By: HILOBROW

“The above illustration speaks volumes for itself. Destructiveness is the center of all the characteristics named here.” *** According to Louis Allen Vaught, the purpose of Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902) is to acquaint readers […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“Nature has the habit of now and then producing a type of human being far in advance of the times; an ideal for us to emulate; a being devoid of sham, uncompromising, and to whom […]

By: Franklin Bruno

“St. Louis Blues” may be “the jazzman’s Hamlet,” as one critic has it, but its author, W.C. HANDY (1873-1955) might be compared more fairly to Aeschylus than to Shakespeare. Just as the Greek’s works served […]

By: James Parker

I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]

By: Tom Nealon

If OL’ DIRTY BASTARD’s (Russell Tyrone Jones, 1968-2004) madness was a tumor pressing on his genius and making it dance, it also caused him excruciating pain. His anguished, wailing stabs at song remain some of […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Perhaps the most prolific cartoonist ever for the high-middlebrow/nobrow New Yorker, and creator of the story that inspired the quatsch film Shrek, WILLIAM STEIG (1907-2003) might not seem an obvious hero for HiLobrow.com. Ladies and […]

By: Matthew Battles

In the New Yorker’s “Current Cinema” column this week, David Denby offer a quick and compelling appraisal of Richard Kelly’s new film, The Box. Kelly wrote and directed the magical and unsettling cult film Donnie […]

By: HILOBROW

*** Eighth in an occasional series.

By: Sarah Weinman

GEORGE V. HIGGINS (1939-99) is usually remembered for his 1972 novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It was his first outing, and its unglamorous look at the underworld set Higgins’ work apart from the grand […]

By: Mark Kingwell

He invented cultural criticism.

By: Joe Alterio

Robot: “Green, Tree, Ocean” — by D. Emory Allen *** 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: Matthew Battles

The Guardian’s Alastair Harper offers a paean to the voices of the Great War— the first European war, as has been observed from many perspectives, to have been fought in the public sphere. Many combatants […]

By: Lucy Sante

HANS MAGNUS ENZENS­BERGER (born 1929) is a poet, critic, playwright, translator, magazine editor, and author of children’s books about science and mathematics. He has often been called Germany’s greatest living poet. T. W. Adorno, introducing […]

By: Patrick Cates

If you grew up glued to a television set in England in the ’80s, as I did, nothing irritated you more than local and general election broadcasts, which your parents insisted on watching while you […]

By: Lynn Peril

On September 23, 1969, a group of women, conspicuous among them a tall, patrician blonde, handed out mimeographed leaflets to passersby and newlyweds alike at New York City’s marriage bureau. Rather than wedding-day platitudes, the […]