Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Presentation drawing of “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, 1875. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry G. Sperling Fund, 2014.
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Miscellany
“By the end of the fifteenth century, when the power of theology was exhausted and the patriarchal understanding of the origin of kingship no longer satisfied people’s appetite for science, politics started to develop as a science,” wrote political theorist Carl Schmitt. “Dictatorship, in particular, is described as a specific arcanum dominationis of the aristocracy. Its purpose is to create an institution that frightens the people into believing that it constitutes an authority against which there is no possibility of provocation…In the state certain events are always necessary that conjure the impression of freedom, simulacra or decorative occasions designed to pacify the population.”
It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority.
—Claude McKay, 1937Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus
But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More
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Robert D. Kaplan
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More