Presents

 OPENING NIGHT READING: BRAVERY

Hosted by comedian Baratunde Thurston

Monday, April 29, 7-8:30 p.m.

The Great Hall, Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, NYC

Join The New Inquiry on 4/20 from 8-11pm to celebrate TNI Magazine, Vol. 15: Weed.

We’ll have $2 beer and music. Whatever you do before or after the event is up to you.

The party will be held at the Smart Clothes Gallery currently featuring Molly Crabapple’s landmark “Shell Game,” which we expect to have a whole new appreciation of by the end of the night.

Saturday, April 20
8pm-11pm
Smart Clothes Gallery
154 Stanton St.
New York, NY

Life as Live-Stream:
Douglas Rushkoff and Rachel Rosenfelt
Thursday, March 21, 7:00 pm
McNally Jackson (New York, NY)

On Thursday the 21st, join The New Inquiry at McNally Jackson to celebrate the launch of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now and TNI Magazine, Vol. 14: Time.  TNI’s editor-in-chief Rachel Rosenfelt will interview TNI blogger and renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on his latest book and discuss how the shifts in our contemporary perception of time impact our lives and society.

The event will be followed by an after party at Puck Fair.

Read more here.

Tuesday, March 27
6:30-10:00pm

@ The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY (map)

After party from 10:00-11:30pm at The Half King

Celebrate the release of The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 2: Youth at The Kitchen on Tuesday, March 27 for a screening of one of the buried gems of late 60′s youth-power exploitation cinema, “Wild in The Streets.”

Over four decades before “The 99%,” rock star-turned-President Max Frost told America’s youth they were “The 52%” – a majority that should act like it. In the run up to Occupy Wall Street’s declared May 1 general strike, we’ve assembled a panel to discuss the film, pop music, and revolutionary politics featuring:

Greil Marcus
Legendary rock critic and author of Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train, and most recently, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

Sara Marcus
Author of Girls to The Front: The True Story of The Riot Grrrl Revolution

Andrew O’Hehir
Head film critic for Salon.com

Laurie Penny
UK columnist and activist, TNI contributing editor, and author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism and Penny Red

Cosmo Bjorkenheim
New York based controversial-film maker and anthropophobe

Moderated by TNI editor Malcolm Harris.

This event is free and open to the public. Drinks are on us.

RSVP on Facebook

How, when, and why was The New Inquiry originally founded?

I started The New Inquiry with two friends, Mary Borkowski and Jennifer Bernstein, as a shared Tumblr blog in 2009. We weren’t thinking of it as a magazine back then: it was more of a tactic to establish a community-driven creative outlet that wasn’t available to us in our post-collegiate lives. I can’t speak for either of them, but in my case, pouring my energy into TNI fulfilled my need for intellectual and creative stimulation beyond wage work.

We were experimenting with the platform for a while before the formative moment struck. I was reading through the archive of one of my favorite critics, Scott McLemee, when I came across a prescient piece he wrote in a 2007 issue ofBookforum called “After the Last Intellectuals.” This was a few years after the article’s publication, and in the intervening time we had experienced an economic crash, the contraction of the university system, the death of print, and the rise of new media. The institutions that Russell Jacoby describes in his book The Last Intellectuals — mass media, mainstream publishing, the academy, all the places which had come to employ and therefore absorb a category we had once known as the public intellectual — had atrophied across the board. As a result, the would-be academicians, editors, copy writers and advertising cronies who would once have been absorbed into those institutions suddenly constituted a surplus population.

I also realized that the most fiercely intellectual, provocative, and original thinkers among this new population were never very well-assimilated into cultural institutions to begin with: they weren’t the kind you’d meet at a publishing party, or who would’ve be dispositionally capable of working their way up the organization ladder. But these same people who had already taken advantage of new media and managed to carve out an independent platform for their for themselves online, and this sudden change in the paradigm actually put them at a distinct advantage. The crazies, the loose cannons, the pseudonymous hermit, the girl shouting on a blogspot soapbox: these were the new voices on the cutting edge of culture and I made it my business to bring them together.

Strengthened and focused by McLemee’s example, ideas, and eventual mentorship, we began to think of The New Inquiry as more of a movement than a magazine — and we still do. I set out to connect with the already established extra-institutional writers and artists that I most admired, as well as discover strong emerging voices that hadn’t yet found a platform to enable their development. It’s sort of a Bad News Bears montage genesis story: me searching the crevices of New York and the Internet to bring together the rag-tag group of misfits who would eventually coalesce into a real team. The salon we run in New York gives my editors and contributors a space to connect as people rather than bylines and form a real, concrete community, for which there is no substitute.

Read it all here.