Middlebrow Bestsellers — Week of 10/11/09

By: HILOBROW

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their […]

Read This Post

Middlebrow Bestsellers — Week of 9/27/09

By: Joshua Glenn

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sentimental, uplifting, a favorite gift from compassionate conservatives to their […]

Read This Post

MIDDLEBROW BESTSELLERS — THIS WEEK

By: Joshua Glenn

Same as last week, except Gladwell Moore’s Clunk enters the list at no. 8, knocking out Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, […]

Read This Post

Engaged vs. Disengaged Irony

By: Joshua Glenn

A quick note about Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art. This item is excerpted from yesterday’s essay on the Postmodernist Generation. Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Yves Klein were born between 1924-33. Reacting […]

Read This Post

Middlebrow Bestsellers — this week

By: Joshua Glenn

A service that we may or may not continue to offer. Thanks to our friends at the New York Times for doing the primary research. 1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David […]

Read This Post

New God Middlebrow

By: Joshua Glenn

High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the New Gods Generation include: Alfred Bester, Charles Bukowski, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Cordwainer Smith, Dean Martin, Dizzy Gillespie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Eric Hobsbawm, Hank Williams, Hugh Kenner, Jack […]

Read This Post

Quatschwatch (3): Words of Power

By: Joshua Glenn

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: […]

Read This Post

Partisan Middlebrow

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 […]

Read This Post

High-Mid shenanigans

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 […]

Read This Post

Fred MacMurray

By: Katie Hennessey

Though often cast as a lovable father in middlebrow comedies like The Shaggy Dog and the long-running TV show My Three Sons, FRED MACMURRAY (1908-91) was more convincing in noir films. In Double Indemnity (1944), […]

Read This Post