Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
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
Il Salvataggio Selvaggio
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
Dance with The Devil
Twenty-seven years after it was first published in his native Hungary, László Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, Satantango, has materialized in America.
Occupy The Library
I spent the early evening yesterday at the Berkeley anthropology library, which was officially to close at 5 p.m. It did not, because Occupy Cal occupied it
Some Links on the Fuel Subsidy Protests in Nigeria
A Country’s Frustration, Fueled Overnight Nigeria: country tense as Jonathan accedes to some of fuel protestors’ demands Nigeria fuel strike ends with soldiers in streets…
Martin Scorsese Started the Fire: Hugo and The Bad Thing
It might be too much to call Hugo a fascist movie, in this sense, but I like the way the word feels on my tongue, here, the kind of association between spectacle and authority that it evokes (and consequential contempt and crass instrumentalization of those who are weak enough to be used).
Objets Trouvés or I like Looking in New York
A mystic lost his head on the Lower East Side.
The Invented Persians
The Palestine/Israel and U.S. narratives on Palestinians coincided in a haphazard way this month. While the popular resistance committee in the village of Nabi Saleh mourned the killing of Mustafa Tamimi, which it named its first martyr, an American presidential candidate resurrected the British Mandate-era mythos about the ‘invented’ Palestinian people.
Multitudes, Horizontal Spontaneities, Whatever
It is difficult to come by a news item about South America and the economy that doesn’t include the phrase ‘Brazil rising’ in it.
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