By: Joshua Glenn

Even though there’s no shepherd issuing orders, we behave like docile sheep.

By: Joshua Glenn

High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and 1953 Commentary essay, “The Plight of Our Culture,” are […]

By: Joshua Glenn

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge “that maybe should have […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Why we’re trained to scorn highbrows

By: Joshua Glenn

The 1894-1903 cohort are bitterly resigned to unfreedom.

By: Joshua Glenn

The era of guilt- and con­sequence-free sex ended in 1982.

By: Joshua Glenn

“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]

By: Joshua Glenn

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]

By: Matthew Battles

A COLLEGE WHERE I do a bit of teaching just sent me an email announcing the formation of a “social media working group” whose job it is to “research, suggest, and implement strategies and best […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The most dangerous game?

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

“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

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

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: Joshua Glenn

Psyche­delic revel­ations about the arti­ficial nature of reality