By: Joshua Glenn

Ringtone: “Swinging on a Star”

By: Joshua Glenn

Over at Significant Objects today, Margaret Wertheim of the admirable Institute for Figuring tells a story about an owl-shaped pincushion and its role in the discovery that Leibniz was right to reject Newton’s notion of […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“At present my life can almost be likened to what a chess-piece in a game must feel when the opponent says: This piece is not to be touched — like an idle onlooker; for my hour […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Over at The Bygone Bureau, today, Tomorrow Museum’s Joanne McNeil says that HILOBROW is the Best New Blog of 2009! Why? It celebrates intellectualism and pop culture, seeking the extermination of quatsch and middlebrow. If […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“My books (& stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes & I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are & how we look into the world, & world as […]

By: Joshua Glenn

DINNER. Not a little fit, not a little fit sun sat in shed more mentally. Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why way. Only a moon to […]

By: Joshua Glenn

But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag — It’s so elegant So intelligent ‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’ ‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street ‘With […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“That pig was telling me exactly what to do.”

By: Joshua Glenn

In 1963, BRUCE LEE (1940-73), an immigrant from Hong Kong who’d been studying philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, dropped out in order to teach the Chinese art of kung fu. Impatient with […]

By: Joshua Glenn

HiLobrow.com friend and contributor Douglas Wolk presents Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment… in five minutes. Using comic book art. At Ignite Portland 7, last week. Rumor has it that Tomorrow Museum blogger Joanne MacNeil, HiLobrow.com’s […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]

By: Joshua Glenn

ORANGE: Egmont, our interests have for years weighed upon my heart; I ever stand as over a chess-board, and regard no move of my adversary as insignificant; and as men of science carefully investigate the […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“Nature has the habit of now and then producing a type of human being far in advance of the times; an ideal for us to emulate; a being devoid of sham, uncompromising, and to whom […]

By: Joshua Glenn

In a 1945 essay, the French-Jewish author, philosopher, and journalist ALBERT CAMUS (1913-60) asked, “What is a man who revolts?” His answer: “First of all, it’s a man who says no. But if he refuses, […]