Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
The Precision of Luck, by Joel Rea, 2015. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 48 inches. © Joel Rea, courtesy the artist and Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York City.
VIEW:
Miscellany
Sailors’ fear of bananas may extend back to seventeenth-century Spanish ships trading in the Caribbean. Crew members would often purchase wooden crates of the fruit, and when their vessels sailed north to pick up the Gulf Stream in the Straits of Florida, hazards of the passage shipwrecked many, leaving behind stray clumps of bananas floating ominously on the water’s surface for later ships to see.
Fortune resists half-hearted prayers.
—Ovid, 8Lapham’sDaily
Stay Updated Subscribe to the LQ Newsletter
Roundtable
Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus
But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More
The World in Time
Robert D. Kaplan
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More