Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Acrobats (detail), Japanese handscroll, nineteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Henry J. Bernheim, 1945.
VIEW:
Miscellany
“One enterprising seventeenth-century systematizer,” noted classicist Mary Beard in a discussion of the different ways the sounds of laughter have been recorded throughout history, “attempted to classify the variants in these sounds and relate them to the different temperaments, hi hi hi indicating melancholics, he he he cholerics, ha ha ha phlegmatics, and ho ho ho hotheads.”
Happiness is not something you can catch and lock up in a vault like wealth. Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1939Lapham’sDaily
Stay Updated Subscribe to the LQ Newsletter
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