By: Ingrid Schorr

According to DAWN POWELL (1897-1965), there was no trick to writing satire. You just describe people as they are, and add a motive. If you substitute vision for motive, then what you get is romance. […]

By: Joshua Glenn

In 1963, BRUCE LEE (1940-73), an immigrant from Hong Kong who’d been studying philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, dropped out in order to teach the Chinese art of kung fu. Impatient with […]

By: Joe Alterio

CHARLES M. SCHULZ (1922-2000) might seem an unlikely hero for HiLobrow.com, because his comic strip Peanuts and, particularly, the animated Peanuts TV specials, are so mainstream. A casual reader might even perceive Peanuts as a […]

By: Tor Aarestad

The apex of MARK LANEGAN’s (born 1964) visibility came more than fifteen years ago as the lead singer of the feral Seattle band Screaming Trees during the apogee of that city’s fame as the rebirthplace […]

By: Patrick Cates

If you were to approach STEPHEN MERCHANT (born 1974) and berate him for looking like a myopic ostrich, he would stare vacantly back at you and, after a pause suffused with the awkward comedic tension […]

By: Mark Kingwell

ARTHUR ADOLPH “HARPO” MARX (1888-1964) was a philosopher of silence. Though it started as a way to distinguish him from his voluble brothers, especially front man Groucho, his assumed muteness became a career-long existential conundrum […]

By: David Smay

TERRY GILLIAM (born 1940) first worked with John Cleese (and Gloria Steinem) in the early 1960s, on Harvey Kurtzman’s Help, collaborating on a fumetti: “Christopher’s Punctured Romance.” After Help’s demise he moved to England where […]

By: David Smay

Is it possible that BJÖRK (born 1965) is not an unreasonably talented singer and video artist, but just a typical Icelander who bothered to leave her homeland? How to judge the genius of Björk’s Oscar-night […]

By: Douglas Wolk

CHESTER GOULD (1900-85) missed his calling as a professional designer of deathtraps. In the middle of one 1943 Dick Tracy sequence Gould wrote and drew, the villainous Mrs. Pruneface chains the valiant detective to the […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Although other scholars have been cited as soothsayers of the mechanics of our Great Recession, ZYGMUNT BAUMAN (born 1925) has been unerringly the Prophet of its ethos. Since his retirement from active teaching at the […]

By: Erik Davis

Long before they became whiners — carping about Napster and exploring their inner kiddie tantrums in Some Kind of Monster — Metallica were America’s best metal band, or at least the best American metal band […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“Nature has the habit of now and then producing a type of human being far in advance of the times; an ideal for us to emulate; a being devoid of sham, uncompromising, and to whom […]

By: Franklin Bruno

“St. Louis Blues” may be “the jazzman’s Hamlet,” as one critic has it, but its author, W.C. HANDY (1873-1955) might be compared more fairly to Aeschylus than to Shakespeare. Just as the Greek’s works served […]

By: Tom Nealon

If OL’ DIRTY BASTARD’s (Russell Tyrone Jones, 1968-2004) madness was a tumor pressing on his genius and making it dance, it also caused him excruciating pain. His anguished, wailing stabs at song remain some of […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Perhaps the most prolific cartoonist ever for the high-middlebrow/nobrow New Yorker, and creator of the story that inspired the quatsch film Shrek, WILLIAM STEIG (1907-2003) might not seem an obvious hero for HiLobrow.com. Ladies and […]