Olympia, by Édouard Manet, 1863. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Eros

Volume II, Number 1 | winter 2009

The Toilette of Venus, by François Boucher, 1751.

Preamble

Transits of Venus

By Lewis H. Lapham

The commodification of sex and love has shaped our attitudes toward both over the past half century, but eros is more than just dollars and cents.

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The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca Da Rimini, illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, by William Blake, 1824-27.

Hell House

By Jeff Sharlet

Young Christians encounter sex, violence, and the eros of evangelicalism in an East Texas hell house.

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Map

The Grand Tour

Sexual hazards from around the world and throughout time.

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c. 1861 | Amherst, MA

Rowing in Eden

Wild nightsMore

c. 397 | Hippo

The Brambles of Lust

St. Augustine flounders in a broiling sea of fornication.More

1927 | Milan

To Virginia Woolf

Vita Sackville-West sends one out to the one she loves.More

Charts & Graphs

A Kingdom for a Kiss

Sex and politics throughout history.

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Canadian musician and author Leonard Cohen.

French author the Marquis de Sade.

British writer Vita Sackville-West.

English poet, dramatist, and critic John Dryden.

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.

- St. Augustine, c. 387

Molière & Albert Camus

Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Delayed Reaction

By Joanna Scutts

Why didn’t the sinking of the Lusitania cause the United States to enter more quickly into the war? More

DÉjÀ Vu

Go West, Mr. President

2015:

Barack Obama becomes only the fourth president to visit all fifty states.

1880:

President Rutherford B. Hayes makes a belated trip to California.

More

Political cartoon showing Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

LQ Podcast

#56 Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian speaks with Lewis Lapham about her latest book, The Bully Pulpit. More

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