Josh Glenn
Josh Glenn is a Kingston (NY)-based consulting semiotician. He is cofounder of the consultancy Semiovox, editor of the websites SEMIOVOX and HILOBROW, and founding editor of The MIT Press's proto-sf RADIUM AGE series. His books (as writer and/or editor) include The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, the family activities guide Unbored, and the 2025 anthology Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age. In the ’90s, Josh published the intellectual zine/journal Hermenaut; in the 2000s, he was a founding staffer and columnist for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section.
Meet the Semionauts
"Between the experiential cunning of the animal and the more self-disciplined and attentive cunning of the man."
Fifties Backlash
"Disney sold him into slavery, and he’s nothing. He's nothing."
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
A non-compact topological group of bare-breasted women in G-strings.
Thick Description (Abduction)
How do we identify codes, and in doing so begin to construct a meaning matrix?
Disney Co. Mascot
"He’s so much of an institution that we’re limited in what we can do with him."
The African Queen
How to survive not war, but peace, with one’s humanity intact?
Thick Description (Deduction)
How do we identify paradigms and thematic complexes?
Forties Backlash
"A degenerate 'middlebrow' horror, mass-produced for profit."
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Comical yet not funny, equal-opportunity in its portrayal of human folly, artificial in the extreme.
Dazed and Confused
Single-night movies aren’t snapshots, they’re moonlit summoning rituals.
Scientist vs. Life Coach
Making sense of how brands, media and culture are responding to COVID-19. (4 of 4)
Challenging the World
Comic juxtapositions, flaring brilliances, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities.