Lapham’s Quarterly

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A magazine of history and ideas. Our latest issue is Energy.

Picture of issues of Lapham’s Quarterly, including our latest issue, Energy.
By way of a best-guess answer to the question “How can such things be?,” this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly borrows from a book, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, by the political theorist William Ophuls. Published in 2012, but eleven years later more readily understood as a canary in the mine, the book supplies the issue with its accounting for the price charged by nature for the use of its facilities and resources, lists the thermodynamic tolls and fees paid for the self-glorifying assumption that mankind’s wonder-working technologies subjugate nature, develop it into a colossal cash machine.