HILOBROW 2Q2025
By:
June 30, 2025
Here’s what HILOBROW published in April, May, and June 2025.
We’re grateful to our many stalwart contributors, and also to first-time contributors Tana Sirois, Jake Zucker, and Wendy Chin-Tanner.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025 SNEAK PEEK.
Also see: HYPOCRITE IDLER 2Q2025.
During 2Q2025, HILOBROW published DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Here’s the lineup:
Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | Wendy Chin-Tanner on MY PARENTS’ ART STORE.
Adam McGovern is the DEFER series editor. He is very grateful to the series’ contributors, many of whom donated their honoraria to Annunciation House, which provides sanctuary and support to new arrivals to America at the Texas border.
In 2010–11, HILOBROW serialized Cocky the Fox, a swearing-animal novel by our friend James Parker (with illustrations by Kristin Parker). During 1Q2025, James began re-telling the Cocky saga… in the form of an opera, here at HILOBROW!
During 2Q2025, we published three further installments of COCKY: THE OPERA. Here’s the lineup:
- ACT ONE, SCENE TWO. Excerpt:
BILLY: Observers of the scene, please
remark
that I do my business mainly in the dark
and to safeguard my survival
I’ll be sorting out my rivals
so the Borough belongs to MEEEE - ACT ONE, SCENE THREE. Excerpt:
COCKY: For the recreational drugging
and the glug glug glugging
my vixen did expel me.
I was too loud, I was too twitchy —
plus other failings about which she
did not neglect to tell me. - ACT ONE, SCENE THREE (contd.). Excerpt:
COCKY: I’m a gentle fox,
not a mental fox,
really a transcendental fox,
my contemplations floating ever higher.
Adam McGovern continued to deliver over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship via his monthly-ish series OFF-TOPIC. Here’s the lineup:
- LIGHTNING PEACE: SHAZAMizdat! Excerpt:
The hurt of social neglect, exploited by those who supply a target to blame and attack while using you as the point of their spear to dispossess even more people; the resentments that can be amplified by the phantom voices of social media, corroborating conclusions you’ve come to in actual isolation; the certainty that the system is unfair, twisted cynically into a sense that competition for the unequal favor is the only option…
- FUTURE INTENSE: Making up history with The Future Is ******’s FRED VAN LENTE. Excerpt:
Nerds and geeks gravitate towards the heroic mode of storytelling because we’ve been bullied, we’ve been picked on, we want to see people with power act well and not badly, and so it’s always a real shame when you see tech people, who you assume are nerds and geeks, become the bullies. Now we’re on like a third level of anti-bullying, where Wheeler and his bunch are the ones going after the bad actors in the tech sphere; it’s like a triple reversal.
Also from Adam: PEE-WEE’S BIG SELFIE.
Josh Glenn’s SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s the 2Q2025 lineup:
- Thomas Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. Excerpt:
Because Pynchon takes pains to ensure that we’re left wondering how much of Slothrop’s story and investigation are the products of a paranoid mind, Gravity’s Rainbow requires us to develop a skeptical attitude not only towards the West but consensus reality.
- Ken MacLeod’s COSMONAUT KEEP. Excerpt:
In conversation with his colleagues, Gregor announces: “‘What I’ve realized is that the actual solution to the [starship navigation] problem requires a non-human mind, specifically a squid mind, and that our research in cephalopod neurology can contribute to simulating such a mind — in its barest outlines, of course, but it’s the outline, the structure, the architecture, if you will, that counts.'” We latter-day structuralists get a big kick out of this sort of thing, of course.
- Yoon Ha Lee’s NINEFOX GAMBIT. Excerpt:
Like an open-minded ethnomathematician, a semiotican drops into a semiosphere and interrogates the arbitrary assumptions that are taken for granted there. What is the dominant discourse? How is meaning structured here? From what sources is this meaning-structure challenged, and how are these challenges overcome?
The 10-part series LOGOLOGY featured selected excerpts from Josh Glenn’s 2024 contribution — a top-of-mind, semiotics-adjacent analysis of fast food and cannabis brand logos and pack design — to issue no. 1 of the marketing-culture zine Cash & Carry.
Due to popular demand, we’ve revived HERMENAUTICA, a series featuring pages from Hermenaut, a DIY intellectual zine/journal published (1992–2001) by HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn.
The series NOT TODAY, EBAY continued to share recent examples of stuff that Josh was tempted to purchase from eBay… but, heroically, didn’t.
Josh’s other HILOBROW series include: SCREENSHOTS | PHOTO DUMP
As we have done for over ten years now, we continued to serialize some of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s the 2Q2025 lineup:
- Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors (1901), cont.
- Frank L. Pollock’s “The Skyscraper in B Flat” (1904), cont.
- Christopher Blayre’s “Aalila” (1921)
- George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (excerpt, 1931)
- Algernon Blackwood’s “Playing Catch” (1924)
HILOBROW published further installments in the series RADIUM AGE POETRY. Here’s a sampling of the 2Q2025 lineup:
Paul Valéry’s THE YOUNG FATE | Álvaro de Campos’ TIME’S PASSAGE | Vladimir Mayakovsky’s OUR MARCH | Kenneth Rexroth’s “FROM ANY EVENT INTERVALS…” | Amy Lowell’s “IF A SAND-STORM WOULD COME…” | Archibald MacLeish’s THE END OF THE WORLD | Wallace Stevens’ A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO | Stanley G. Weinbaum’s TWO SUNSETS | Olaf Stapledon’s “IS MAN A DISEASE…”.
RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025. FULL SERIES INFO.
On to 3Q2025…