By: Joshua Glenn

Hip hop, zines, alt-culture comics, post-punk, hardcore…

By: Peggy Nelson

Short attent­ion span? Frag­ment­ation and ab­sorption are models of inter­action.

By: Matthew Battles

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 […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Crime writer Robert B. Parker is dead. HiLobrow.com contributor Sarah Weinman, who writes “Dark Passages,” a monthly online mystery & suspense column for the Los Angeles Times, and “The Criminalist”, a monthly online column for […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Last week’s advice was not for everyone, Gladwell Moore recognizes that. What if you don’t want to be a playa? What if you just want one, the one, with whom you can hang out at […]

By: Matthew Battles

Over at the group philosophy blog Crooked Timber, John Holbo is conducting a discussion of sans serif type and its connection to twentieth-century Modernist art and design. The post’s lengthy comment thread captures a vital […]

By: Matthew Battles

At Slate last week, Troy Patterson argued that books don’t need to be promoted with the kind of flashy, light-beer cinema that is the phenomenon of the “book trailer.” At Snarkmarket, however, Matt Thompson offers […]

By: Matthew Battles

In the Golden Age, when the fruit of knowledge hung heavy from boughs in the grove of academe and all the birds and beasts knew their places, there was a little ritual called note-taking. Students […]

By: Matthew Battles

In the New Yorker’s “Current Cinema” column this week, David Denby offer a quick and compelling appraisal of Richard Kelly’s new film, The Box. Kelly wrote and directed the magical and unsettling cult film Donnie […]

By: Joshua Glenn

A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis (“It helps lower cholesterol”) and antithesis (“It tastes […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The matrix of modern dispositions

By: Joshua Glenn

Every now and then, a well-meaning intellectual mounts a three-quarters-hearted defense of Cold War-era High Middlebrow — i.e., the Great Books of the Western World collection, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Masterpiece Theatre, the arts magazine Horizon, […]

By: HILOBROW

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their […]

By: Joshua Glenn

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Why do middlebrows love to hate performance art?