AMLO All Along
Obradorismo was nationalist austerity governance under the pretense of left-wing populism
David Graeber's Debt: My First 5,000 Words
If anything, the limitation of this big book is actually that it’s not big enough, that it gestures towards -- without fully including – so very much that is within the ken of its ambition. But the short version of this review, simply, is this: I can’t really picture a better book than this one
Simulacra Descending a Staircase
In these dark and brooding times it is Kafkaesque tragicomedy that strikes the right note of collective mirth. The Iranian government recently staged an anniversary celebration of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's momentous return from exile in France. The cardboard reenactment of his arrival has been the subject of effusive internet mockery since photos from the state-affiliated
On Modeling as Modern-Day Physiognomy
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.
Greetings From the Internet
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…
Sunday Reading
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…
Facebook division of labor and the rewired society
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…
Time Comes Around
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…
Working Beauty
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.
Against a Dream Deferred
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…
The New Inquiry
Welcome to the new New Inquiry. site ready to go...
Pont Blank
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
Starting out in the Evening
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
Notes on the "data self"
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…
The Pitfalls of Indie Fame
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.
Consultancy Rock
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
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