MEDIA DIET
By:
August 7, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Drew has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2016. His first post was on the topic of MARIANNE. His most recent contributions to this publication include: BRANDED TO KILL | I SEE A DARKNESS.
Baltimore…
HILOBROW: What work of nonfiction (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
DREW DANIEL: Honestly I think my answer right now would be a book by Jamie Merchant called Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline (Reaktion Books). It’s a Marxist analysis of economic policy decisions in China, the US and Europe and the crisis of capitalism at the present time that offers a strikingly comprehensive account of How Things Got So Fucked Up; it’s a much deeper book in my opinion than that Hyperpolitics book by Anton Jager that got all the reviews and attention. If you want a sprawling panorama about the infernal cruelty of the present, go for Phil Neel’s Hellworld.
HILOBROW: What are your reading habits?
DREW DANIEL: I read at a lot of different speeds and in a lot of different registers and contexts. I am usually reading early modern plays and poetry and new and old literary criticism about those subjects. That kind of reading is teaching-driven, so it tends to mean reading a work in one sitting in an extractive manner, cadging quotes and flagging areas that look juicy for discussion with my students.
The things I read really quickly but also relentlessly: classic Golden Age mystery novels, often consumed via omnibus editions on the iPad late at night before bed, by anglosphere writers like Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Edmund Crispin, P.D. James, and also mystery and detective fiction writers in translation such as Georges Simenon. I read them as if they were candy bars: gobbling at top speed.
For the past five years I have also been doing more or less the opposite of that: joining various reading groups that help me make my way slowly across Large Imposing Tomes. One group read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa over an entire calendar year, synching our reading of that epistolary behemoth to the dates of each letter. I am also part of a reading group that reads philosophical texts together, mostly German Idealism. For the past five years we’ve read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, then Robert Brandom’s 800 page commentary on that text A Spirit of Trust, and this year that group has been reading Hegel’s Science of Logic — we’re now about 600 pages in.
Possibly TMI but I think the most unusual thing that I read regularly is gay male pornographic stories shared by various nom de plume users on a site called the Nifty Archive; these stories are broken up into different kink flavors and topics, and the graphic design of the site looks stuck in about 1993, and the writing varies wildly from short straight-to-the-action “one handed” reading material to people writing more or less novel length episodic romance fiction with various levels of explicitness and various kinds of kink. Because I love Dennis Cooper, the Marquis de Sade, Anais Nin and various sorts of allegedly artistically defensible forms of writing, and because this site is called HILOBROW it seems to me worthwhile to cop to the Low/Lo side of the frequency band in this manner. Man does not live on Hegel alone.
HILOBROW: What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently?
DREW DANIEL: I was really blown away by Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, a kind of ne plus ultra of “cinema verité” documentary in which the director interviews (stalks?) his romantic ex after she becomes a lesbian sex worker who lives in feminist communes in Japan in the 1970s. There is a scene of her giving birth to a baby on a stack of newspapers that you will absolutely never forget. Scaldingly uncomfortable but you cannot look away, the film teeters very unstably between various modes and relations and makes you think deeply about the family, the couple form, and the edges of what they can contain. A very intense ride.
HILOBROW: Anything else?
DREW DANIEL: I quite like the Twitter account “Depths of Wikipedia!” (@depthsofwiki) because it offers jarring facts, odd decontextualized photographs, curiosa and factoids that snag the mind of the observer. It is mostly curated by one person, and I think she also tours as a stand up comedienne (maybe?) but she has a fantastic eye for the singular.
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | FLOURISH KLINK | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.