By: Matthew Battles

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 […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Ringtone: “Swinging on a Star”

By: Lynn Peril

A virtuoso pianist with a biting wit, OSCAR LEVANT (1906-72) was equally at home with Schoenberg’s atonalism and Gershwin’s jazzy rhapsodies, dated a series of Broadway chorus girls, acted alongside stars like Fred Astaire and […]

By: HILOBROW

“Young ladies, indelibly fix this shape of head in your memories. Any man who will make a natural, kind and true husband will have a head in outline from a side view like this.” *** […]

By: Erik Davis

Of all the hilo heroes of American music, only FRANK ZAPPA (1940-93) turned the scramble of the brainy and the base into an aesthetic practice so strident it counts as an ethical philosophy. The dialectic […]

By: HILOBROW

“The reason this man is an unreliable husband is because he is very weak in Conjugality and Parental Love and exceedingly strong in Amativeness. Young ladies, beware such men as husbands.” *** According to Louis […]

By: John Holbo

“An unspeakable sledge,/and eight Things to strike fear!”

By: Mimi Lipson

He knew his audience inside and out.

By: HILOBROW

“We affirm in the most absolute manner that words can be used that mother love is located exactly where this backhead projects most. To be a true, natural mother is to have this faculty highly […]

By: HILOBROW

“Why is this head and face the opposite of the masculine? Because the feminine faculties are predominant. There is a great vital truth right here.” *** According to Louis Allen Vaught, the purpose of Vaught’s […]

By: David Smay

The 1960s was a terrible decade for film and television comedy, but it did produce a stellar class of comedians working the beatnik demimonde: Mort Sahl, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Bill […]

By: Matthew Battles

In an impulsive experiment in cross-platform grandiosity, I’ve published a collection of three stories that originally appeared here at HILOBROW in an edition for the Kindle. Entitled The Sovereignties of Invention, it includes the title […]

By: Joe Alterio

CHARLES M. SCHULZ (1922-2000) might seem an unlikely hero for HiLobrow.com, because his comic strip Peanuts and, particularly, the animated Peanuts TV specials, are so mainstream. A casual reader might even perceive Peanuts as a […]

By: Matthew Battles

HE STOOD THERE with the box torn open, with ribbons of packing tape and flaccid little packing-bags strewn about on the table. And in the midst of this mess, the prize — the shiny tool […]

By: HILOBROW

“It will pay all to remember the shape of this head and face.” *** According to Louis Allen Vaught, the purpose of Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902) is to acquaint readers “with the elements of […]