Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Shepherds with Picnic, by Jacob Wothly and Emile Mangel du Mesnil, c. 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016.
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Miscellany
The astronomer and mathematician Thales of Miletus is believed to have been the first ancient Greek scholar to discuss the phenomenon of magnetism. Aristotle notes in On the Soul that Thales held the belief that “the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.” Five and a half centuries later, Diogenes Laërtius concurred with Aristotle, observing that Thales “attributed a soul or life even to inanimate objects.”
I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”
—Michel Serres, 1982Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
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