Gray Magic for a Gray Day
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Presenting Georges Méliès’ Les cartes vivantes, a short, fey film by the maker of Le voyage dans la lune. Méliès was a magician before he made films, and here he adapts a bit of stage […]
Read This PostAuthor: Matthew Battles
Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.
To Err is Bounteous
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One of my favorite blogs, Bozo Sapiens, offers a thoughtful consideration of Aleister Crowley, who as a HiLo Hero was recently fêted in this space. Blogger Michael Kaplan serves up elegant and evocative accounts of […]
Read This PostKindling Hilobrow
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In an impulsive experiment in cross-platform grandiosity, I’ve published a collection of three stories that originally appeared here at HILOBROW in an edition for the Kindle. Entitled The Sovereignties of Invention, it includes the title […]
Read This PostSans Serif & Negative Space
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Over at the group philosophy blog Crooked Timber, John Holbo is conducting a discussion of sans serif type and its connection to twentieth-century Modernist art and design. The post’s lengthy comment thread captures a vital […]
Read This PostCandyland, the Book
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I have written about Candyland in another connection. But until yesterday I hadn’t played it in ages. While we waited for the button on the turkey to pop, a session of Monopoly erupted. This is […]
Read This PostThe Sovereignties of Invention
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HE STOOD THERE with the box torn open, with ribbons of packing tape and flaccid little packing-bags strewn about on the table. And in the midst of this mess, the prize — the shiny tool […]
Read This PostThe Cinematic Possibilities of Pop-up Books
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At Slate last week, Troy Patterson argued that books don’t need to be promoted with the kind of flashy, light-beer cinema that is the phenomenon of the “book trailer.” At Snarkmarket, however, Matt Thompson offers […]
Read This PostScurvy Note-Taking Pirates!
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In the Golden Age, when the fruit of knowledge hung heavy from boughs in the grove of academe and all the birds and beasts knew their places, there was a little ritual called note-taking. Students […]
Read This PostThe Humbug Police
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In the New Yorker’s “Current Cinema” column this week, David Denby offer a quick and compelling appraisal of Richard Kelly’s new film, The Box. Kelly wrote and directed the magical and unsettling cult film Donnie […]
Read This PostThe Great War & Modern Enchantment
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The Guardian’s Alastair Harper offers a paean to the voices of the Great War— the first European war, as has been observed from many perspectives, to have been fought in the public sphere. Many combatants […]
Read This PostReverse-engineering the book
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As a child, John Carrera was fascinated by the trove of yellowing pages of Webster’s Pictorial Dictionary he found beneath his grandfather’s chair. As a fine-press printer, he has painstakingly brought the book back to […]
Read This PostEzra Pound
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In a wire cage in the Pisan sun at the end of the Second World War, the forces of chaos and order clashed for EZRA POUND (1885–1972) more keenly than ever. With the accusation of […]
Read This PostA Wholly Remarkable Book
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Kindle, iPhone: both are cool/irksome. But which device is the harbinger of Things to Come? Pointing out that “the Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book,” Jason Kottke urges us to think of […]
Read This PostGroovy Robot Myrmidons
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Boston Dynamics, creators of the quadrupedal robot “BigDog,” bring you “Petman,” a robot modeled on the gait of Mr. Natural. Unlike Mr. Natural, Petman is stable when pushed. They say that the robot is designed […]
Read This PostI Sing the Trousers Electric
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A new Levi’s advertisement uses a wax-cylinder recording of what is believed to be Walt Whitman reciting his own poem. Of course, it’s by no means Whitman’s first trousers ad — O soul in […]
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