August 01, 2014
On Pediatrics
A medical student in his final year takes a turn on the children’s ward.
Read MoreRoundtable
Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.
May 6, 2025
July 15, 2014
Wasted on the Young
“One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” George Eliot lamented in a letter to a friend in 1844. “I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Edward Young’s theory that ‘as soon as we have found the key of life, it opens the gates of death.’”
Read More
July 15, 2014
Alternative Histories
When homegrown radicals decide to take what they often call revolutionary action—with a bomb, a gun, or worse—their visions often have little to do with the reform of government, and everything to do with a maniacal will to shape another world.
Read More
June 09, 2014
The Riot of Spring
The 1913 premiere of “The Rite of Spring” was no less than a revolution in modern dance, but it was the violence of the audience’s reaction that would shake the world.
Read More
May 12, 2014
Making the Argument
I spent much of my freshman year of college on the verge of becoming a card-carrying socialist but somehow always knew I would not. This was late 2003, George W. Bush had recently unleashed shock and awe upon Iraq, and in Burlington, Vermont, where I was attending my state’s university, there was a small and active cell of the International Socialist Organization.
Read MoreMay 01, 2014
Gilt by Association
The Marie Antoinette cliché is easy to not just summon, but accessorize: there is the pouf, the diamond necklace, the dressmaker’s bills, and the toy farm. There is the fat husband, the overbearing mother, and the dashing Swedish count. And then there are the turns of phrase both too flippant and too penitent to really be believed: “let them eat cake,” as she presumably nibbled her own, and “forgive me, sir, I did not mean to do it,” as she stepped on her executioner’s foot.
Read More
April 28, 2014
Trotsky’s Canadian Holiday
It was a brief internment in Nova Scotia that lay the groundwork for the Soviet gulag.
Read More
April 15, 2014
Miracles and Manure
It’s a popular dismissal of revolutions to say that they always end in the tyranny they sought to overthrow. What use is the whole bloody mess if the oppressed becomes the oppressor?
Read More
March 21, 2014
Jane Austen’s Trivial Pursuits
Sometime during the 1990s, when big-screen adaptations of Regency novels became a near-annual tradition, a strange thing happened: Jane Austen stopped being funny.
Read More- ‹ previous
- 150 of 162
- next ›
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.