HYPOCRITE IDLER 2025

By: Joshua Glenn
December 30, 2025

To idle is to work on meaningful and varied projects — and to take it easy. The title of the series refers to this self-proclaimed idler’s inability to take it easy.

HILOBROW is a noncommercial blog. None of the below should be construed as an advertisement for one of my various, more or less profitable projects. This series is merely intended to keep HILOBROW’s readers updated on the editor’s doings and undoings.

I am grateful to the talented and generous folks with whom I’ve collaborated during 2025.

MORE HYPOCRISY: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025.

Also see: HILOBROW 2025

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

I’m cofounder of the semiotics-fueled consultancy SEMIOVOX. Our methodology provides insight and inspiration — to brand and organization strategy, marketing, design, innovation, and consumer insights teams, as well as to their agency partners — regarding the unspoken local/global “codes” that help shape perceptions of and guide behavior within product categories and/or sociocultural territories.

During 2025, our projects included (but were not limited to) the following.

BEVERAGE UPLIFT CODES (USA): On behalf of a multinational beverage company, we analyzed US energy drink, soda pop, and RTD coffee codes. A combination of semiotic analysis and (via our sister agency, Consumer Eyes) concept development. Innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, pack design.

BEVERAGE UPLIFT CODES (GERMANY): On behalf of the same multinational beverage company, we analyzed German energy drink, soda pop, and RTD coffee codes. Innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, pack design.

CRAFTED BEVERAGE CODES (GLOBAL). On behalf of a multinational beverage company, we kicked off a project analyzing Crafted Beverage codes in seven markets worldwide. We’ve enjoyed collaborating on this project with Becks Collins (England), Sarah Johnson of Athena Brand Wisdom (Canada), Labbrand (China), Aya Kanda of Salt (Japan), Mariane Cara of Comunicara (Brazil), and Marion Polauck (Germany). We’ll continue working on this major audit through 1Q2026. Product innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, retail design.

FINE WRITING CODES (USA): On behalf of a leading global consumer goods company that owns several iconic fine writing brands, working via our sister agency Consumer Eyes we analyzed luxury and fine writing codes. Innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, pen design.

In February, at the Market Research Society’s Semiotics and Cultural Insights 2025 conference in London, Konrad Collao of the media and entertainment research agency Craft and Laurie Kearns, an insights manager for BBC Studios, presented on “how UK stories land in US culture.” Their talk shared learnings from a 2024 project to which Ramona Lyons and I, after having analyzed / analysed 160 hours of British TV [I tackled scripted series; she tackled unscripted and children’s series], contributed, among other things, the chart shown here.

This Fall, the BBC Studios’ project with Craft was short-listed for a Marketing Research Society award in the Cultural Insights category, which honors UK consumer research that “goes beyond traditional data to uncover deep cultural forces, values, and beliefs that drive consumer behavior.” Ramona and I are grateful to have been involved.

In June, I attended the mini-conference SemioTopia: Materiality and Humanity in the Cloud Age, organized by commercial semioticians Charise Mita and Sarah Johnson, in NYC. Here’s a photo I took of the attendees at lunch in Chinatown. It’s always fun and inspiring to get together in person with my fellow semios.

TEACHING & SPEAKING

In October, I hosted a Semiofest Session titled CASE FILES. We commercial semioticians tend to discover all sorts of things — whether amazing, amusing, or tragic — that challenge our assumptions, make us sit up and say “Wow!” For this session, I invited colleagues from China, Portugal, Argentina, Sweden, Mexico, and Italy to share stories of serendipitous discoveries… and to reveal how these discoveries were received by their clients.

Photo of my RISD MID advisees at work/play

This semester, I have been serving as an informal advisor to two RISD MID students whose thesis projects are related to my own interests. It’s fun and intellectually rewarding to stay connected with the MID program, even though I have moved too far away from Providence to continue as an adjunct there.

In November, Ramona Lyons and I spoke (via Zoom) with Michelle Chihara’s USC Cinema & Media Studies class.

BEFORE SUPERMAN

In August, the MIT Press published Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age, an anthology that I’ve edited featuring Radium Age superhuman-themed stories and novel excerpts from Gertrude Barrows (aka Francis Stevens), George Bernard Shaw, H. Rider Haggard, Alfred Jarry, Marie Corelli, Hugo Gernsback, M.P. Shiel, Karel Čapek, Thea von Harbou, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jean de La Hire, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

As I write in the anthology’s introduction:

Via the stories and excerpts presented in this volume, you’ll encounter a colorful panoply of literature’s earliest and uncanniest supermen and -women… heroes and villains alike. As with every installment in the Radium Age series, the purpose of this anthology is two-fold: to explore how science fiction rapidly evolved (like a superhuman, if you will) into the genre we’ve come to know and love; and to offer sf fans a few thrills and chills.

Lucy Sante, BEFORE SUPERMAN launch, 8/21 at O+ Exchange (Kingston, NY)

I’m grateful to HILOBROW friends Lucy Sante, Annie Nocenti, Emma Tourtelot, and Drew Broussard — for reading from Before Superman at the book’s launch party!

In November, writing for the Financial Times, British sf author James Lovegrove named Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age one of the Five Best SF Books of 2025. Excerpt:

Part of the Radium Age series — reissues and anthologies of early-20th-century science fiction in nattily designed paperback editions — Before Superman assembles stories about superhumans from an era before they achieved comic-book ubiquity. Authors represented include Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Karel Čapek, even George Bernard Shaw. Sheer retro bliss, no spandex.

For more 2025 reviews of this title, please scroll down to this post’s GOOD VIBRATIONS section.

GIVE IT UP

For over 15 years, my friend and collaborator Rob Walker and I have investigated (anthropologically) what objects mean — and also (semiotically) how they mean what they mean — via fun, engaging story telling projects, both fiction and nonfiction. After the 2023 publication of Lost Objects (Hat & Beard Press), which developed out of our 2017–2021 nonfiction PROJECT:OBJECT endeavor, we took a break.

In 2025 we reunited for GIVE IT UP, a project that explores what (and how) objects can mean to us… and tactics for letting go of our meaningful stuff. This was our first place-based and interactive project. We staged it this August and September in Kingston, New York.

First of all, we recruited 11 interesting Hudson Valley denizens to participate. These included:

Writer, Lit Hub podcaster, and bookstore manager Drew Broussard was willing to be persuaded to give up his… WOODEN SCIMITAR
Author and music critic Will Hermes was willing to be persuaded to give up his… HUMILITY PLAQUE
Writer and editor Halimah Marcus was willing to be persuaded to give up her… NYC BICYCLE
Musician and author Adam Snyder was willing to be persuaded to give up his… PROTECTOGRAPH
Community organizer and Good Neighbor cofounder Adriana Wong was willing to be persuaded to give up her… LOVE-LOST NECKLACE

Julian Richards’ UNDEVELOPED FILM on exhibit at Half Moon Rondout Cafe

Then, from Aug. 15th–Sept. 1st., our participants’ significant objects and stories were on display in 10 Kingston venues.

During this period, the general public was invited to persuade our participants to give up their objects. We passed the many throughtful responses along to the project’s participants. Meanwhile, from Sept. 3–10, all objects were put display in a group exhibit at the cafe / bar / social space Camp Kingston.

Rob Walker (left) and I interview Maggie Inge about her object… and the most persuasive response to her story. PHOTO CREDIT: Bridget Badore

The most persuasive responses were announced at the project’s literary event / party on Sept. 10th, at Camp Kingston. I offered commentary on the typology of object-meanings (totem, talisman, tardis, etc.), and Rob commented on the responses we received to the object stories. It was a really fun event.

Rob and I are grateful to: the project’s participants, the story respondents, the participating venues, and to our Kingston team: Karlie Flood, Bridget Badore, Tommy Sullivan, and Susan Roe.

RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF

I’m editor of the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE proto-sf reissue series.

In addition to Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (anthology edited and introduced by yours truly), which was mentioned above, during 2025 we published the following titles:

J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (March 2025, with a new introduction by Ted Chiang). “Extravagance… but of so remarkable a character that it keeps you almost spell-bound. What follows is philosophy, psychology, poetry, allegory, what you will.” — The Bookman (1911) | See this title at the MIT Press website.
John Taine’s The Greatest Adventure (March 2025, with a new introduction by S.L. Huang). “A mixture of H. Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Roy Chapman Andrews, and a bottle of excellent gin.” — California Tech (1929) | See this title at the MIT Press website.
Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd (August 2025, translated and introduced by Jill Roese). “A novel of our time, in which major events succeed each other with purely cinematographic speed….” — Nikolai Meshcheryakov, “Foreword to the First Edition” (1924) | See this title at the MIT Press website.

For recent press about the series, see this post’s GOOD VIBRATIONS section.

RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025. FULL SERIES INFO.

Rodchenko’s “Superimposed Triangles” (1918)

Here at HILOBROW, I’ve continued to share my Radium Age-related research. For example, via the series RADIUM AGE POETRY, I’ve reissued overlooked proto-sf-adjacent poems from the years 1900–1935.

Here’s a selection of the 2025 RADIUM AGE POETRY lineup:

To see the full RADIUM AGE POETRY lineup, organized thematically, visit this page.

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is published by King Mixer LLC; I’m the editor. To see everything that we’ve published this year, please check out the post HILOBROW 2025. Here, I’ll just mention two series that I edited, and one that I co-wrote with Mark Kingwell.

During 1Q2025, HILOBROW published MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). As the series editor, I’m very grateful to its contributors. Here’s a selection from the MacGYVER lineup:

During 4Q2025, HILOBROW published SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on our favorite… ska songs! As the series editor, I’m very grateful to its contributors. Here’s a selection from the SKANK lineup:

Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ OH CAROLINA

During 4Q2025, HILOBROW published BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, a serialization of an epistolary dialogue about science fiction (from 2022) between me and Mark Kingwell.

Here’s the BROKEN KNOWLEDGE lineup:

To see my solo HILOBROW series and posts from 2025, please check out the WRITING (HILOBROW) section of this post; to see what’s coming up soon, please see the post 1Q2026 SNEAK PEEK.

SEMIOVOX.COM

SEMIOVOX, my branding consultancy’s eponymous website, is published by SEMIOVOX LLC; I’m the editor. For a full update on what we’ve published this year, please see the post SEMIOVOX 2025. Here, I’ll just mention a few highlights.

MAKING SENSE is a long-running series of Q&As dedicated to revealing what makes semioticians tick. Here’s a selection of the 2025 series lineup:

Via the series CASE FILE, our semiotician colleagues from around the world share stories of things they were amazed and amused to learn (whether or not they proved useful to the client). We wrapped up this series in early 2025. Here’s a selection from the 2025 lineup:

Samuel Grange (France) on SWAZILAND CONDOMS | Ximena Tobi (Argentina) on SLUM PANDEMIC | Martha Arango on M | Chris Arning on X | Ramona Lyons on THE FALL.

Via the series PHOTO OP, our semiotician colleagues from around the world share photos that they’ve snapped while “off the job.” Here’s a selection of the series lineup:

Via the series MEDIA DIET, our semiotician colleagues from around the world discuss their media “input.” Here’s a selection of the series lineup:

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m founder and co-coordinator (with Ade Vaca, as of late 2025) for SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, a series of online get-togethers — intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community.

For a full update on this year’s Semiofest Sessions, please see the post SEMIOVOX 2025. Here are a few examples:

JANUARY: MEDICAL SEMIOTICS. The art of medical diagnosis (known in Greek antiquity as techne semeiotike) shares a long history with semiotics. Today, medical professionals increasingly recognize that the molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids with which we come in contact initiate sequences of semiotic transformations in our bodies at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. Also, medicine is more than chemistry: How a society regards medicine, health, and disease is itself influenced by semiotic codes. Yogi Hendlin invited colleagues to discuss the current state — and future — of medical semiotics.

APRIL: SEMIOTICS OF PLACE. Place can be a powerful way for brands and cultural strategists to generate meaning and value… and at the same time, in a world of bland developments and cut-and-paste tourism, semiotics can provide a crucial tool for meaningful place shaping. Gemma Jones invited place-oriented practitioners to discuss place as a cultural “text”… and to share creative methodologies for developing a place-based participatory semiotics.

SEPTEMBER: NARRATIVE SEMIOTICS. Narratives influence our beliefs and actions, even our perception of reality. So when it comes to influencing global perceptions, driving social change, and consolidating symbolic and political power, it’s crucial to use the tools offered by narrative semiotics. Serdar Paktin, host of this session, invited Sarah Dodge (Ellen MacArthur Foundation) and Laura Jordan Bambach (Uncharted) to unravel the semiotic strategies behind impactful narratives across diverse domains — social activism, design, advertising, marketing, politics — thus allowing us to grasp their profound implications.

PROJECT:OBJECT KINGSTON

The PROJECT:OBJECT KINGSTON team, the same folks who brought you GIVE IT UP this past summer, is working now on several small, one-off, experimental object-oriented story-telling events for 2026. GIFT IT UP will be the first of these experiments — stay tuned!

WRITING (HILOBROW)

During 2025, I wrote the following HILOBROW series and posts.

ENTHUSIASMS

Jim Nutt’s “Her Face Fits” (1968), from the 2018–19 Hairy Who exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Click for larger version.

For the MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM series, I contributed an installment on VOLTRON. Excerpt: “Much like Voltron vis-à-vis its own limbs, the ‘text’ of the Voltron that we know and love is… an assemblage of sorts. Perfect!”
For the DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM series, I contributed an installment on ART. Excerpt: “Around the time I turned 45, at a time when many male members of my generational cohort were discovering an obsession with door-stopper biographies and World War II documentaries, I started to get excited about… Öyvind Fahlström, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Nutt, and other high-lowbrow artists about whom Gary Panter was at that time writing so insightfully for HILOBROW.”
For the ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM series, I contributed an installment on JOEL CAIRO. Excerpt: “Unlike most other villains, Lorre’s Cairo is seeking more than wealth or power — something that he’ll likely never find. What is it? A clue can be found in the way that Lorre enunciates the word ‘idiot,’ twice.”
For the SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM series, I contributed an installment on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE. Excerpt: “‘Skaville’ does feature choppy ska guitar chords, not to mention percussive toasting — shicka-shicka-shhh noises that transport the listener into that dreamy mindstate peculiar to train travel. But the record’s cooler vibe, more spacious tempo, its simple, strolling bass line, and its restrained horns produce a soulful ‘riddim,’ i.e., not a ska but a rocksteady sound design.”

SEMIOPUNK

I contributed a dozen installments to the SEMIOPUNK series. For example:

Samuel R. Delany’s THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. Excerpt: “Will Lobey’s species — hampered by ill-fitting bodies and hindered by outmoded mythologies — figure out how to liberate themselves too? Will we, Delany’s readers, Delany’s readers, hampered and hindered in much the same ways, also aim to liberate ourselves?”
Thomas Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. Excerpt: “‘If there is something comforting — religious, if you want — about paranoia,’ Slothrop muses, in one of the book’s most often-quoted passages, ‘there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.’ […] Pynchon’s fictional semiosphere — which might best be diagrammed, perhaps, via an Imipolex-G-schema — is a non-totalizing, negative-dialectical, post-structuralist one. Which is to say: It’s very much a structuralist scheme, while one that remains sensitively attuned to structuralism’s limitations.”
Don DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE. Excerpt: “Murray finds deep significance in ordinary, everyday events and locations; channel-surfs the TV for signs of ‘American magic and dread’; and roams the aisles of the supermarket, soaking up ‘psychic data’ (one of the author’s proposed titles for the book) about the coercive and transcendental messages encrypted in product labels.”

6/15 — a week before Sam and Kayla’s wedding

ALSO: I’ve continued to add installments in the solo series SCREENSHOTS, PHOTO DUMP, NOT TODAY, EBAY, and HERMENAUTICA.

WRITING (ELSEWHERE)

During 2025, at SEMIOVOX, I wrote CASABLANCA CODES, an eight-part series via which I offer a semiotic analysis of the underlying meaning-structure of Casablanca. Here are the final two installments:

RICK. Excerpt: “As an antihero, the RICK paradigm straddles the line between the dominant discourse (associated with WAR and BUSINESS, in this semiosphere) and the counter-discourse (associated with PEACE and PLEASURE). He refuses to choose.”
RENAULT. Excerpt: “Renault tells Laszlo, regarding Ugarte: ‘I’m making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.’ It’s a telling admission, from this semiosphere’s anti-antihero, that he has confused his ability to perceive the semiotic structure of the narrative in which he finds himself with the ability to author that narrative. A fatal flaw for any and all anti-antiheroes.”

SERIES INSTALLMENTS

For SEMIOVOX’s CASE FILE series, I contributed an installment on THE AMERICAN SPIRIT. Excerpt: “Are you listening, Democrats? Here are five insights into the ‘spirit of America’ that could help you turn things around with young white men.”

For SEMIOVOX’s PHOTO OP series, I contributed an installment on JOINED AT THE DIP. Excerpt: “I appreciate puns as much as the next middle-aged Dad, but… no.”

I contributed an installment in SEMIOVOX’s MEDIA DIET series. Excerpt: “Philip K. Dick’s hastily written science fiction from c. 1964–1973 predicts our present moment here in the USA: environmental collapse, escapist virtual experiences, smartphone-enabled hookups, manipulative authority figures, capitalist moguls with godlike pretensions, neofascist regimes that portray themselves as champions of liberty, robots who show empathy and human beings who do not, paranoids who are right and reasonable people who are wrong, presidents and other world leaders who cannot be anything other than evil aliens… and in general, a bewildering sense that the distinction between reality and illusion, fact and fiction, has become blurred — perhaps forever.”

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Getting the word out, during 2025…

GIVE IT UP

The GIVE IT UP experiment in Kingston, NY (August 15 through September 10) received some nice local publicity, including…

Cover story in the HV1 Almanac. Excerpt:

“These significant objects can be extremely hard to let go,” Glenn told me, “so you need new ideas, new thinking about ways to let them go.”
Feature in the Kingston Wire. Excerpt:

Kingston, according to Rob Walker, became the perfect setting to explore [Josh and Rob’s] idea of decluttering our lives. Walker describes the experiment as a combination of The Moth meets Marie Kondo.

RADIUM AGE SERIES

For a full update on this year’s Radium Age series publicity, please see the post RADIUM AGE 2025. Here are a few examples.

In February, The Inhumans was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Awards’ Best Collection award.
In March, Ted Chiang’s introduction to The Hampdenshire Wonder was published by Literary Hub.

On May 2, the 2025 Locus Awards top ten finalists were announced. The Radium Age series’ The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction (Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, trans. and ed.), was announced as a top ten finalist in the Anthology category. Very cool!

For the August 29 episode of the Lit Hub Podcast, I was interviewed about the Before Superman anthology, and the Radium Age series in general, by host Drew Broussard.
“Provides essential background on the rise to dominance of superhumans in our own pop culture.” — From a Toronto Star review of Before Superman.

In October, writing in Leonardo Reviews, a peer-reviewed publication of the international arts, sciences, and technology society Leonardo, the Belgian poet and cultural studies professor Jan Baetens reviewed Before Superman. Excerpt:

A smart selection of various types of authors (well-know, lesser known, sometimes almost forgotten, some also translated from the French or the German) as well as a cunning mix of independent short stories and fragments of larger novels. | Before Superman is a joyful as well as thought-provoking volume of an excellent series, insightfully presented by Joshua Glenn. The book is of great interest for all SF lovers but also to all literary and cultural historians, who can only feel encouraged to rethink some of their labels and periodization tools.

Anna Aslanyan reviewed Jill Roese’s translation of Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd for the November 14th edition of the Times Literary Supplement. Excerpt:

What to put in a novel to make it a page-turner that would last a century? Here are some possible ingredients: a fast-rising body count; flashy sci-fi devices; “a hidden bomb of infernal contents” planted inside a clock (part of a fascist plot to destroy communism); narrative darting around from America to Russia and back again, propelled by technology; “all manner of cheerful objects… streaming into the world”. Militant masses marching to modernity.
In December, Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Schrödinger’s Wife author Pippa Goldschmidt. Excerpt: “As in so much speculative fiction set in imagined futures, these superhumans shed a light on the age in which they were conceived. Rather than strengths, they reveal its anxieties and preoccupations.”

GENERATIONAL SCHEMA

Every once in a while, the topic of generational periodization resurfaces in US culture… and sometimes when that happens, my absurdist-yet-correct generational periodization schema will briefly resurface.

HILOBROW friend Jim Hanas, writing for his excellent LOU REED’S NEPHEW substack, was agitated enough by a cringe-y New York Times T Magazine feature package on “Generation X” to make a few comments. Including:

I’ve been aware of Glenn’s periodization since the ’90s, but I was surprised to find, while writing this, how clearly it anticipated the cusp secessions of Generation Jones and the Xennials and satisfies my requirement of having teens of the ’80s and ’90s treated separately.

This makes me feel triumphantly vindicated.

***

On to 2026…

MORE HYPOCRISY: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025.

HYPOCRITE IDLER 2025

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