Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-bc Egyptian frieze, c. 1920. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930.
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Miscellany
A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.
Be courteous to all but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
—George Washington, 1783Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus
But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More
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Robert D. Kaplan
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More