing contributor image silhouette

Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.

Bacchylides & Johan Huizinga

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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