November 20, 2014
When the Clocks Stop
Henri Bergson’s fight against time or: how I learned to stop, kill, and save time while working at a watch shop.
Read MoreRoundtable
Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.
April 27, 2025
November 13, 2014
The Truth About Time
Every era has its own time-truthers, those who insist that through careful manipulation, minutes and seconds as we know them can be altered or even erased.
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November 11, 2014
Stop All the Clocks
After nearly a hundred years, a two-minute silence has proved a lasting memorial for the dead of the First World War.
Read MoreOctober 03, 2014
Zero Hour
In The Burning of the World, his recently discovered memoir of the first few weeks of World War I, the Hungarian artist, officer, and man about town Béla Zombory-Moldován writes frequently about his attachment to his watch. When he’s wounded in the confusion of battle in the forests of Galicia, he finds the watch unscathed during an agonizing evacuation of the area, and exalts the survival of “my trusty companion, sharer of my fate, the comrade that connected me to my former life.”
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September 11, 2014
The Presumption of Youth
The reason so many coming-of-age tales revolve around boarding schools is that they are the perfect setting for the unique and incredible experience is a part of growing up.
Read MoreAugust 16, 2014
Early Work
The childhood scribblings of writers far more famous than I can be found online in the vast attic of digital archives. Most of the juvenilia available on the Web date to the nineteenth century, when middle- and upper-class childhood was increasingly prized, and kids’ ephemera more likely to be saved.
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August 12, 2014
The Great Comic Book Conflagration
In October of 1948, the students of Spencer Graded School in West Virginia gained national attention when a thirteen-year-old led his classmates in “burial rites” for their comic books, declaring that the funeral “will benefit ourselves, our community and our country.”
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August 01, 2014
On Pediatrics
A medical student in his final year takes a turn on the children’s ward.
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July 15, 2014
Wasted on the Young
“One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” George Eliot lamented in a letter to a friend in 1844. “I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Edward Young’s theory that ‘as soon as we have found the key of life, it opens the gates of death.’”
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August 07, 2023
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.
May 22, 2023
Revolutionary Lovebirds
2023:
Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.
c. 1945:
Young communists engage in party matchmaking.