Lapham's Quarterly | Hacker News Reader

Lapham's Quarterly

laphamsquarterly.org

27 pointsjonathansizz9 comments

I love Lapham's Quarterly. Also, what a missed opportunity it represents for Harper's (Lapham's previous employer). Harper's has been famously slow to embrace the web and as a result has been declining lately despite still featuring strong writing. Lapham is an octogenarian and very old school in many ways, but has still managed to pull off the print/web hybrid format in a way that Harper's hasn't. I can easily imagine an alternate reality where LQ is a Harper's vertical as opposed to an independent breakaway journal.

I was going to dig up some old comments by the publisher of Harper's to show how anti-web publishing he is, but the NYT recently did a profile on him that reveals a lot: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/business/media/harpers-pub...

Lapham's Quarterly is another example of print never going away (though it may become a niche one day like vinyl records). Their attention to physical detail in paper, ink and illustration gives each issue a tangible value that's hard to replicate in the digital world no matter how "interactive" you might make it.

I've been a reader of Lapham's Quarterly for about 2 years now. So much better than watching TV and crappy movies.

Its kind of meant to be a starting point for readers to find something interesting and follow it through in more detail.

Similar to a curated list of topics with short bits of content to pique interest.

I love it.

I was a fan of the magazine and subscribed for the first two years, largely on the strength of the inaugural issue focusing on war. In a way I think they kind of cheated with that issue because it turns out that there is a huge amount of compelling writing and art on the subject of war -- massively more than some of the late subjects they chose.

Particularly the "money" issue seemed amazing superficial. As in most of the extracts were just various ways marveling at the concept of fungibility.

(Or maybe I don't appreciate it because I'm not as smart as Lewis Lapham.)

I think it's a bit of a Rorschach test. I bought the "Future" issue on a newsstand and immediately subscribed. Of the next three issues I found two less interesting, so I let it lapse. Then the fourth was interesting again. I just picked up the latest issue, "Time", on the newsstand and it's great. So different from the usual magazine where maybe a quarter of the content is interesting to me. Here, maybe half the content is interesting, but it's divvied up such that it's feast or famine.

They have an excellent 404 page, see here: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/foobar/

Mr Lapham's writings in the Harper's Notebook column justified the cost of the subscription for me. The breadth of scope he would bring always amazed me.

Much as we like Lapham's, it would be better to post a substantive article from the website instead of the magazine home page.

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