The New Inquiry

World Wide Waves: an interview with Laleh Khalili

By Jake RommOctober 2, 2024

A new book on the political economy of shipping covers how the labor behind global supply chains has both transformed since post 9/11 securitization and remained brutally the same since shipping's earliest days.

The Beheld

On Modeling as Modern-Day Physiognomy

By Autumn Whitefield-MadranoFebruary 6, 2012

Just as the face-reading art of physiognomy was a reflection of social and scientific standards instead of an actual science of character, today's “It” girl is as much a reflection of tastemakers’ collective sense as she is an owner of her own talent.

The Beheld

Greetings From the Internet

By Autumn Whitefield-MadranoFebruary 6, 2012

I just wanted to introduce myself to new-to-me readers here at The New Inquiry. Faithful readers of TNI may know me from the recent comparative…

Zunguzungu

Sunday Reading

By Aaron BadyFebruary 5, 2012

On Sundays, I post a lot of links to things I think are worth reading, almost always from the previous week, and in exactly no…

Latest Issue

Assets

Vol. 76 | July 2022

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Marginal Utility

Facebook division of labor and the rewired society

By Rob HorningFebruary 3, 2012

I'm reading through the summary of findings of this Pew survey of Facebook users. (It is based on phone polling, so caveat emptor.) The point…

Uncategorized

Time Comes Around

By Malcolm HarrisFebruary 3, 2012

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of the Pont des Arts taken by Kertész in 1929. Taken from inside the…

Essays & Reviews

Working Beauty

By Malcolm HarrisFebruary 3, 2012

In the opening scene of Julia Leigh’s debut film Sleeping Beauty, Lucy (Emily Browning), our beautiful college-student protagonist, serves as a medical test subject. She leans her head back as the doctor slowly threads a tube down her throat, then fills a balloon in her chest with air while she holds the tube in place.

Essays & Reviews

Against a Dream Deferred

By Natasha LennardFebruary 2, 2012

Don’t do it for the children I don’t want you to think I don’t like children. I do. I number among the insufferable…

Uncategorized

The New Inquiry

By TNIFebruary 2, 2012

Welcome to the new New Inquiry. site ready to go...

Uncategorized

Pont Blank

By Kevin BreathnachFebruary 2, 2012

This is the story of how I came to be profoundly disillusioned with the modernist photographic tradition. Through careful study of their work, it came to my attention that Eugène Atget, André Kertész, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, men whom I had once taken for heroes, were involved in the systematic corruption of the

The Austerity Kitchen

Starting out in the Evening

By Christine BaumgarthuberFebruary 2, 2012

A newly revised Starting Out is in order. But what would such a thing look like? Under my editorship it would be present- rather than future-oriented, and it would exult an ethic of making do. Entire chapters would be devoted to advice on living, if not stylishly, then passably while servicing debt. It would be

Marginal Utility

Notes on the "data self"

By Rob HorningFebruary 2, 2012

1. Identity is fundamentally multiple, incomplete, provisional, cyborg, contextually contingent, etc. Deleuze et al. are right about that. (See Turkle's "Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community…

Uncategorized

The Pitfalls of Indie Fame

By Malcolm HarrisFebruary 1, 2012

Editor's note: The following is a piece from way back in the TNI archives, Malcolm Harris writing about Chuck Klosterman in 2001. When we saw the similarities between Klosterman's take-down of tUnE-yArDs and Harris's article – well, we're not accusing anyone of anything, we leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

Essays & Reviews

Consultancy Rock

By Rob HorningJanuary 27, 2012

The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone. How

Essays & Reviews

Il Salvataggio Selvaggio

By Evan Calder WilliamsJanuary 25, 2012

We might consider making things that can’t sink. One good way to do this is to not build boats. But there are landslides, and many houses are placed along the sea. Once you open the door to non-sinkability, it’s hard to know where you reasonably stop. Or perhaps a boat made of water, but that

Essays & Reviews

Dance with The Devil

By Dan BevacquaJanuary 23, 2012

Twenty-seven years after it was first published in his native Hungary, László Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, Satantango, has materialized in America.

Bail Bloc 2.0

Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention

Features

Liquid Border

By Annalisa Camilli and Eleanor PaynterAugust 20, 2019

An excerpt from The Law of the Sea by Annalisa Camilli

Features

United States v. Scott Daniel Warren

By LazzJune 27, 2019

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.

Essays & Reviews

Abolish the ICE Prison Complex

By Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia HernandezMay 16, 2018

A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons

Essays & Reviews, Features

Border Theories

By Marcos Santiago GonsalezNovember 13, 2017

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.

Essays & Reviews

Soft Borders

By Jack GrossSeptember 15, 2017

The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.

Essays & Reviews

Fash at Sea

By Mohammed Harun ArsalaiSeptember 15, 2017

The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over

Essays & Reviews

Operation Streamline

By Brandon ShimodaMay 3, 2017

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.