Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
The Spell, by William Fettes Douglas, 1864. © National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, The Bridgeman Art Library.
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Miscellany
In 1936 Sotheby’s auctioned many of Isaac Newton’s nonscientific papers, containing much writing about his alchemical interests. A large batch was bought by John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in a lecture published posthumously as “Newton, the Man,” that the physicist and mathematician “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”
To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.
—Albert Camus, 1951Lapham’s
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