By: Matthew Battles

Wisconsin’s Sand County lacks the grandeur of the Sierras that inspired John Muir. Its modest landscapes of meadows, streams, and oak savannas do not exhibit the sublime extremes of the ocean that furnished Rachel Carson […]

By: Brian Berger

He challenged social and musical conventions.

By: Joshua Glenn

He gave us the term “robot,” as part of his critique of capitalism.

By: Lynn Peril

Dubbed the “Striptease Intellectual” by the American Mercury, GYPSY ROSE LEE (1911-70) wowed the boys with her witty chatter as she removed all but her G-string and two strategically placed bows. An autodidact who penned […]

By: Sarah Weinman

NICHOLSON BAKER (born 1957) was not the first novelist to create an entire narrative out of the smallest of events, but his 1988 debut, The Mezzanine, still strikes a melodic chord in readers because of […]

By: Patrick Cates

Editor’s note: This is one of the most popular posts, traffic-wise, ever published on HiLobrow. Click here to see a list of the Top 25 Most Popular posts (as of October 2012); and click here […]

By: Jason Grote

No one personified the knotty relationship between comedy and brutality quite like MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE (1940–94), the man responsible for the funniest (and most unnerving) comic bits from the golden ages of both Saturday Night Live […]

By: Mark Kingwell

The Trinidadian Marxist and cricket expert C. L. R. JAMES (1901-89) pioneered what is now known as post-colonial thought, but did so by being thoroughly colonial. After attending school in the West Indies, James pursued […]

By: Tom Nealon

Before Merry and Pippin, before Elvish, and before Orcs, J.R.R. TOLKIEN (1892-1973) saved Beowulf. In 1936, he published Beowulf: The Monster and Its Critics and forever changed the trajectory of the Anglo-Saxon epic’s critical reception. […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Celebrating thirteen HiLo Heroes about whom we wrote in 2009.

By: Franklin Bruno

Interviews with TODD HAYNES (born 1961) are well-stocked with the film-studies and queer-theory jargon the filmmaker absorbed at Brown and Bard, and several of his movies have the air of academic exercises, at least on […]

By: Mimi Lipson

The documentary films of FREDERICK WISEMAN (born 1930) are usually set in institutions and have institutional titles like Hospital and High School and Welfare. His work is often called cinéma vérité, but it’s a term […]

By: David Smay

There’s no point being dainty about it; Dirty Plotte means dirty cunt. Which evokes the blunt pleasure of JULIE DOUCET’s (born 1965) most famous work, but undersells its artistry and gleeful humor. Her cartoon “If […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Nephew of philosopher W.V.O. Quine, and cousin to the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, ROBERT QUINE (1942-2004) spent the peak of his musical career in the penumbra of such innovators as Richard Hell and Lou Reed, […]

By: Douglas Wolk

MARIANNE FAITHFULL (born 1946) is the rare pop musician who’s turned her comeback into the main body of her work. The initial phase of her career — in which her persona was a posh debutante […]