Olympia, by Édouard Manet, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

Eros

Volume II, Number 1 | winter 2009

The Toilette of Venus, by François Boucher, 1751.

Preamble

Transits of Venus

By Lewis H. Lapham

The commodification of sex and love has shaped our attitudes toward both over the past half century, but eros is more than just dollars and cents.

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The Love Letter, by Jean Honoré Fragonard, early 1770s.

Up Close and Personal

By Noga Arikha

The evolution of personal ads, from the newspaper to the social network.

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Map

The Grand Tour

Sexual hazards from around the world and throughout time.

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1869 | Galicia

On Your Knees

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch does what he’s told. More

1976 | Paris

The Actual State of Sex

A reality check from Michel Foucault.More

c. 1919 | Paris

The Bread of Angels

Edith Wharton gets comfortable. More

Charts & Graphs

Getting in the Mood

Aphrodisiac foods in the centuries before Viagra.

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Black and white photograph of French writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir.

English dramatist, writer, and poet Aphra Behn.

Sculpture bust of Greek dramatist Euripides.

photograph of David Foster Wallace speaking at a podium

Painting of Benjamin Franklin reading a batch of papers next to a classical bust.

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.

- Saint Augustine, c. 387

Molière & Albert Camus

Lapham’sDaily

Fiume, c. 1890–1900.

Roundtable

A Poetic Regime

By Leopold Froehlich

The fascist aesthetics of Gabriele D’Annunzio. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Fonts and Scoundrels

2017:

Using Microsoft fonts to solve an international scandal.

1440:

Exposing a literary fraud in the fifteenth century.

More

LQ Podcast

#09 Michael Kazin

Lewis Lapham talks to Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918. More

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