By: David Smay

What did it take to be the most scandalous performer in Weimar Berlin? ANITA BERBER (1899-1928) had a penchant for going out in public naked under her sable wrap, affairs with married women and judges, […]

By: Peggy Nelson

WHEN I WATCH old monster movies, I think, What is it with these scientists? Whenever you have some Misshapen Fiend lurching all over the frame, muttering gibberish, trying to kill everything in its path and […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Teenage mutants…

By: Joshua Glenn

Nietzsche’s lonely­hearts ads went unanswered…

By: Joshua Glenn

An abridged version of this essay appeared in the journal n+1 (Winter 2007). PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE I set out to commemorate the heroes of old who sailed the good ship […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Called by collaborator Moss Hart “the greatest amateur I ever met,” COLE PORTER (1891-1964) treated the plots and characters of his Broadway shows and Hollywood films as shim-thin pretexts for his brilliant, brittle, notably frank […]

By: Joshua Glenn

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 […]

By: Lynn Peril

NANCY SINATRA (born 1940) was everywhere in the mid-1960s: dressed in tight leather as a motorcycle mama in The Wild Angels, blowing minds with Lee Hazlewood and Sammy Davis, Jr. on her Movin’ With Nancy […]

By: Matthew Battles

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” […]

By: HILOBROW

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more HiLo Hero birthdays. JUNE 7 Time is a trick, says PRINCE (born 1958), and to consider him as […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Filmmaker CHANTAL AKERMAN (born 1950), the arthouse precursor to Charlie Kaufman, Jem Cohen, and even Sam Mendes, took one small step for a woman, and one giant leap into interstitial space, with her investigations of […]

By: Lucy Sante

PANCHO VILLA (born Doroteo Aranga Arámbula; 1878-1923) was an outlaw with a world-class strategic intelligence who became a general during the chaotic and unending Mexican Revolution. John Reed was present in the Governor’s palace in […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Psyche­delic revel­ations about the arti­ficial nature of reality

By: Joshua Glenn

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 […]

By: Mimi Lipson

With his casual athleticism and big white teeth, with his good-looking features that somehow fail to coalesce into good looks, BRUCE DERN (born 1936) is the dropout personified — the kid who had every advantage […]