September 2010
25 posts
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green islets and meadows;...”
– Charles Dickens, from Bleak House. Dickens worked as a clerk in a solicitor’s office and a court stenographer before he first gained recognition for his fiction in his mid-twenties, publishing the Pickwick Papers in serial form from 1836 to 1837. One of the greatest and most prolific authors of the...
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In China, Buildings Die Unnaturally →
“China aggregates 2 billion square meters of new building area every year, consuming about 40% of the world’s concrete and steel. However, on the flip side of the new building fever, there lie the rubbles and remains of other ‘older’ buildings: people tear down four-star hotels to build five-star ones and bulldoze newly developed construction sites before they are even finished....
2010: Santiago
Home to a private army of BMW and Mercedes owners and an impressive array of successful, globally integrated companies, Chile is widely regarded as being the economic miracle of Latin America. Between 1988 and 2008 the country’s economy doubled and then tripled in size, increasing by almost 600 percent in two decades. Fast growth helped cut down on the number of people living in absolute poverty,...
“Genius (philosophy and literature). Range of mind, power of imagination, and...”
– Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, from the Encyclopédie. A career army officer known to have shared mistresses with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, Saint-Lambert published a volume of verse and contributed various articles to Diderot and d’Alembert’s dictionary of thought. From our Spring 2010...
How to Think About Zero-Carbon Cities →
They’re “best regarded not as structures that will actually be built but as a regional subgenre of science fiction,” writes Jesse Walker at Reason. Though he admits Masdar is going farther than most, he continues to say that even “if it is completed, I doubt that everything will work out as planned. Much less ambitious utopias have found themselves taking paths their...
Last of the Floating Worlds
Experimental designs include floating cities actually made from trash. A Dutch architecture firm recently put forward a plan to turn a mass of 100 million tons of plastic that has accumulated in the Pacific into a habitable city of 500,000, with a functioning economy based on algae-farming. The firm notes that Recycled Island is located in a beautiful ocean area northeast of Hawaii, but “because...
A Literary Map of Manhattan →
We remember this fabulous map of the various haunts of literary characters in its printed form. Wish the online incarnation was a little more high res. Bah, you can’t have everything. (via mcnallyjackson)
“The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman; If it be a few...”
– Walt Whitman, 1856. From our Fall 2010 issue, “The City.”
Mark Twain's "Conversation, as it was the Social... →
This, along with the Milton, made it a grand day for historical scatology. (via housingworksbookstore) Found at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe: A little dirty book Mark Twain wrote called 1601: Conversation, as it was the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors in which Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh, and other famous Tudors chat about masturbation, farting, and other interesting subjects,...
“Every coffeehouse is illuminated both without and within doors…This is the...”
– Thomas Brown, from Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London, c. 1700. Coffee proved so popular among London men that some women drafted a petition against that “black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous puddle water.” By 1700 there were more than two thousand...
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Dickens in Lagos
“Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone...
1801: The First Pie Chart
“The pie chart first appeared in 1801 in a publication entitled The Statistical Breviary by William Playfair. In this publication, Playfair used a variety of graphs to present geographical areas, populations, and revenues of European states. We have Playfair to thank for many of the popular graphs that we use today, including the bar graph. Although he didn’t invent the line graph, his...
“The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads,...”
– Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958. From our newly released Fall 2010 issue, “The City.”
Albany is an old man in a deli, trying to send...
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
We love John Berger’s observation about the particular sex and age of every city. Reblog this and add your own cities into...
Intern at Lapham's Quarterly
It’s no secret that what we do at Lapham’s Quarterly is the most fun you can have with a liberal arts education. That’s why each quarter we take on three full-time interns who are transformed into beloved members of the staff. An ideal intern is a recent college graduate with a frighteningly large personal library and familiarity with the magazine. Lapham’s Quarterly offers...
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“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome...”
– John Berger, 1987. From our Fall 2010 issue on The City, which is now available online.
“What a catalogue of new books this year, all this age (I say) have our Frankfurt...”
– Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. From the Déjà Vu blog “Our Eyes Ache With Reading,” about information overload in the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries.
