By: Matthew Battles

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 […]

By: Joshua Glenn

On Thursday, the editors of HILOBROW discussed the particulars of our project during a weekly meetup with Brian and Tom Nealon, proprietors of the excellent Pazzo Books (located in the Boston neighborhood of West Roxbury). […]

By: Matthew Battles

BORN IN 1900, German artist Gerd Arntz designed a pattern language for life in the twentieth century. His prints and designs were intended to further the purposes of a socialist world even as they dreamt […]

By: Matthew Battles

MELDING ‘PATA­PHYSICS and popular mechanics, Proust and power tools, Dada and do-it-yourself, Eric Kraft is a hilobrow novelist par excellence. With the publication of his latest novel, Flying Home, Kraft’s cracked mythology is arguably complete […]

By: Matthew Battles

MARGARET and CHRISTINE WERTHEIM are crocheting a coral reef, and they’re eager for help. The sisters direct the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, which supports lectures, publications, and projects that explore the “figurative ecology” […]

By: James Parker

IT’S TOO HEAVY METAL to be available online, but the cover story of the new Revolver is a killer. Atlanta’s Mastodon have just released their masterpiece, Crack The Skye, and the band’s dense mythological Jethro-Tull-with-plasma-cannons […]

By: Matthew Battles

The art of Thomas Doyle is at once inviting and unsettling. Miniature tableaux under glass, his pieces have the quirky, lilliputian charm of the model railroad, the dollhouse, and the museum diorama. But upon further […]

By: Matthew Battles

Susan Sontag pays a visit to the Seagram Building (“gleaming like a switchblade”) to interview architect Philip Johnson. Embedded here with thanks to Joanne McNeil, who posted this at her terrific blog Tomorrow Museum. Sontag’s […]

By: Matthew Battles

Steampunk artist and impresario Hieronymus Isambard von Slatt has joined the ranks of good people observing Ada Lovelace Day. See how he makes his Altoids tin etching of an Ada Lovelace portrait here. Ada Lovelace […]

By: Matthew Battles

Herbert Pfostl is an artist we’d like to know more about. His work combines found images and text with figural notions of animals and herbs, half-finished rubbings, and archetypal blots and smudges. Pfostl’s drawings and […]

By: Matthew Battles

Atlantic correspondent James Parker is the hilobrow critic par excellence. Whether reviewing a biography of G. K. Chesterton or musing on the meaning of slasher films (as he does in the forthcoming issue of the […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Craig Yoe’s most recent Arf book (published by Fantagraphics) may be his last. In a March 6 email to those of us who’ve reviewed previous installments of his brilliant series of attractive and engaging books […]

By: Joshua Glenn

HiLobrows are emotional, yes; sentimental, (mostly) no. Which means that although we may worship, we try not to fetishize. Or scapegoat, which is the negative form of fetishization. Which brings us to Kindle, and the […]

By: Matthew Battles

Julian Dibbell, anthropologist of the tribes of technology, has written an entertaining and useful consideration of kittens. Specifically, he’s writing about the viral video Kittens Inspired by Kittens, in which a young girl re-enchants the […]