iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lapham’s Quarterly

@laphamsquarterly.bsky.social

1.4K followers 22 following 117 posts

A magazine of history and ideas. Our latest issue is Energy.

Posts Replies Media

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

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...

010

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

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...

110

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

25% off all Lapham’s Quarterly back issues, from now until Labor Day. Which issues do you still need for your collection? ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

111

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

This week on The World in Time, John Jeremiah Sullivan brings us a piece of writing by Mark Twain that scholars considered lost. www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/epis...

131

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

We’re pleased to announce the return of something long awaited: our full catalog of in-stock back issues is once again available for purchase. ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AAF/app...

1121

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

We are delighted to announce that Lapham’s Quarterly will return later this year, thanks to our new home with the @hannaharendtcenter.bsky.social. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/l...

Picture of issues of Lapham’s Quarterly, including our latest issue, Energy.

195

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

We are excited to share a significant development in the ongoing recovery efforts for Lapham’s Quarterly. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity and vision of Hawthornden Foundation, the Quarterly has been given a lifeline that promises a brighter future. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/h...

1181

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 10/10/2023

Read Lewis H. Lapham’s preamble to our forthcoming issue, Energy. www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/p...

By way of a best-guess answer to the question “How can such things be?,” this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly borrows from a book, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by the political theorist William Ophuls. Published in 2012, but eleven years later more readily understood as a canary in the mine, the book supplies the issue with its accounting for the price charged by nature for the use of its facilities and resources, lists the thermodynamic tolls and fees paid for the self-glorifying assumption that mankind’s wonder-working technologies subjugate nature, develop it into a colossal cash machine.

This issue of the Quarterly borrows from Ophuls because I share his way of thinking and know him as my first cousin. Ophuls was born in 1934, a year before my own arrival, and we are therefore old enough to have seen at least two changes of the civilizational guard over the course of our nine decades on the pilgrim road to who knows where. Before we were schoolboys in San Francisco in the 1940s, we were onstage for what Ibn Khaldun would have recognized as a first act in the life of a civilization: the emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from the ashes of the Great Depression. After December 7, 1941, and beyond the age of six, we were participant in the willingness to lend a hand, collecting for the war effort scraps of rubber, tin, and bacon grease; as children we were accustomed to ration books and the shortages of sugar, shoes, meat, and fuel.

011

Lapham’s Quarterly @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

Join us in-person on October 12 at the newly reopened Center for Brooklyn History for an evening of readings and conversation on the rich and complex history of education in American prisons and jails. Register here: www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cbh...

010