Author: Joshua Glenn

Josh Glenn, HILOBROW's editor, is a principal of the commercial semiotics agency Semiovox. He is co-author and/or co-editor of several books, including The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, and the bestselling family activities guide UNBORED. In the ’00s, Josh was a columnist and blogger for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section; in the ’90s, he published the zine/journal Hermenaut. He lives in Kingston, NY.

Double Exposure (6) — Food Fight

By: Joshua Glenn

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]

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René Goscinny

By: Joshua Glenn

Unlike Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Foucault, exact contemporaries of his who were merely inspired by pop culture, the French-born comics writer RENÉ GOSCINNY (1926-77) cranked the stuff out. Les Aventures d’Astérix, which he authored (and Albert […]

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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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