Watch the watchmen, critique the critics, épater les savants.
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“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]
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Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]
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Nobrows are easily recognized, for their gait is dancing and bold. But HiLobrows frequently deceive one because their bearing is curiously like that of a class of people heartily despised by Nobrows as well as […]
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Hey, PhD students looking for a thesis topic — here’s a freebie. These sketchy notes are inspired by a B&N.com review of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, by HiLobrow.com friend James Parker. Parker writes: […]
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A COLLEGE WHERE I do a bit of teaching just sent me an email announcing the formation of a “social media working group” whose job it is to “research, suggest, and implement strategies and best […]
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WHAT’S A HILOBROW to wear? This is the question that bedevils me. When preparing to leave the workforce last year, I anticipated with relish the sudden sartorial liberation. No more ties and coats and codes! […]
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“I am the sum of my small steps,” announce the handwritten-style notes in an advertisement torn from a recent issue of Oprah Magazine. Ecce Middlebrow’s ideal American woman, forever in pursuit of a clear (un-anxious, […]
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Looking back on it all, from the vantage point of a couple months, it’s apparent that the Susan Boyle Phenomenon (SBP) had very little to do with poor Susan Boyle (SB) herself. Susan Boyle’s judges […]
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Is it so small a thing To have enjoy’d the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done… SO DEMANDS THE protagonist of Matthew Arnold’s 1852 […]
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FROM THE STRUGGLE between Cartesian science and the Classics lampooned by Jonathan Swift in his “Battle of the Books,” to the “Two Cultures” argument of physicist and novelist C. P. Snow, to the “nonoverlapping magisteria” […]
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Psychedelic revelations about the artificial nature of reality
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OUR READERS already know that HILOBROW has a problem with — in fact, an animus against — quatsch. As of today, we’re going to start fighting back against its reign of terror. Building on my […]
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WES ANDERSON’S Bottle Rocket (1996) raised the hopes of hilobrows everywhere, and his Rushmore (1998) fulfilled those hopes in spades. So what happened? Anderson once knew how to get a great performance out of his […]
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