“A Rothko painting conveys so much consciousness. That’s the importance of art—helping to ferry us from one island of consciousness to another.” —Michael Pollan

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with folklorist, classicist, and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor about her new book, MYTHOPEDIA: A BRIEF COMPENDIUM OF NATURAL HISTORY LORE.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of IN TREES: AN EXPLORATION, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist and critic Morgan Meis, author of a trilogy of books about the history of art, civilization, war, and much else.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of THE HIDDEN GLOBE: HOW WEALTH HACKS THE WORLD.

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with James Romm, historian and classicist, about his new book, PLATO AND THE TYRANT: THE FALL OF GREECE'S GREATEST DYNASTY AND THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHIC MASTERPIECE.

"What has happened to human attention over the last century is exactly what has happened to the prairielands of America: a monoculture." —The Friends of Attention

“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time.

Read an end-of-the-year letter from acting editor Donovan Hohn. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/h...

Charles King on baroque music’s glorious revolution. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/f...

Save on back issues through the end of 2025. Forty percent off everything in our web store right now. ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Charles King about his latest book, “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Jeremy Eichler on Benjamin Britten and the angels of history. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/r...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, author of “Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Sometime in the late 1580s, Christopher Marlowe came upon a book that jolted him. Entitled “The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus,” it was an English translation, done by someone who signed himself “P.F. Gent.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/h...

Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe’s Faustian bargains. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/h...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt about “Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

In which @alexanderchee.bsky.social and @calebcrain.bsky.social propose that Moby Dick, dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“‘It’s awful,’ the historian said. ‘All true,’ I said.” A collage essay from @hernyfreebland.bsky.social, published by @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.

Aaron Sachs, author of Up from the Depths, speaks with Donovan Hohn about chapter 72 of Moby Dick for @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social’s The World in Time podcast:

Re-reading Moby Dick at Ahab’s age. An essay by @calebcrain.bsky.social. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/a...

In an extended, 3-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this podcast considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Hawthorne. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

In which I reminisce with @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social about my long career of queering Melville . . .

I spoke to Donovan Hohn of @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social for their Moby Dick podcast. We talked about Chapter 4, my Queequeg and Ishmael fanfic (Quishmael for my fellow old Tumblr heads) and Melville’s unrequited love for Nathaniel Hawthorne. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“That’s the trouble with dreams of power. It stimulates anxiety about a catastrophe that has yet to happen. ” @hernyfreebland.bsky.social in a collage essay which was published by @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.

“One of the poignancies of Darrow’s life is that it was hard for him to feel better. He wanted people to feel better. There was so much cruelty in the world. I wonder if, in his heart of hearts, Bryan also couldn’t stand that meaninglessness.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Brenda Wineapple on the hundredth anniversary of Tennessee v. Scopes. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/t...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

The collage essay I put together for @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social out of Lewis Lapham’s sentences is excerpted in the new issue of @harpers.bsky.social. Feels fittingly full circle: I sourced many of the sentences from his Harper’s columns, and LQ is effectively Readings through history.

“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in … We have evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Experiencing history in Assassin’s Creed. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/i...

Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan project. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/a...

“But what is important to me in ‘The Sermon’ is that he—how can I put this?—he is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. And Ahab is the person who wants you to give up any sense of proportionality.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab.... he is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. Father Mapple kind of supplies a warning and a possible lens for a reading of the entire novel" - Retired Prof/novelist Charles Baxter on Moby Dick

Read Charles Baxter on the literature and politics of charisma. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/f...

Charles Baxter visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Moby Dick. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its file on James Baldwin in April 1960 when Baldwin’s name appeared among the signatories to an open letter that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee published as an advertisement in the New York Times. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/b...

“They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

The FBI reads James Baldwin. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/b...

“He writes wonderfully about Baldwin. He writes about their early days in Paris. Friedrich had these wonderful, wonderful anecdotes about the trips they took to the south of France that went totally awry.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/n...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about “Baldwin: A Love Story,” a book three decades in the making. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

He entered the world on May 25, 1803. This was in Boston, the city he would later condemn as a necropolis of dead ideas and faint hearts and mercantile mildew. But what he saw as a child was very different. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/d...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

You still have a chance to buy back issues during our summer sale. 25% off all available Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, from now until Labor Day. ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

“Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

Consider the meanings of the verb to loom, whether Ishmael is likeable or funny, why the antebellum religious press condemned Moby Dick, and what the best medicine might be for “the universal thump” on our podcast. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“If you were to ask a range of readers, ‘Can you think of a 1st sentence?’ You probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, & the best of times,’ and people would get it backward. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’” www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

“I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words. I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.” Read an essay from Greil Marcus. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/g...