March 05, 2014
Going Viral in the Nineteenth Century
Whenever a newspaper story came up short, editors reached for the squibs.
Read MoreRoundtable
Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.
July 23, 2025
February 22, 2014
“As for Me, I Sell Abuse”
At first glance, Ambrose Bierce didn’t look like a coldblooded verbal killer. He was tall and handsome and scrupulously groomed, with a cherubic mop of golden hair. He excelled as a conversationalist and womanizer. He was also was nineteenth-century America’s greatest insult artist.
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January 15, 2014
Bedside Manner
Comedy thrives on contradiction, and the absurdity of life is particularly refined in the hospital. Doctors discuss breakfast as they open someone’s sternum, and a delirious patient demands green Jell-O. Laughter, it seems, is one of the few genuine reactions one can have to such a paradoxical world. But it can be deceiving.
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January 15, 2014
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.”
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December 31, 2013
Faces of Death
Artists throughout history have striven to personify death: to translate the intangible, unknown end of human beings into an image that can be perceived by the eye and grasped by the mind.
Read MoreDecember 22, 2013
Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Hit
Everyone thinks they know the tragic story of James Dean: he died young and violently, he embodied the ennui and angst of the postwar generation, and his image lives on as a hollow signifier of youthful rebellion. But most don’t understand how the timing of his death, and the very specific timing of his films, turned a tragic death into a cultural crater—one that would be widened and exploited by the Hollywood publishing industry.
Read MoreDecember 19, 2013
Human Trophies
The collection of Japanese war trophies—which included various body parts, including skulls—was, by all accounts, endemic and uncontrollable. When Charles Lindbergh returned to the States after a tour in the Pacific theater, he was asked by customs officers if he was carrying any “human bones” in his luggage.
Read MoreDecember 17, 2013
Death from Above, 1793
1793 was a tender year for the new United States: the Revolutionary War had come to a close, the Bill of Rights had recently been ratified, and plague of yellow fever had struck the nation’s largest city and newest capital, Philadelphia.
Read MoreDecember 10, 2013
The Art of Dying
Seeing the buzzing around Jane lying prostate in bed, I felt myself on the set of the Ars Moriendi, the small medieval manual featuring eleven woodcuts on how to die the Good Death. The scenes are more crowded than the main floor of Barney's at Christmas season, teeming with saints, devils and people.
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August 07, 2023
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.
May 22, 2023
Revolutionary Lovebirds
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.