Elias Altman
Elias Altman was an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly for seven years. His criticism has appeared in The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review.
All Writing
Roundtable
Seeking Asylum, Getting the Story
An interview with journalist Mattathias Schwartz, whose writing appears in the Spring 2015 issue, Foreigners. More
Roundtable
The Importance of Being Wilde
Before Oscar Wilde wrote anything of note, he traveled around America like a rock star. More
Roundtable
When the Clocks Stop
Henri Bergson’s fight against time or: how I learned to stop, kill, and save time while working at a watch shop. More
Roundtable
The Presumption of Youth
The reason so many coming-of-age tales revolve around boarding schools is that they are the perfect setting for the unique and incredible experience is a part of growing up. More
Roundtable
Wasted on the Young
“One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” George Eliot lamented in a letter to a friend in 1844. “I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Edward Young’s theory that ‘as soon as we have found the key of life, it opens the gates of death.’” More
Roundtable
Making the Argument
I spent much of my freshman year of college on the verge of becoming a card-carrying socialist but somehow always knew I would not. This was late 2003, George W. Bush had recently unleashed shock and awe upon Iraq, and in Burlington, Vermont, where I was attending my state’s university, there was a small and active cell of the International Socialist Organization. More
Roundtable
Miracles and Manure
It’s a popular dismissal of revolutions to say that they always end in the tyranny they sought to overthrow. What use is the whole bloody mess if the oppressed becomes the oppressor? More
Roundtable
The Joke’s on Us
“Laughter is easily restrained by a very little reflection,” wrote the perpetually pedantic Philip Dormer Stanhope to his son in 1758, “but as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity.” More
Roundtable
The Man Before the Mast
When Herman Melville began to write Moby Dick he was chasing his own literary white whale: Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. More