By: Matthew Battles

FREEFALL IS ONE chief theme in this season’s action films. One of the most scintillating scenes of the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie has Kirk, Sulu, and a doomed redshirt skydive from suborbital altitude […]

By: Matthew Battles

“My life is made up of so many other lives…. all of them rearranging themselves.” This advertisement for the Palm Pre smartphone promotes the curious Zen of being your own Dear Leader. Pajama-clad minions engaged […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The secret origins of Generation Y

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 […]

By: Matthew Battles

AMIDST THE CYCLE of encomiums spurred by Michael Jackson’s death last week, his weirdness has been treated as an unfortunate epiphenomenon and distraction from his greatness. But the weird — a thoroughgoing weird without stint […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Nope! A century-old literary mystery, solved.

By: Matthew Battles

1 …Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“I am the sum of my small steps,” announce the handwritten-style notes in an advertisement torn from a recent issue of Oprah Magazine. Ecce Middlebrow’s ideal American woman, forever in pursuit of a clear (un-anxious, […]

By: Joshua Glenn

In a recent HiLobrow.com post, I casually asserted that the so-called Baby Boomers [I call them the Blank Generation] were born from 1944-53. I’m aware, of course, that America’s postwar “baby boom” began in 1946 […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Looking back on it all, from the vantage point of a couple months, it’s apparent that the Susan Boyle Phenomenon (SBP) had very little to do with poor Susan Boyle (SB) herself. Susan Boyle’s judges […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The oldest Boomers turn 65 this year, and the youngest turn 56. By now, they’ve partially relinquished their collective death grip on the best jobs — though not the best lifestyles, which they’ll always enjoy. […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy’d the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done… SO DEMANDS THE protagonist of Matthew Arnold’s 1852 […]

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” […]

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 […]

By: Matthew Battles

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