Watch the watchmen, critique the critics, épater les savants.
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HILOBROW is superficially similar, as we’ve noted, to Middlebrow. So HiLobrow despises Middlebrow for the same reason that idlers detest slackers, and punks detest rockists: we’re afraid that we’re really just like them. No wonder, […]
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A service that we may or may not continue to offer. Thanks to our friends at the New York Times for doing the primary research. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David […]
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the New Gods Generation include: Alfred Bester, Charles Bukowski, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Cordwainer Smith, Dean Martin, Dizzy Gillespie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Hobsbawm, Hank Williams, Hugh Kenner, Jack […]
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The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: […]
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Last week the New York Times’s occasional “Op-Art” column was furnished by Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty, whose handwriting manuals explain and promote the italic hand. In “Write Stuff,” they offer italic as a balm […]
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Even though there’s no shepherd issuing orders, we behave like docile sheep.
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and 1953 Commentary essay, “The Plight of Our Culture,” are […]
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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge “that maybe should have […]
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Though often cast as a lovable father in middlebrow comedies like The Shaggy Dog and the long-running TV show My Three Sons, FRED MACMURRAY (1908-91) was more convincing in noir films. In Double Indemnity (1944), […]
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The era of guilt- and consequence-free sex ended in 1982.
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“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]
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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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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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