By: Tom Nealon

At Pazzo Books, the shop my brother Brian and I keep in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, I’ve learned that old books are funny things. Often you catch them looking at you sideways, across a room, and […]

By: Matthew De Abaitua

A prehistoric track stretches across 250 miles from the Dorset coast to the Norfolk Wash. For over five thousand years, people have walked or ridden this trail. The first section we know as the Ridgeway, […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The malign influence of typewriting upon our behavior?

By: Matthew Battles

. The mere possibility of an impending announcement of a tablet from Apple has tech journalists everywhere abandoning their cynicism for bouts of credulity and wonder. But the sudden zeal with which many commentators anticipate […]

By: Matthew Battles

One of my favorite blogs, Bozo Sapiens, offers a thoughtful consideration of Aleister Crowley, who as a HiLo Hero was recently fêted in this space. Blogger Michael Kaplan serves up elegant and evocative accounts of […]

By: Matthew Battles

I have written about Candyland in another connection. But until yesterday I hadn’t played it in ages. While we waited for the button on the turkey to pop, a session of Monopoly erupted. This is […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]

By: James Parker

I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]

By: Matthew Battles

The Guardian’s Alastair Harper offers a paean to the voices of the Great War— the first European war, as has been observed from many perspectives, to have been fought in the public sphere. Many combatants […]

By: James Parker

If Queen had not existed, it would by no means have been necessary to invent them. Sweaty old 1973, the year of their debut album (the campily Tolkien-rocking Queen) was also the year of Elton […]

By: James Parker

In December 1984 a small but memorable press conference was held in an English pub. It had just been announced that Ted Hughes was to be the new Poet Laureate, and a media reception had […]

By: Matthew Battles

Kindle, iPhone: both are cool/irksome. But which device is the harbinger of Things to Come? Pointing out that “the Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book,” Jason Kottke urges us to think of […]

By: James Parker

The owl and the pussycat went to jail, for something the piggy-wig said. They sat for a while with no hope of a trial, and paper bags over their heads, Till a man with dark […]

By: James Parker

Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s […]

By: Joshua Glenn

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 […]