Intelligence Upgrade
Anyone even pretending to write, read, or think needs to get Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s the closest a real publication has ever come to videogame books, where simply owning them makes you permanently better at something.
Of course you still need to read it, in the same way someone ordering a rare Kobe steak still “needs” to eat it. Every issue has a theme, like “Food” or “The City”, and collects writing about it. From all the writing about it. Ever. Writers range from Hemingway to an ancient Egyptian scribe instructor, from Marilyn Monroe’s potty mouth to Virgil’s epic poetry with Twain’s quotes and recent journalists and full-page color cave paintings in between. And everything fits.
It’s a VIP pass to deep thought, skipping past the long queue of pondering the classics and into the champagne room of revelation and the ecstasy of new connections. Each extract is only a page or two, and as you read through the millennia and every angle on the issue you can’t help but have your own insights..
It’s also a crash course in style. Ten pages will take your mental gear from iambic pentameter to the musings of Greeks, downshifting through Gogol before accelerating into reportage. It would teach a blind illiterate to see changes in style, force the comatose to appreciate pacing, and turn English from a second language to a second nature.
Get it or give up on these ‘word’ things.
Of course you still need to read it, in the same way someone ordering a rare Kobe steak still “needs” to eat it. Every issue has a theme, like “Food” or “The City”, and collects writing about it. From all the writing about it. Ever. Writers range from Hemingway to an ancient Egyptian scribe instructor, from Marilyn Monroe’s potty mouth to Virgil’s epic poetry with Twain’s quotes and recent journalists and full-page color cave paintings in between. And everything fits.
It’s a VIP pass to deep thought, skipping past the long queue of pondering the classics and into the champagne room of revelation and the ecstasy of new connections. Each extract is only a page or two, and as you read through the millennia and every angle on the issue you can’t help but have your own insights..
It’s also a crash course in style. Ten pages will take your mental gear from iambic pentameter to the musings of Greeks, downshifting through Gogol before accelerating into reportage. It would teach a blind illiterate to see changes in style, force the comatose to appreciate pacing, and turn English from a second language to a second nature.
Get it or give up on these ‘word’ things.
