Author: Matthew Battles
Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.
More Troubled Superhumans
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A super video reminding you of our micro-fiction contest.
Read This PostWhat a Tangled Bank We Weave
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Darwin’s dangerous idea does more than explain the existence of life in its myriad forms and set forth a materialist worldview that makes Biblical literalists foam at the mouths. It’s also as meme with enormous […]
Read This PostBookfuturists of the world, unite (tonight)!
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There’s a new disposition on the rise: that of the Bookfuturist, someone who embraces the book’s history and its technological future. Bookfuturists love books in all their forms—from the scroll to the social media, from […]
Read This PostFor Provisional Description of Superficial Features
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The surface of OGLE-350c, like so many other superearths Sevin and Vulpes had visited, was composed of a mixture of crumbly xenolith and light, rubbery, frozen organics mounded like ice cream — if ice cream […]
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In Search of Strategically-Placed Sensors
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As readers of HiLobrow know, Joshua Glenn shows the same mastery over the history of science fiction that a mad scientist exerts over his army of murderous fembots. While Roxxxy the Robot’s makers might claim […]
Read This PostAldo Leopold
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Wisconsin’s Sand County lacks the grandeur of the Sierras that inspired John Muir. Its modest landscapes of meadows, streams, and oak savannas do not exhibit the sublime extremes of the ocean that furnished Rachel Carson […]
Read This PostDo Not Go Gentle into That Good Night Moon
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This image comes from the sad, strange book children’s book The Dead Bird, by Good Night Moon author Margaret Wise Brown and Remy Charlip (1958). (SPOILER ALERT an extract: “And every day, until they forgot, […]
Read This PostOf Tablets, Holy Writ, & Holy Grails
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. The mere possibility of an impending announcement of a tablet from Apple has tech journalists everywhere abandoning their cynicism for bouts of credulity and wonder. But the sudden zeal with which many commentators anticipate […]
Read This PostAnd Now a Word from Our Sponsor
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Recently, the dulcet voice of HiLobrow cofounder Joshua Glenn has been broadcast on some of the finest frequencies on the FM band. On Monday, Josh gave HiLobrow itself a shout-out on Benjamen Walker’s excellent WFMU […]
Read This PostApple’s Alien Minions
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With speculation on the appearance of Apple’s tablet computer rampant, a minor detail, which has entirely escaped the notice of breathless commentators, may prove the most important of all. Among Apple’s patent filings pursuant to […]
Read This PostGaming, Dreaming, & the City of the Everyday
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The art game Every day the same dream is a casual fantasia on the quotidian dialectic of work and reverie. It’s a mere bagatelle, tossed together in six days for the monthly competition sponsored by […]
Read This PostThe Dogs in the Trees
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The first sightings of dogs in trees were reported not long after the Fall equinox. Early rumor came in the form of videos shot at arms’ length on cell phones and hastily uploaded — grainy, […]
Read This PostAvatars
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I’ve been reading the debate about James Cameron’s CGI magnum opus Avatar over at io9— which strangely reawakened an old puppetry hobbyhorse long dormant. And then I happened across this YouTube clip of a film […]
Read This PostGray Magic for a Gray Day
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Presenting Georges Méliès’ Les cartes vivantes, a short, fey film by the maker of Le voyage dans la lune. Méliès was a magician before he made films, and here he adapts a bit of stage […]
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