
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
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Roundtable
The magazine will relaunch under the stewardship of Bard College and its Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2025. More
DÉjÀ Vu
Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
The World in Time
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More
Roundtable
Miscellany
The Hungarian American physicist Leo Szilard first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction—a crucial milestone in the development of the atomic bomb—on a gray London morning in September 1933 while waiting for a traffic light to change from red to green. “It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element…which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron,” he wrote, this element could “liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs.” In his book on the history of the bomb, historian Richard Rhodes writes that “as he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world.”
Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.
—Peter Hitchcock, 2010More EnergyGo to Issue Page >