December 08, 2014
Royal Pains
As Will and Kate touch down in New York, a look back at the first royal visit to America and the FDR-appointed ambassador who let no bath towel be overlooked.
Read MoreRoundtable
Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.
May 7, 2025
December 02, 2014
The Most Punctual Man in India
The watch never left his side. It was the first thing Gandhi reached for when he rose each morning at 4 a.m., and the last thing he checked before going to bed, often past midnight. He consulted it frequently through the day so as never to be late for an appointment. And, at that final moment, when three bullets from an assassin’s Beretta knocked him over, his 78-year-old body slumped to the ground, and the watch also stopped.
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November 20, 2014
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.
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November 13, 2014
The Truth About Time
Every era has its own time-truthers, those who insist that through careful manipulation, minutes and seconds as we know them can be altered or even erased.
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November 11, 2014
Stop All the Clocks
After nearly a hundred years, a two-minute silence has proved a lasting memorial for the dead of the First World War.
Read MoreOctober 03, 2014
Zero Hour
In The Burning of the World, his recently discovered memoir of the first few weeks of World War I, the Hungarian artist, officer, and man about town Béla Zombory-Moldován writes frequently about his attachment to his watch. When he’s wounded in the confusion of battle in the forests of Galicia, he finds the watch unscathed during an agonizing evacuation of the area, and exalts the survival of “my trusty companion, sharer of my fate, the comrade that connected me to my former life.”
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September 11, 2014
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.
Read MoreAugust 16, 2014
Early Work
The childhood scribblings of writers far more famous than I can be found online in the vast attic of digital archives. Most of the juvenilia available on the Web date to the nineteenth century, when middle- and upper-class childhood was increasingly prized, and kids’ ephemera more likely to be saved.
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August 12, 2014
The Great Comic Book Conflagration
In October of 1948, the students of Spencer Graded School in West Virginia gained national attention when a thirteen-year-old led his classmates in “burial rites” for their comic books, declaring that the funeral “will benefit ourselves, our community and our country.”
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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.