On the difficulty of identifying Hilobrows

By: Joshua Glenn

Nobrows are easily recognized, for their gait is dancing and bold. But HiLobrows frequently deceive one because their bearing is curiously like that of a class of people heartily despised by Nobrows as well as […]

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Comedy and the Death of God

By: Joshua Glenn

Hey, PhD students looking for a thesis topic — here’s a freebie. These sketchy notes are inspired by a B&N.com review of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, by HiLobrow.com friend James Parker. Parker writes: […]

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Thorstein Veblen

By: Joshua Glenn

“The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture….” That first phrase from his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class summed up the […]

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Walter Benjamin

By: Joshua Glenn

In the rumpus room of midcentury intellectual culture, WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) is everybody’s favorite overstuffed velveteen rabbit. Susan Sontag, for example, rationalized Benjamin’s many self-defeating habits: the glacial pace at which he worked, she wrote, […]

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Significant Objects

By: Joshua Glenn

EARLIER THIS WEEK, Rob Walker and I launched an online experiment called Significant Objects. The project, in brief: Rob’s “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine attempts to figure out why consumers respond the […]

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Jacko and Farrah

By: Joshua Glenn

Earlier this week, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam gave my generational periodization scheme a shout-out. Beam writes: Glenn has devoted considerable time — too much time, frankly — to slicing up the post World War […]

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Peter Lorre

By: Joshua Glenn

From Abbott, the courtly assassin in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, to the un-manly yet indefatigable Joel Cairo, in The Maltese Falcon, PETER LORRE (1904-64) mocked or otherwise subverted the very concept of […]

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