Author: 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.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

By: Matthew Battles

In more than 120 television specials JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU (1910–97) portrayed a floating utopia in which perfectly tanned, massively skilled argonauts roamed the seven seas in search of beauty and danger, supported by donations and calendar […]

Cold War of the Ancients and the Moderns

By: Matthew Battles

FROM THE STRUGGLE between Cartesian science and the Classics lampooned by Jonathan Swift in his “Battle of the Books,” to the “Two Cultures” argument of physicist and novelist C. P. Snow, to the “nonoverlapping magisteria” […]

Taking Three Wolves to the Moon

By: Matthew Battles

We know, we know: the Three Wolves Moon T-Shirt thing is old news: snarky hipster posts an Amazon “review” of one of those silk-screened t-shirts of the trippy druidic sort — others sport dragons, dolphins, […]

I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully

By: Matthew Battles

BEFORE THE TURN of the millennium when the Web was new, I worked in the bowels of Harvard’s Widener Library. There was as yet no Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube; blogs and wikis were the […]

Eat Your Heart Out, Chinette

By: Matthew Battles

WASARA IS “DISPOSABLE paper ware for spiritual enrichment.” Made from sugar cane refuse and other low-footprint fibers, these high-concept paper plates and cups meld Japanese aesthetics, industrial disposability, and a touch of DIY panache (or […]

Death Becomes Us

By: Matthew Battles

HORROR IS CRUCIAL to human experience. Like sex, innocence, and despair, the fear of death is a wellspring of all kinds of creative activity; with the help of its zombified double, the uncanny, it unsettles […]

How Can I Counteract?

By: Matthew Battles

FIRST PAGE FROM GOOGLE on the phrase “how can I counteract?”: How can I counteract the depressing hospital setting? How can I counteract the food cravings I get on HRT? How can I counteract the […]

The Feral is Beautifully Broken

By: Matthew Battles

Is Call of the Wild truly feral? Or merely fascist?

The Little People

By: Matthew Battles

They’ve always been with us

Roboflânerie

By: Matthew Battles

AUTONOMOUS CITY EXPLORER, or “Ace,” is a robot built by researchers at the University of Munich that navigates city streets by asking passers-by for directions. New Scientist has the story.

Enlarging the Trek Fanfic Canon

By: Matthew Battles

THE STAR TREK MYTHOS hosts one of the most flourishing bodies of fan fiction since Euripides and the boys got busy on Homer back in the day (indeed, Trekkies ushered in the modern fan fiction […]

Share This Book!

By: Matthew Battles

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF’S BOOKS include novels, cyberspace memoirs, works of media criticism and religious exploration, and the cult classic Stoned Free: How to Get High Without Drugs. But with the forthcoming Life, Inc.: How the World […]

Venetia Phair (1919–2009) or, Alien Naming Conventions

By: Matthew Battles

VENETIA PHAIR (née Burney), who named the planet Pluto, died on April 30 in Banstead, Surrey. She was 90. In March 1930, Eleven-year old Venetia was talking to her grandfather, Falconer Madan, about the discovery […]

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY HILOBROWS

By: Matthew Battles

Metamorphoses

By: Matthew Battles

The catalogue of the MIT Press arrived in the mail today. One of my favorite university presses, MIT publishes books that are terrifyingly smart, but often audacious and surprising as well. (last year’s Digital Apollo […]