Roundtable

Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.

October 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.”

September 11, 2014

The Presumption of Youth

By Elias Altman

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.

August 16, 2014

Early Work

By Rebecca Onion

The Brontë Sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë

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.

A German refugee child reads a Superman comic, 1942

August 12, 2014

The Great Comic Book Conflagration

By Jacqui Shine

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.”

August 01, 2014

On Pediatrics

By Caleb Gardner

A medical student in his final year takes a turn on the children’s ward.

July 15, 2014

Wasted on the Young

By Elias Altman

“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.’”

Ted Kaczynski as a young professor at U.C. Berkeley, 1968

July 15, 2014

Alternative Histories

By Miles Klee

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.

June 09, 2014

The Riot of Spring

By Madison Mainwaring

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.

May 12, 2014

Making the Argument

By Elias Altman

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.

From Déja Vu

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.

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