Lapham's Quarterly

Lapham's Quarterly Lapham's Quarterly is a magazine edited by Lewis Lapham.

“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by ...
03/04/2026

“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Because you’re going deeper into the painting.”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

“The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going ...
02/19/2026

“The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going every hour,” says Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “But, basically, a free port is an island, a cordoned-off piece of land, where the rules are not the same as outside. In economics and history, we sometimes talk about onshore and offshore. Onshore and offshore don't really refer to shores or land. They just refer to legal regimes. A free port will be offshore, and if you walk ten feet through a gate, you’re back onshore. It’s fiction. It’s a legal construct.”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

"It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all," says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World...
02/04/2026

"It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all," says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World in Time. "There are three or four different factions, each with their own military wing, competing for control of Syracuse. Plato is watching all this from Athens in what must have been a state of horror, because he understands he was partly to blame, or at least that some people were blaming him for what was taking place. And the Seventh Letter—by far the longest, most detailed, the richest source of evidence for my story—is extremely defensive in an effort to extricate Plato from this morass."

The latest episode of The World in Time.

"What has happened to human attention over the last century is exactly what has happened to the prairielands of America:...
01/21/2026

"What has happened to human attention over the last century is exactly what has happened to the prairielands of America: a monoculture." – The Friends of Attention

On the varieties of attentive experience.

“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. B...
01/16/2026

“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “For instance, giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and other human beings, properly understood, that’s human attention. It also involves daydreaming and taking care of a child and burying your dead—those are attentional activities. It’s been hard for us to keep track of that fact about ourselves as we have increasingly asked ourselves to be more and more seamlessly integrated into these continuous, twenty-four seven data flows and communication entertainment networks. We worry about machinic attention—that it is inextricable from the way we feel bad; that there are authentic pandemics of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, despair; and that our politics is weirdly fractious and dysfunctional.”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Charles King about his latest book, “Every Valley: The Desperate Live...
12/19/2025

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Charles King about his latest book, “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah.”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, author of “Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second...
12/05/2025

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, author of “Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War.”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this ...
11/21/2025

“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ”

The latest episode of The World in Time.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial...
10/24/2025

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board.

The latest episode of The World in Time.

In May 1943, Peggy Guggenheim hosted a “Spring Salon for Young Artists” at the Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th ...
10/08/2025

In May 1943, Peggy Guggenheim hosted a “Spring Salon for Young Artists” at the Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th Street. Guggenheim, who had inherited a modest portion of her family’s mining fortune, had opened an art gallery in London in 1938. With the aid of advisers like Marcel Duchamp, it had been a succès d’estime, and she decided to establish a museum of contemporary art. In August 1939, Guggenheim set out for Paris to arrange loans for an opening exhibit. With the outbreak of war in September she abandoned the project and shifted into full-scale collecting mode, buying paintings and sculptures at a great clip from the likes of Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Brancusi, Giacometti, Dalí, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Tanguy, and Chagall (some of whom sold at fire-sale prices to raise cash to leave the country).

Read more about Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan project at the link below.

Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan project.

J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its file on James Baldwin in April 1960 when Baldwin’s name app...
10/01/2025

J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its file on James Baldwin in April 1960 when Baldwin’s name appeared among the signatories to an open letter that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee published as an advertisement in the New York Times. In one memo preserved in the file, Hoover describes Baldwin as “a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety of the United States in a time of emergency.”

The FBI reads James Baldwin.

Charles Baxter visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Mo...
09/26/2025

Charles Baxter visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Moby Dick.

The latest episode of The World in Time.

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