This is ironic, as one of the points of Lapham's Quarterly is to restore excellence to long-form journalism.
Side note: a subscription to LQ would make a great Christmas present for discerning types.
Other side note: this video of Lapham at Google, although uneven, contains some first-rate material about the history of journalism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQYkTttj7k.
Lapham's is a great publication. Especially for anyone who loves history (through the words of those living it, without the benefit of hindsight).
Though, you definitely have to love reading also to make it worth your while. Some of it can get pretty dense. I usually end up reading only 2 or 3 of the articles but still get a lot out of it.
The emphasis on history is really the killer feature. I almost posted this a few days ago because I love how they frame older documents in modern contexts:
I didn't, in the end, because I decided it would lead to a useless discussion about how stupid Gandhi was.
On a tangential note, wouldn't it be great if there were a news network (say like NPR, the good parts) whose focus was to include history in everything? For example, when covering the Libyan war, also cover the colonial history, previous wars fought there (http://www.google.ca/#ssource=hp&q=%22benghazi+stakes%22) - really anything related would do. We could better understand what's going on, learn things of substance, and the material wouldn't have to be the same old recycled talking points bullshit, because you'd have all of history to draw on. (It needn't just be history, either; that's just where the most ready material would be.) Rather than interviewing bobbleheads for their opinions, interview scholars for their learning. I bet you could get some pretty good historians to go on for cheap.
Completely agree. I'd personally love something like that. But then again, I'd think it would be a very VERY niche product. I have trouble enough convincing people I know to watch an episode of Charlie Rose.
Can you get all of the articles online? What's the paid $29/yr digital subscription getting you as far as extra content? Is the digital format lame? (Ideal would be directly into instapaper)
I still like Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs the best of all subscriptions, followed by the Economist.
Sorry, I don't know. I just read the occasional article on the web (and it popped into my head that a subscription would be the perfect gift for someone I know).
Kinda hard to TL;DR actually. It's a poetic history of gambling on the future and how every new twist on the practice causes crashes, regulations, etc. And the history goes back to ancient Rome. In conclusion, we haven't mastered predicting the future and mitigating risk but have an unhealthy obsession to do so. The article is so long because it's so poetic.
Would also suggest to anyone interested in this topic to check out anything written by Nassim Taleb. Both of his main stream books are good ("Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan"). Black Swan is more general while Fooled slants towards finance. Peter Bernstein's "Against the Gods" about the history of risk is also great and a little less wordy than Talebs.
