A young worker at the C & NW RR 40th Street shops, Chicago, Ill, photograph by Jack Delano, 1942. Library of Congress.

A young worker at the C & NW RR 40th Street shops, Chicago, Illinois, 1942. Photograph by Jack Delano. Library of Congress.

Lines of Work

Volume IV, Number 2 | spring 2011

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Women become skilled shop technicians after careful training in the school at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant, Long Beach, CA, photograph by Alfred T. Palmer, 1942. Library of Congress.

Preamble

The Servant Problem

By Lewis H. Lapham

It is man’s nature to be doing something, or at least to fancy that he’s doing something, but to what purpose?

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Treasure Hunt

By Alain de Botton

A person’s vocation has become more than a job—it should transform us into who we are.

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Map

Cornering the Market

The countries that rule the industries.

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458 BC | Rome

Public Servant

Cincinnatus, from farmer to dictator to farmer.More

1802 | Manchester

Satanic Mill

Robert Southey observes the unsettling status quo.More

1621 | Oxford

The Devil’s Tools

Robert Burton on the disease of idleness.More

Charts & Graphs

Famous people and their unemployment.

Fired!

Famous people and their unemployment.

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Seated man with a large white beard wearing a dark suit

Chinese-American journalist Leslie T. Chang.

American animator, writer, and director Mike Judge.

English cook and author Isabella Mary Beeton.

American poet Theodore Roethke.

Black and white photograph of English poet and librarian Philip Larkin.

Color image of English novelist Charlotte Brontë with book in hand.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

—W.H. Auden, 1946

Portrait of Philip Dormer Stanhope wearing a blue sash.

Missing contributor image silhouette

Philip Dormer Stanhope & Louis C.K.

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

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

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