Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Return to Amsterdam of the Second Expedition to the East Indies, by Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom, 1599. Rijksmuseum.
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Miscellany
A hand’s primary function, Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power, is as “a claw to grasp whole branches” while climbing; both hands partner in “grasping” and “letting go.” This is like trade, he argues: “one hand tenaciously holds on to the object with which it seeks to tempt the stranger” while the other “is stretched out in demand.” Trading, then, offers “profound and universal pleasure” as “a translation into nonphysical terms of one of the oldest movement patterns.”
More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
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Robert D. Kaplan
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