
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 astronomer and mathematician Thales of Miletus is believed to have been the first ancient Greek scholar to discuss the phenomenon of magnetism. Aristotle notes in On the Soul that Thales held the belief that “the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.” Five and a half centuries later, Diogenes Laërtius concurred with Aristotle, observing that Thales “attributed a soul or life even to inanimate objects.”
I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”
—Michel Serres, 1982More EnergyGo to Issue Page >