HYPOCRITE IDLER 2Q2025

By: Joshua Glenn
June 29, 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 2Q2025.

MORE HYPOCRISY: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025.

Also see: HILOBROW 2Q2025.

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 2Q2025, our projects included (but were not limited to) the following.

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

FINE WRITING CODES: 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.

Also! 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 are the attendees at lunch in Chinatown. Yours truly can be glimpsed in the mirror. It’s always fun and inspiring to get together with my fellow semios. Not pictured: Max Matus, who arrived at SemioTopia (from Mexico) after lunch.

GIVE IT UP

After the 2023 publication of Lost Objects (Hat & Beard Press), which developed out of our 2017–2021 PROJECT:OBJECT endeavor, Rob Walker and I took a hiatus from our object-oriented story telling collaborations. This summer we’ll return with a new project.

GIVE IT UP is a place-based, interactive evolution of PROJECT:OBJECT’s nonfiction object-oriented storytelling. The debut version of this concept will launch this summer in my new hometown… Kingston, New York.

Author and music critic Will Hermes with the significant object that he may be willing to give up, in the Darlings parking lot (Tillson, NY).

Here are the 10 participants we’ve recruited for GIVE IT UP’s Kingston debut:

Writer, Lit Hub podcaster, and bookstore manager Drew Broussard will give up… WOODEN SCIMITAR
Writer and artist Karlie Flood will give up… BROKEN BARRETTE
Author and music critic Will Hermes will give up… “ANCORA IMPARO” PLAQUE
Midtown Kingston Arts District (MKAD) Board of Directors president Maggie Inge will give up… ANTIQUE HANDBAG
Writer and editor Halimah Marcus will give up… NYC BICYCLE
Journalist, filmmaker, and writer Annie Nocenti will give up… THUMB-PUMP OILER
Writer and photographer Julian Richards will give up… UNDEVELOPED FILM
Camp Kingston founder Samuel Shapiro will give up… BIRCH BARK.
Musician and author Adam Snyder will give up… PROTECTOGRAPH
Rondout Valley Middle School librarian and author Emma Tourtelot will give up… MARRIAGE DISH

From September 1–10, the objects will be on display as a group exhibit at Camp Kingston. Our wrap-up party and reading will take place on Sept. 10.

Here’s a link to the project’s homepage and free newsletter. This project would not be possible without logistical support from Susan Roe, Karlie Flood, and Bridget Badore.

RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF

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

During 2Q2025, I worked with the MITP editorial team to send the series’ Fall 2025 titles to press. These titles are: Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd (translated and introduced by Jill Roese); and my own Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age (anthology edited and introduced). Publication date, for both: August 19th.

We also worked on copy edits of the Spring 2026 titles (one of which is show above), and at this point we have other series installments underway through 2028. In addition to novels and story collections, these future installments include three anthologies, two of which require translation.

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

RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025. FULL SERIES INFO.

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 sampling of the 2Q2025 RADIUM AGE POETRY lineup:

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

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is published by King Mixer LLC; I’m the editor. To see everything that we’ve published recently, please check out the post HILOBROW 2Q2025. Here, I’ll just mention one series.

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 a selection of the lineup:

Adam McGovern is the DEFER series editor. He is grateful to its contributors, many of whom donated their honoraria to Annunciation House, which provides sanctuary and support to new arrivals to America at the Texas border.

To see my solo HILOBROW series and posts from 2Q2025, please check out the WRITING (HILOBROW) section of this post; to see what’s coming up soon, please see the post 3Q2025 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 recently, please see the post SEMIOVOX 2Q2025. 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 the 2Q2025 series lineup:

Photo contributed by Aiyana Gunjan (India). “While driving, do not make appointments with the God of Death, Yamraj, on your mobile phone.”

During 2Q2025, SEMIOVOX began publishing the series PHOTO OP — to which we invited our semiotician colleagues from around the world to contribute photos that they’ve snapped while “off the job.” Here’s a sampling of the 2Q2025 series lineup:

Mariane Cara (Brazil) on LA LUCHA CONTINUA | Aiyana Gunjan (India) on YAMRAJ | Greg Rowland (England) on I ❤️ FOOD | Gabriela Pedranti (Spain) on NOT SO TRIVIAL | Biba Allarakia (Saudi Arabia) on ALL THAT GLITTERS | Brian Khumalo (South Africa) on A LOST MEMORY | Becks Collins (England) on A MILLENNIAL ON THE BRINK | Samuel Grange (France) on SLOW DOWN.

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m coordinator 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 recent Semiofest Sessions, please see the post SEMIOVOX 2Q2025. Here are two examples:

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.

PS: This was the 4th anniversary of Semiofest Sessions, the first of which I helped organize in April 2021 — one year into the COVID-19 pandemic.

MAY: THE RISE OF THE RIGHT. Now that the liberal consensus has collapsed and the right is resurgent across the Western world and beyond, semioticians and their marketing colleagues are asking, “How do we adapt — while resisting fascism?” Session hosts Louise Jolly and Al Deakin invited Nick Asbury and Charise Mita to join them in an exploration of how neo-liberalism and globalisation, which nourished the rise of commercial semiotics, contributed to today’s situation; the right-wing reaction to the “Corporate Purpose” era; and how semiotics and social psychology can most usefully and positively contribute to this historical juncture.

WRITING (HILOBROW)

During 2Q2025, I wrote the following HILOBROW series and posts.

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 SEMIOPUNK series, I wrote about 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.”
For SEMIOPUNK, I also wrote about Ken MacLeod’s COSMONAUT KEEP. Excerpt: “Toggling back and forth between their marine biology research and his family’s surreptitious efforts to crack the code of light-speed travel, Gregor experiences a pattern-recognition revelation that will be familiar to my fellow semioticians: ‘It unfolded before his eyes, the map of the squid nervous system overlaying the data structures of the navigation problem. He understood the architecture of the mind that could understand the problem, and in so doing he understood it himself. He could see, in principle, how the problem could be solved.'”
For SEMIOPUNK, I also wrote about Yoon Ha Lee’s NINEFOX GAMBIT. Excerpt: “We surface and dimensionalize the architecture of a semiosphere’s consensus reality — the framework of shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that the semiosphere’s denizens collectively accept as their understanding of the world, a consensus that helps shape social norms and behaviors, providing a common ground for interaction and understanding.”

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

WRITING (ELSEWHERE)

During 2Q2025, at SEMIOVOX, I continued to contribute new installments to CASABLANCA CODES, an eight-part series via which I’m offering a semiotic analysis of the underlying meaning-structure of Casablanca. Here’s the series lineup so far:

ILSA. Excerpt: “Whereas Strasser the cruel autocrat deploys ideology in an effort destroy everyone else’s ability to imagine something better, to isolate them, and to make them feel alone and powerless to fight authoritarianism, Ilsa the empathetic activist offers no ideological justifications. Her secret weapon is her utter sincerity, her emotional honesty.”
UGARTE. Excerpt: “Though Ugarte won’t ever get his hands on those large sums of money he’s dreamed about, nor will he make it out of Casablanca alive… his story does have a kind of happy ending. The stooge has earned the antihero’s respect. If only for a moment, Ugarte’s thirst is quenched.”
YVONNE. Excerpt: “The seeker in any semiosphere will often end up in a jam. They’re torn between their semiosphere’s dominant discourse and its counter-discourse. How to decide? They oscillate between the semiosphere’s ‘poles,’ whirling in a vortex of their own making.”

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Getting the word out, during 2Q2025…

RADIUM AGE SERIES

For a full update on recent Radium Age series publicity, please see the post RADIUM AGE 2Q2025. Here are a few examples.

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!

Sneak peek at MIT Press catalog’s RADIUM AGE series page, Fall 2025…

TAKING IT EASY

In April, we hosted an engagement party for Sam and Kayla — here in Boston, for family members and friends. Here’s Sam and Kayla, my six siblings and I, six in-laws, Max and their (and Sam’s) twelve cousins, plus my father and stepmother. A platoon!

Here’s Katie Hennessey, James Parker, and Nancy Pinchera — a representative sample of the “village” who helped use raise Sam, gathered at his engagement party.

In May, Max and I did the Five Boro Bike Tour. Forty miles, partly in the driving rain, over the course of three hours. An excellent way to tour New York City.

In June, Sam and Kayla were married — on a cliff overlooking the North Fork of the Blackfoot River near Ovando, Montana. Here they are practicing the ceremony, the day before, with the officiant, their friend Emi. Sam and Kayla’s wedding day, and the days of preparation leading up to it, were profoundly joyous and moving. More photos here.

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On to 3Q2025…

MORE HYPOCRISY: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025.

HYPOCRITE IDLER 2Q2025

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