The Romans of the Decadence (detail), by Thomas Couture, 1847. Musée d’Orsay.

Intoxication

Volume VI, Number 1 | winter 2012

Purchase

Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs by Anthony van Dyck.

Preamble

Alms for Oblivion

By Lewis H. Lapham

“One should always be drunk,” proclaimed poet Charles Baudelaire. But the question remains, drunk with what?

Evening Landscape with Two Men by Caspar David Friedrich.

Essay

Last Testaments

By Francine Prose

What do artists and writers do when they are faced with the imminence of death? Francine Prose reviews the final works of historian Tony Judt.

Map

Indigenous Intoxicants

Getting high, around the world.

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Miscellany

In the United States around 1787—the year that Thomas Jefferson took a three-month sabbatical to tour the vineyards of France and Italy—the average drinking American consumed the equivalent of an estimated six gallons of pure alcohol per year. The figure today is 2.2.