Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
The Romans of the Decadence (detail), by Thomas Couture, 1847. Musée d’Orsay.
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Miscellany
About the presidential election of 1928, between anti-Prohibitionist Al Smith and Prohibitionist Herbert Hoover, H.L. Mencken wrote, “If Al wins tomorrow, it will be because the American people have decided at last to vote as they drink.” Hoover won, earning 444 of the 531 electoral-college votes.
I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.
—Walt Whitman, 1842Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus
But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More
The World in Time
Robert D. Kaplan
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More