Middlebrow Bestsellers — this week
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A service that we may or may not continue to offer. Thanks to our friends at the New York Times for doing the primary research. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David […]
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New God Middlebrow
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the New Gods Generation include: Alfred Bester, Charles Bukowski, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Cordwainer Smith, Dean Martin, Dizzy Gillespie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Hobsbawm, Hank Williams, Hugh Kenner, Jack […]
Read This PostQuatschwatch (3): Words of Power
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The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: […]
Read This PostT.W. Adorno
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Even though there’s no shepherd issuing orders, we behave like docile sheep.
Read This PostPartisan Middlebrow
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and 1953 Commentary essay, “The Plight of Our Culture,” are […]
Read This PostHigh-Mid shenanigans
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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge “that maybe should have […]
Read This PostFred MacMurray
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Though often cast as a lovable father in middlebrow comedies like The Shaggy Dog and the long-running TV show My Three Sons, FRED MACMURRAY (1908-91) was more convincing in noir films. In Double Indemnity (1944), […]
Read This PostQuatschwatch (2): The Keeping-My-Baby Meme
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The era of guilt- and consequence-free sex ended in 1982.
Read This PostDouble Exposure (7): Free-Range Children
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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 […]
Read This PostDouble Exposure (6) — Food Fight
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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 […]
Read This PostPut Down that Web!
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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 […]
Read This PostDouble Exposure (4)
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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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