By: Douglas Wolk

It can be hard to distinguish BRITNEY SPEARS (born 1981) the performer from Britney Spears the cultural construct — which one shaved her head, again? which one’s got the unerring song-sense that led her to […]

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: Joshua Glenn

“That pig was telling me exactly what to do.”

By: Jason Grote

If there were to be a patron saint for misfit smart kids who do poorly in school, it would have to be MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1918-2007). A gifted writer from the age of 5, she was […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

According to DAWN POWELL (1897-1965), there was no trick to writing satire. You just describe people as they are, and add a motive. If you substitute vision for motive, then what you get is romance. […]

By: Joshua Glenn

In 1963, BRUCE LEE (1940-73), an immigrant from Hong Kong who’d been studying philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, dropped out in order to teach the Chinese art of kung fu. Impatient with […]

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: Tor Aarestad

The apex of MARK LANEGAN’s (born 1964) visibility came more than fifteen years ago as the lead singer of the feral Seattle band Screaming Trees during the apogee of that city’s fame as the rebirthplace […]

By: Patrick Cates

If you were to approach STEPHEN MERCHANT (born 1974) and berate him for looking like a myopic ostrich, he would stare vacantly back at you and, after a pause suffused with the awkward comedic tension […]

By: Mark Kingwell

ARTHUR ADOLPH “HARPO” MARX (1888-1964) was a philosopher of silence. Though it started as a way to distinguish him from his voluble brothers, especially front man Groucho, his assumed muteness became a career-long existential conundrum […]

By: David Smay

TERRY GILLIAM (born 1940) first worked with John Cleese (and Gloria Steinem) in the early 1960s, on Harvey Kurtzman’s Help, collaborating on a fumetti: “Christopher’s Punctured Romance.” After Help’s demise he moved to England where […]

By: David Smay

Is it possible that BJÖRK (born 1965) is not an unreasonably talented singer and video artist, but just a typical Icelander who bothered to leave her homeland? How to judge the genius of Björk’s Oscar-night […]

By: Douglas Wolk

CHESTER GOULD (1900-85) missed his calling as a professional designer of deathtraps. In the middle of one 1943 Dick Tracy sequence Gould wrote and drew, the villainous Mrs. Pruneface chains the valiant detective to the […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Although other scholars have been cited as soothsayers of the mechanics of our Great Recession, ZYGMUNT BAUMAN (born 1925) has been unerringly the Prophet of its ethos. Since his retirement from active teaching at the […]

By: Erik Davis

Long before they became whiners — carping about Napster and exploring their inner kiddie tantrums in Some Kind of Monster — Metallica were America’s best metal band, or at least the best American metal band […]