MEDIA DIET
By:
August 14, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Jim has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2023. His first post was on the topic of WIRE BASKET (a 2010 story cross-posted from our sister site SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS). His most recent contributions to this publication includes the series LOU REED’S NEPHEW, a series featuring collages created by Jim for his 2023 email serial of the same title.
Brooklyn…
HILOBROW: What music did you love as a teenager? Do you still listen to it today?
JIM HANAS: I find myself returning to my teenage musical tastes, which were shaped by two cities, Minneapolis and Manchester. (Neither of which I have ever visited.) I grew up in Cincinnati (on the south side; what geographers call Kentucky) so Minneapolis seemed like the cooler version of where I was. My first all-ages show was Hüsker Dü and I couldn’t believe such a performance was legal. That said, it is Manchester that has stood the test of time. The Smiths, if not Morrissey, New Order without reservation, and The Fall have become a mid-life obsession. I listen to The Fall almost exclusively now, like I’m secretly working on a stunt journalism pitch. (“I Listened to ‘Oswald Defense Lawyer’ Every Day for a Month. Here’s What I Learned About NFTs.”) When I first got into Mark E. Smith’s multi-decade performance art project, I was intimidated by the size of the catalog. I am not a completist, since I know completism would make me miserable, so I didn’t want to deal with it. Now I listen to the complete albums on shuffle — 44 hours of music by Spotify’s recoing — and I can’t imagine a more compelling catalog. Intertextual, Dadaist, visionary, and collagist with hypnotic bass lines, swirling guitar motifs, and blasé-to-angry absurdism. When asked what Fall album was most essential, John Peel famously said, “You must get them all.” I get it now. “All” is the basic unit of The Fall experience.
HILOBROW: What work of literature (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
JIM HANAS: The Possessed by Dostoevsky. I refuse to call this book Demons, despite the grammatical case put forth by the current translators. The coddled young men who follow reason to its monstrous conclusions seem much more infected than rotten to the core, and it is remarkable how well their tendencies map onto the strains of today’s intellectual manosphere. There is the engineer turned philosopher who is puzzled why suicide rates are so low when the case for it is so solid, and Shigalyov, who has deduced that rule by the few is inevitable and refuses to discuss his equations further. And these are just the secondary characters. The book is a roadmap of the risks when liberalism falters, from icy abstraction to Oedipal misogyny. Here is a synopsis, in limerick form:
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Found himself low-key bereftsky.
He saw that the youth
Had lost sight of the truth,
Still they thought until nothing was leftsky.
HILOBROW: What work of nonfiction (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
JIM HANAS: At the risk (or joy?) of sounding unbelievably pretentious, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel is the G.O.A.T. when it comes to cultural analysis. Understanding this book — as best you (or anyone) can — makes so many other things make sense. Whether you ultimately agree with Hegel or not, dialectical analysis is an essential tool in anyone’s toolbox. (And you probably already have it, via Marx or Foucault, but better to get it from the source.). Linear history has a terrible time explaining the sorts of inversions we now see weekly — like why the left-wing nihilists of The Possessed might appear on the right in America today — but Hegel can handle it. A word of caution from socialist turned National Review nudist Max Eastman: “Hegelianism is like a mental disease — you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can’t know because you’ve got it.” I myself am beyond help.
HILOBROW: Do you subscribe to any magazines or newsletters that you’d strongly recommend?
JIM HANAS: I find Andrew Burman’s Upper Middle newsletter to be consistently hilarious and uncomfortable, as advertised. Addressed to “the uncomfortably comfortable” I first assumed it was a Jacobin op collecting names for after the revolution. Nevertheless, its Fussellian analyses of class and consumption are better than your DSA friend’s, and — like early Spy — coming from inside the house! Come for that and stay for the New York Post-grade headlines like “Brown vs. Bored and Educated” for an article about the rise and fall of Condé Nast.
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.