Lapham's Quarterly

09/03/2026

Gloria Steinem, 1978. From "If Men Could Menstruate," printed in our Comedy issue (Winter 2014)

09/01/2026

08/30/2026

With an annual subscription to the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, you can now read, search, and browse—on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone—every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Every issue, every page, from the Neolithic period to the Information Age.

This new digital archive was made possible by our friends at Aboard.com, a software consultancy co-founded by writer and editor Paul Ford, architect of the digital archive of Harper’s Magazine. The Aboard team built the Quarterly’s digital archive in tribute to and in memory of Lewis H. Lapham.

Link in bio.

08/26/2026

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08/25/2026

Extracts: On Education. A collage of passages and images from the Fall 2022 issue of *Lapham’s Quarterly.* Read in full on the LQ Substack.

Link in bio.

08/19/2026

Acting editor Donovan Hohn speaks with returning guest Andrea Wulf, about *The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris,* a narrative and intellectual biography of the German polymath George Forster—a botanist whose investigations of the breadfruit disclosed the history of Polynesian migrations; a prose stylist whose account of Cook’s second voyage helped invent the genre of travel writing; an intellectual pugilist who quarreled with Rousseau and Kant and influenced Coleridge and Von Humboldt; a revolutionary whom Friedrich Engels called “the German Thomas Paine.”

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes an epilogue about Forster’s Parisian exile during the tumult of the French Revolution.

08/11/2026

An essay adapted from Andrea Wulf’s new book, THE TRAVELER: ONE MAN’S QUEST FOR HUMANITY FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC TO REVOLUTIONARY PARIS.

“In Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals Forster’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.”

Link in bio.

08/03/2026

From HEART OF A PHOENIX by acting editor Donovan Hohn.

We are this summer building a searchable, digital archive. Soon anyone with an annual subscription to the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack will be able to read all fifty-seven back issues on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone. If you’ve enjoyed Lapham’s Quarterly this past year—the new episodes of The World in Time, the new readings that accompany them—and would like the revival of Lapham’s Quarterly to continue, please consider donating, purchasing back issues before they sell out, or signing up for a paid Substack subscription. If between five and ten percent of all readers and listeners contributed $50 this year, we would be free of the pandemic debts we inherited in 2024.

Link to the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack in bio.

08/01/2026

Twenty-odd years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called, *The American Ruling Class,* first released in 2005.

Today, August 1, 2026, *The American Ruling Class* is coming to the Criterion Channel.

“Subsequent to the events of September 11th, 2001,” Lapham wrote in a short essay about the film, “I don’t know of any topic as relevant to the predicament in which the country now finds itself than the composition of the American leadership class.”

You can read his short essay about *The American Ruling Class* at laphamsquarterly.substack.com, where you will also find a video tribute to Lewis Lapham made by his colleagues in film and television.

07/30/2026

Twenty-odd years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called, *The American Ruling Class,* first released in 2005.

On August 1, 2026, *The American Ruling Class* is coming to the Criterion Channel.

“Subsequent to the events of September 11th, 2001,” Lapham wrote in a short essay about the film, “I don’t know of any topic as relevant to the predicament in which the country now finds itself than the composition of the American leadership class.”

You can read his short essay about *The American Ruling Class* at laphamsquarterly.substack.com, where you will also find a video tribute to Lewis Lapham made by his colleagues in film and television.