Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
Assorted Thoughts on Social Mobility
Economic mobility is a different thing from social mobility, as any number of nouveau-riche tales of ostracized woe can testify to. Measuring whether one goes from one arbitrarily determined income bracket to another doesn’t tell us much about experiential changes; it doesn’t tell us whether one’s social circuit had changed, whether one’s children now go
Return of The Managerial Demiurge
It sort of veers in a different direction by the end, but Žižek’s new LRB essay is actually a pretty lucid explanation of the terminology from autonomist Marxism, sewing the jargon together in a cohesive whole.
Wages Versus Progress
In what is ostensibly a news article on the Wall Street Journal front page today (“Revitalized Detroit Makes Bold Bets on New Models”) this sentence jumped out at me as being a clear example of ideology in action:
Now Playing
January 21, 2012: Snow Day "Team The Best Team" Doomtree "Colorless Sky" Desire "Swerve..." Shabazz Palaces "Cop Killer" John Maus "Bill Hickman at Home" Bad…
"The actors remain actors"
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to shoot a sitcom. There’s the traditional multi-camera style of “I Love Lucy,” “The Cosby Show” and “Seinfeld” —…
The Future Is Female
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, women are nowhere and everywhere
Reanimation Library at MoMA
The New Inquiry is proud to announce that Reanimation Library, the project of our contributor and friend Andrew Beccone, will be temporarily relocated to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the Print/Out exhibition, part of Print Studio from January 23 until March 9.
Accounting for Beauty
Erotic capital doesn’t set us free. It yokes women’s careers to the whims of men
Un(der)known Writers: Martin Luther King Jr.
"While he was peacefully snoring up on the mountain, a great revolution was taking place in the world - indeed, a revolution which would, at points, change the course of history. And Rip Van Winkle knew nothing about it; he was asleep."
Scoreboard Jesus
Can Tim Tebow, the latest American exemplar of “muscular Christianity,” get a witness?
Not Great Men
Georges Simenon’s The President shows how history swallows its agents.
Cruise Control
Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.
Do Nothing, Be Nothing
Violence, idleness, and nihilism in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Un(der)known Writers: Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan was born Helen Woods in Cannes, France. She perceived herself as deeply unloved.
No Resolutions
Lauren Berlant wants you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Cruel Optimism at the beginning of the end.
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