The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), by Thomas Cole, 1836.

Book of Nature

Volume 1, Number 3 | summer 2008

Birds and Flowers of Spring and Summer, by Kano Eino, late seventeenth century.

Preamble

Messages in a Bottle

By Lewis H. Lapham

Nature is the only artist, the wonder of her collected works formed by their reflections in the mirrors of the human imagination.

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The Empire of Flora, by Nicolas Poussin, 1631.

Funhouse Goddess

By D. Graham Burnett

It has never been easy to decipher what nature is trying to tell us, but that hasn’t stopped us from filling in the blanks. A look at the sexual politics of natural law theories.

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Map

Clearing the Inventory

Mining gold, chopping timber, tapping oil, fishing oceans.

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1933 | South Dakota

Point of Order

The “Wild West” begins. More

c. 1600 | Salem

Staging a Puppet Show

Nathaniel Hawthorne on what lies beneath Main Street.More

1749 | Paris

A Shortage of Rational Conjectures

On the importance of the superficial.More

Charts & Graphs

The Line Is Hot

Poisonous elements in the Apple iPhone.

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American poet Anne Bradstreet.

Photograph of American novelist Jack London.

American physicist Richard Feynman.

English poet Edmund Spenser.

Nature’s rules have no exceptions.

- Herbert Spencer, 1851

William Shakespeare & Friedrich Nietzsche

Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Glossary: Fear

By Leopold Froehlich

From “alarm” to “worry,” the language of fear. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Apropos of Nothing

2017:

The Trump administration lies about terrorist attacks.

c. 1517:

Machiavelli assures “fraud is fair in war.”

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LQ Podcast

#07 Kory Stamper

Lewis Lapham talks with Kory Stamper, lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. More

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