For more winged moon-men and other historical misfits, please visit www.laphamsquarterly.org.

2009: Last month, NASA scientists crashed a bus-sized satellite into the surface of the moon. On November 13th, they announced that they had found water. As the New York Times reported, "The confirmation of scientists' suspicions is...

For more on historical whores, please visit www.laphamsquarterly.org.

2009: Bestselling author and call-girl Belle du Jour, whose web diary about the fourteen months she lived as a high class prostitute was collected into popular book and a television show, revealed in this Sunday's Guardian that she is Dr....

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. He lives in Los Angeles. For more from Lapham's Quarterly, please visit www.laphamsquarterly.org.

One of the earliest...

Peter Foges worked for the BBC in London for fifteen years as a correspondent, anchor, producer, and director, before moving to the U.S. to serve as BBC-TV's Bureau Chief. He later became Director of News and Public Affairs Programming for WNET/Thirteen in New York City. For more from Lapham's Quarterly,...

Peter Struck is an associate professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts. Professor Stuck is a member of the Lapham's Quarterly editorial board.

From Buckley to Beck

Back...

"Dementia Risk Seen in Players in N.F.L. Study," The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2009:

A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league's former players vastly more often than in...

To distance itself from last week's terror attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organization now held responsible for the violence, issued a missive from "Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan," a fake terror organization. As The Hindu, India's most circulated periodical, reports, Indian intelligence was not fooled.

• "Terror Mail Analysis Supports Claim of...

N.B.: This post was compiled by Lapham's Quarterly intern Andrew Carlson, a former student of Wallace's at Pomona College.

On Friday, September 12, writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide, succumbing to a decades-long struggle with depression. Appraisals of his literary career flourish, many of them including lurid analyses of his...

Ethnically distinct from their Georgian neighbors, South Ossetians were separated from what became North Ossetia (and Russia) in the 13th century, when Mongol invaders pushed them southward into the Caucasus.

A break with Georgia, reports The New York Times, would potentially let South Ossetians reunite with...

With the swimming competition of the Beijing Olympics completed, the game of finding an athlete comparable to 14-time gold medalist (8 in Beijing) Michael Phelps can begin. Spitz...Armstrong...Secretariat -- all comers (and all species) are welcome.

Phelps's hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun, celebrated its local hero after he completed...

One of Wall Street's classic modernist designs, the leveraged buy-out (LBO) allows for small, private firms to purchase and take control of enormous corporations, generally with non-existent money (i.e., with billions in incurred debt). Ideally, the firm conducting the LBO uses its newly-won control to improve the performance of the...

With an estimated 1.2 million Americans living with HIV, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reports that the U.S. is home to "one of the largest HIV epidemics in the world." Racial and ethnic minorities represent especially risk-prone populations. In 2005, African Americans accounted for 48% of new...

Through two centuries of history guided by the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the Roosevelt Corollary (1905), and the Washington Conventions (1907), no Latin American nation has dangled at the end of the U.S. State Department's marionette strings more wretchedly than Nicaragua. From William Walker's crusading filibuster in the 1850s to the...

Since the first Portuguese caravel banked eastward from the Azores toward the Gold Coast in the fifteenth century, Africa has been fetishized by both Americans and Europeans as a virgin princess ripe for the taking -- and re-taking. As recently as 1977, historian Bernard Porter characterized, without irony, the early...

Barack Obama's presumptive nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate is perhaps most starkly contrasted with the unbridled hatred encountered by African American politicians during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period between 1865 and 1877.

The Los Angeles Sentinel, the oldest and most influential African American-owned newspaper on the West Coast,...

Modern epidemiology was born amidst the not-so-infrequent cholera outbreaks of Victorian London. With germ theory still in its infancy, London physician John Snow used statistics and probabilities to help debunk the fallacy of the "miasma theory," which held that hot, stuffy, and smelly--or otherwise foul--air, and not contaminated water, communicated...