Michael Gural-Maiello

Balenciaga Should Not Have Backed Down

This week, a pair of ad campaigns from fashion house Balenciaga attracted criticism from The New York Post and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, creating an online mobbing that branded the luxury clothes and accessory maker pedophilia-adjacent. The New York…

Ticketmaster Sucks, Happy Black Friday

Any of us who buy tickets to shows and events knows that Ticketmaster shows up, time and time again, when we go to purchase. The ticketing service has exclusive deals with major, middle and minor venues around the world, and has huge influence over…

Not With A Bang But a Twitter

Elon Musk may kill Twitter, or Twitter might die on its own. The death of social networks is rarely dramatic or cataclysmic, though. They fade, rather than explode and the koan becomes, if no one is around to doom scroll, does the feed still make…

The Mystery of Mysteries

A friend proposed we write a mystery together — actually, a series and we’re now batting ideas around. As part of our brainstorm, we agreed to loan each other mysteries from our shelves. The Middlebrow quickly noticed how bare his shelves were of…

Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy

Nice country you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. Political division has defined American politics since at least the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, but maybe back to 2000, which featured the first of two presidential…

Real Life, Art and Immersion

Last night, The Middlebrow accompanied The Scholar Wife and Renaissance Son to Christie’s, where we were all to see Jean-Michel Basquiat’s portrait of Harlem boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, alongside other contemporary stunners by Christopher Wool, Salman…

Looking Back At Bob Roberts

This week, Matt Taibbi interviewed actor Tim Robbins, who hits some very Middlebrow themes — namely that the shift to e-commerce and algorithms and away from in-person shopping with recommendations from book, movie and record store employees who…

No Masterpieces Were Harmed!

It’s not just the “Just Stop Oil” activists — climate change protesters have been targeting art work, art galleries, museums, their patrons and their employees all summer, to raise awareness for climate change. They slop soup on a Van Gogh or glue…

An Oldster's Take on TikTok

It is next to impossible to keep up with certain pop cultural trends through life, especially those driven by technology and mass media. Some of this is because certain artifacts are artifacted for specific generations. All those superhero movies and…

Metamorphosis in Auster and Shteyngart

Middlebrow has indulged simultaneous Paul Auster and Gary Shteyngart kicks this year and stumbled upon a startling thematic recurrence in three disparate books. In each, the protagonist descends from a functioning life to one of homelessness. When I…

We Need Books. Lots of Books.

On recent business video conferences from the Middlebrow bedroom/office, friendly participants have asked, “have you read all of those books behind you?” It’s a common question that civilians ask of book hoarders and libro lovers. The honest answer…

Class and the Charity Gala

Cater-waiters glide by with canapés and trays of bellinis, champagne and white wine. Suits and dresses gather at the open bar, picking from three themed cocktails or just calling for straight liquor. Some are models, others lawyers or owners of…

Success in Contemporary Corporate Praxis

The Middlebrow is delighted to share Success in Contemporary Corporate Praxis, a short play written in response to a prompt from the Theatre of Others, an international collective of theatrical artists based around the world, that produces an annual…

Oprah's Middlebrow Book Club

In 1996, Oprah Winfrey started recommending books on her daytime talk show, rocketing the novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard up the bestseller lists. In college at the time, the Middlebrow worked in a book shop that was part of a…

Bring Back the WPA

Unemployment is low now, to the point where some complain of a labor shortage. But among people with degrees in the arts, it’s in double digits. That unemployment number would be higher if you counted people working outside of their preferred…

Angels in Russia

Two words associated with Mikhail Gorbachev made their way into American pop culture during the 1980s: Glasnost and Perestroika. Glasnost was Gorbachev’s attempts to add transparent to the Society System, after many decades of strict censorship and…

Live and Let Rushdie

The Satanic Verses was neither Satanic, nor written in verse. Discuss. Salman Rushdie is one of those writers known better as a personality than an author. Folks know what he wrote and the controversies around it, but few have read the book. The…

Myths, Dreams and Reality Coalesce in Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini

Reviewed by Michael Maiello Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini comprises a poetic cosmology where Jungian archetypes swirl through contemporary life and we witness uncanny valleys (where artificial realities seem so real that they inspire unease) of our own…

Art and Culture at Poster House

For any of you in our around New York City before August 21st, The Middlebrow heartily recommends a visit to Poster House on West 23rd street, near the Flat Iron building. Posters are under appreciated as art despite their ubiquity as advertisements…

All Movies Anywhere, Anytime

Warner Brothers Discovery, a full quarter into its latest corporate iteration, has shelved its straight-to-streaming movies like Batgirl, Wonder Twins and a Scooby Doo movie. They’d already spent $90 million on Batgirl but, in favor of taking a tax…