Olympia, by Édouard Manet, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

Eros

Volume II, Number 1 | winter 2009

The Toilette of Venus, by François Boucher, 1751.

Preamble

Transits of Venus

By Lewis H. Lapham

The commodification of sex and love has shaped our attitudes toward both over the past half century, but eros is more than just dollars and cents.

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The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca Da Rimini, illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, by William Blake, 1824-27.

Hell House

By Jeff Sharlet

Young Christians encounter sex, violence, and the eros of evangelicalism in an East Texas hell house.

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Map

The Grand Tour

Sexual hazards from around the world and throughout time.

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23 BC | Rome

Winter Moon

Horace’s ode to an aging woman.More

1928 | Paris

Defying Modesty

The sexual adventures of young Georges Bataille. More

c. 1670 | Oxfordshire

Arriving Prematurely

“Is there then no more?”More

Charts & Graphs

Impotent Prose

Winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

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PHotograph of American writer Ernest Hemingway.

Black and white photograph of English poet and librarian Philip Larkin.

Painting of Benjamin Franklin reading a batch of papers next to a classical bust.

Engraving of a bust of Lucretius.

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Depiction of Greek lyric poet Sappho.

What reason weaves, by passion is undone.

- Alexander Pope, 1972

Molière & Albert Camus

Lapham’sDaily

Thelonious Monk, Minton’s Playhouse, New York, 1947. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb. Library of Congress, Music Division.

Roundtable

Lewis Lapham Reads “’Round Midnight”

By Lapham’s Quarterly

Listen to the preamble to Music, the Fall 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. More

U.S. secretary of agriculture Sonny Perdue meets with German minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, 2017.

DÉjÀ Vu

Equal Climates

2017:

U.S. Department of Agriculture bans words related to climate change.

-350:

Aristotle denies that the climate is changing.

More

The Fall of Man, by Titian, c. 1550.

LQ Podcast

#13 Stephen Greenblatt

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. More

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