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Comment by cmccart | Hacker News Reader

A little over a year ago, I followed a link to Lapham's from HN, and I've been a subscriber and reader ever since. Every magazine is an absolute treat. For those who are already extremely well read it might be review, but I have always felt that my education leaned too far towards STEM and, save for a few electives, not nearly enough towards a true liberal education. FWIW, I think Lapham's has been a great starting point to filling those gaps.

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My feelings exactly. For anyone considering subscribing, here's the link: https://store.laphamsquarterly.us/gifts/

Lapham is a national treasure...time spent reading his essays, or content he has assembled, or edited, is time well spent...

I've been a regular subscriber to Harper's, as well, for a couple of decades...Lapham was editor there for many years off and on...their "Easy Chair" essay/column/editorial at the beginning of each magazine is often worth the price of the magazine itself...he started that tradition...

Agreed. I'm also struck by how pretty the issues are as physical objects. Something about the dimensions make them function in my life more as books than as short-term periodicals, i.e. they sit on the bookshelf for years rather than the coffee table for weeks. I wish there were more publications doing stuff like them. Though admittedly, it certainly helps to be the scion of a billionaire oil family like Lewis Lapham.

The first issue transformed my understanding of an essential topic, States of War. It was produced in response to the ignorance surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq War at the time, IIRC. I'm someone who reads a lot of serious foreign policy, and by far it's the best, most revelatory, perspective-redefining (my highest complement) thing I've read on the subject. Stealing from an earlier post of mine, Lapham wrote:

Cicero made the point fifty years before the birth of Christ: “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.” The American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made the same point in the essay that served as his epitaph when it was published in the New York Times on January 1, 2007, two months before he died. Under the heading, “Folly’s Antidote,” he prescribed strong doses of history as a cure for “the delusions of omnipotence and omniscience,” akin to those that persuaded the Bush Administration to stage a rerun in Iraq of America’s misadventure in Vietnam. The failure to connect the then with the now Schlesinger diagnosed as an illness which, if left untreated, he thought likely to lead to the death of the American idea. Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religion. ...

An acquaintance with history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of next year’s election, but, as the season or occasion requires, it makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton once called, “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about” ... About the methods of pacifying cities bloodied by civil war, I learn more from Machiavelli’s Discourses or the Memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman than from the testimony of General David Petraeus or the commentary on Fox News. When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero’s hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes. The remembrance of the good old days in ancient Rome serves as a program note for the performances on set with Diane Sawyer and Tim Russert. [1]

Contributors include brilliant people and witnesses to history spanning millenia and nations:

* Thucydides

* Sun Tzu

* Winston Churchill

* George Patton

* George W. Bush

* George Orwell

* Krishna

* Homer

* Lenin

* Saint Augustine

* Albert Einstein

* Kurt Vonnegut

* Jessica Lynch

* (far more than I will list)

http://store.laphamsquarterly.us/back-issues/states-of-war

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[1] The whole essay is well worth reading, both for his writing and for his ideas: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-war/gulf-time

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