Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
Protected: Teju Test- Margin Note Image
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Teju Test- Margin Note
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
We Mock What We Don't Understand
How the paranoid logic of nuclear deterrence became a laughing matter and authorized the even crazier madness of consumerism
Five Questions with Lisa Russ Spaar
What makes a habit "bad"? A rut of overusing genitive-link metaphors. An addiction to certain kinds of low-end television, like The Real Housewives of New Jersey.
Gathering Light
Life for Japan's firefly catchers was full of hard knocks.
Beauty Blogosphere 6.29.12
Hunka hunka sexist love, exclusively plus-size gyms, the trouble with fitspo, and Hello Kitty collagen marshmallows.
The IRL Fetish
The idea that we can no longer access unmediated “real life” is a pretense that allows us to congratulate ourselves for our disconnection.
Values, Stereotypes, and Big Feelings: Compliments, Part II
Four findings of compliment scholarship.
An A B C of Puerility: Anderson, Britten, Crane
Suzy lugs a suitcase of stolen library books through the wilderness, imaginative resources for building a private universe. Her fictions are bulwarks against the flood.
No morsel more delicious than a ripe book...
"Bibliophiles are gastronomes, gourmets, gourmands, epicures..."
No, You're So Pretty: Compliments, Part I
In a study of more than a thousand compliments, women accepted compliments from other women 22% of the time. When they came from men? 68%.
7 Days of Queer Theory
On Facebook last week, my friend Ramzi Fawaz posted a different Queer Studies quote each day, in honor of SF Pride. I enjoyed the quotes, so with his permission, I reprint all seven, with his (brief) introductions.
Onesies
Here at The New Inquiry, we worry that we haven't published enough content on pieces of clothing that - in and of themselves - constitute outfits. That ends now.
Bathrobe Boy
Mid-century pattern for a men's bathrobe I don’t have a novel in me, but a novel has me in it. Although I consider myself a writer,…
The Suit
Recently I came across a twelve-part essay on fashion by a French novelist and intellectual. It was a predictably tweedy take on the act of…
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
Liquid Border
An excerpt from The Law of the Sea by Annalisa Camilli
United States v. Scott Daniel Warren
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
Fash at Sea
The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over
Operation Streamline
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.
In the Water
An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility--they might become our neighbor
Cross-Border Operations
It is no longer plausible to describe the state’s borders as geographically fixed or the state as distinguishable from capital or “markets.”
Empire Records
Guantánamo Diary's missing passages connect it with the US empire's deeper history of far-flung capture and detention networks