By: Douglas Wolk

The hip-hop producer MADLIB (born 1973) is also a helium-voiced rapper (Quasimodo) and a one-man jazz “quintet” (Yesterday’s New Quintet), among other alter egos. Since 1993, he’s contributed to dozens of recordings, and his breed […]

By: HILOBROW

A Kindle just wouldn’t work as well in this propaganda poster, would it? *** Fifth in an occasional series.

By: Sarah Weinman

To call “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC (born 1959) a parodist is to understate his technical proficiency and artistic skill. Anyone can satirize a song or a movie and upload it to YouTube, but Weird Al is […]

By: Joe Alterio

Robot: “Pilot, Happy, Balanced” — by Adam “Apelad” Koford *** Robots and Monsters, a website that swaps custom-designed cartoons and pop art in exchange for a donation to charity, was field-tested in May 2007 by […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Though Iggy Pop did Iggy first (and better), STIV BATORS (1949-90) did Iggy with a striver’s zeal in the right place and at the right time. The arrival of the Dead Boys in 1977 marked the […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The matrix of modern dispositions

By: Joshua Glenn

Her Earthsea fantasy novels — most signally, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972) — concern the education of a young wizard, and are recommended for those who […]

By: Matthew Battles

In one version of an oft-repeated thought experiment, Douglas Hofstadter famously wondered if Albert Einstein’s brain (well, anyone’s brain, really) could be reformatted as a book, with each neuron represented by a page printed with […]

By: Ingrid Schorr

A straight line runs from rockabilly pioneer WANDA JACKSON (born 1937) to Jason and the Scorchers and the Cramps. Watch a 1958 performance of “Hard Headed Woman”: Jackson juts her guitar in a most unladylike […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Every now and then, a well-meaning intellectual mounts a three-quarters-hearted defense of Cold War-era High Middlebrow — i.e., the Great Books of the Western World collection, the Book-of-the-Month Club, Masterpiece Theatre, the arts magazine Horizon, […]

By: Mimi Lipson

“Just because you got them big udders don’t make you something special.” So says Earl Peterson (DIVINE, born Harris Glenn Milstead, 1945-88) to Dawn Davenport (Divine, again) in two of her greatest roles. And Earl […]

By: James Parker

Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s […]

By: Matthew Battles

As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, a pair of physicists have offered a novel theory to explain the troubles bedeviling the Large Hadron Collidor, the world’s most powerful — and to date, […]

By: Lynn Peril

LOTTE LENYA (1898-1981) once described her voice as “an octave below laryngitis.” With her quavering vibrato and what’s been described as her “cavalier” approach to key, no one would mistake Lenya for a trained singer […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Sculpture by unknown artist — image found on Flickr and sent into us. If you have info, please drop us a line. *** Fourth in an occasional series.