As I've read more and more, my expectations of my books has risen. I'm almost proud to say I've reached the point where I enjoy reading the classics. This wasn't always the case: I had to start with simplistic books (in hindsight) and magazines with superficial content.
Over the past few years I've held subscriptions to many newspapers and magazines. The Economist, WSJ, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Business Weekly, The Rake. Almost inevitably, I got bored of all of them. Once you've read several editions of Foreign Affairs, the content becomes stale. You can almost predict the tone and direction the Steve Forbes' essays are going to go into.
Where then could I find a magazine that set a new bar in this age of clickbait BuzzFeed articles? Who still catered to an audience of men and women yearning to be challenged and delight in wonderful writing.
I finally found one avenue: Lapham's Quarterly. Edited by Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar, this publication is truly worth its weight in gold. What makes it stand apart is that they collect essays writing by such great luminaries as Plato, de Montaigne, Herman Melville, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Mark Twain. It is quite simply a curated compilation of the greatest thinkers in a modern coat.
But I wouldn't be doing justice to it if I said it really is only a collection of essays by the greatest minds in human history. The man behind this, Lewis Lapham, himself has an erudite mind. In his 80s, this isn't some 24 year old basic bitch with no understanding of the world. He's been around the block and his writing reflects his great intellect and wisdom.
From the Fall 2016 quarterly's preamble
I highly encourage al RVF members interested in deepening their knowledge base and vocabulary to subscribe to this quite frankly glorious publication.
Over the past few years I've held subscriptions to many newspapers and magazines. The Economist, WSJ, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Business Weekly, The Rake. Almost inevitably, I got bored of all of them. Once you've read several editions of Foreign Affairs, the content becomes stale. You can almost predict the tone and direction the Steve Forbes' essays are going to go into.
Where then could I find a magazine that set a new bar in this age of clickbait BuzzFeed articles? Who still catered to an audience of men and women yearning to be challenged and delight in wonderful writing.
I finally found one avenue: Lapham's Quarterly. Edited by Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar, this publication is truly worth its weight in gold. What makes it stand apart is that they collect essays writing by such great luminaries as Plato, de Montaigne, Herman Melville, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Mark Twain. It is quite simply a curated compilation of the greatest thinkers in a modern coat.
But I wouldn't be doing justice to it if I said it really is only a collection of essays by the greatest minds in human history. The man behind this, Lewis Lapham, himself has an erudite mind. In his 80s, this isn't some 24 year old basic bitch with no understanding of the world. He's been around the block and his writing reflects his great intellect and wisdom.
From the Fall 2016 quarterly's preamble
Quote:Quote:
What animates the would-be marketable commodities in the crowd is the seeking to cast their own flesh in the long-shot images of divine perfection, construct an impenetrable facade and fortress secure against the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, defend it against the intrusion of unsettling emotion, protect it against the threat of cigarette smoke and trans fats, press it into golden masks fashioned by cosmetic surgery, enhance its performance with steroids and Cialis, breast enhancement and penile implant, and maybe at the last, when all else fails, escape entirely from its mortifications into the virtual world, into the dreams of self, ascending as Facebook posts into the computer cloud, and there, in company with the immortal bodies of medieval kings, held harmless from whatever other dreams may come.
I highly encourage al RVF members interested in deepening their knowledge base and vocabulary to subscribe to this quite frankly glorious publication.
