By: Matthew Battles

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! […]

By: Peggy Nelson

A New England scion twice kicked out of Harvard for nonconformity and “apathy,” R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1895-1983) went on to invent the geodesic dome (he said he got the idea while watching the bubbles generated […]

By: HILOBROW

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more HiLo Hero birthdays. JULY 12 A New England scion twice kicked out of Harvard for nonconformity and “apathy,” […]

By: Erik Davis

Smith explored the inner landscapes opened up by postwar mind science.

By: Lynn Peril

Clad in a leather jumpsuit, tiny waist offset by enormous bosom, her performance in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) transformed what could have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie into a parable of female power […]

By: Joshua Glenn

I’ve got the sweetest hangover… I don’t wanna get over.

By: Joshua Glenn

EARLIER THIS WEEK, Rob Walker and I launched an online experiment called Significant Objects. The project, in brief: Rob’s “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine attempts to figure out why consumers respond the […]

By: Matthew Battles

FREEFALL IS ONE chief theme in this season’s action films. One of the most scintillating scenes of the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie has Kirk, Sulu, and a doomed redshirt skydive from suborbital altitude […]

By: James Parker

The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, […]

By: Lucy Sante

ONE DAY VERY SOON it will happen that our heroes, having searched and studied ancient property maps on file at the bureau of records, having rented a basement storage space on the opposite side of […]

By: Douglas Wolk

For a good chunk of the 1940s, the R&B chart (or the “race records” chart, as Billboard called it then) might just as well have been called the LOUIS JORDAN (1908-75) chart: he scored hit […]

By: Jason Grote

The biography of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-88) firmly places Golden-Age SF on the grand continuum of Americana: the no-nonsense engineer’s mentality of his Kansas City upbringing, his longing for military service (he graduated from the […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Kurt Weill settled into a successful Broadway career after escaping Nazi Germany, but the American soujourn of Brecht’s other major Weimar-era musical collaborator did not end so fortunately. HANNS EISLER (1898-1962) set his Schoenberg-trained hand […]

By: Matthew Battles

“My life is made up of so many other lives…. all of them rearranging themselves.” This advertisement for the Palm Pre smartphone promotes the curious Zen of being your own Dear Leader. Pajama-clad minions engaged […]

By: Tom Nealon

It seems impossible that the various identities — Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital, RZArecta, The Abbot, Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah — of rapper, producer, and film scorer RZA (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, born 1969) form a coherent whole; […]