Ideas for Winter 2013

“One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”
 — Lapham’s Quarterly (“The only magazine that collects the most engaging voices from history on today’s most pressing topics”) quotes Baudelaire in the mission statement for its latest issue, “Intoxication,” which focuses among many things on opium, lust, and drunkenness in history in literature, as well as on different intoxicants’ origins. The whole thing (90 stories in all) is available with a yearly subscription for $49 or $29 — a pleasant gift? Its last five pages are rumored to be made of pure cocaine — just kidding, although actually who knows. There’s also an accompanying piece on alcohol and spontaneous human combustion, and a how-much-to-drink-according-to-famous-people chart, which ends: “The only cure for a real hangover is death.”