Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
Moral belief as aesthetic stance
Susan Sontag believed that intellectuals should, must, take political stands. She was active in the movement against the Vietnam War. She tried, with passion and…
The Gift
Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (13 June 1874 - 18 February 1938) Jorge Luis Borges, August 9, 1960: The sounds of the plaza fall behind, and I…
Fringe Feminists
Creem Magazine, February 1976: Patti's heroes may be gone, but she is both with us and for us, so strongly that her music is something,…
Inquiring Minds
Inspired by Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, J. Bernstein asks as series of profound, some might say cosmic questions. To which R. Rosenfelt + M. Borkowski…
Therapy and the idea of the love cure...
...courtesy of a 1972 NYRB article by Ellen Willis that I've just read, called "The Fantasy of the Perfect Lover" (subscribers only, unfortunately). Ultimately Willis…
TNI Hosts: Conservative Thought Salon
Edmund Burke, “The Father of Modern Conservatism” On Saturday, (update: March 6th at 7pm), TNI will host a Conservative Thought Salon dedicated to exploring the conservative…
Freedom?
And his favorite word, his ultimate emotional eloquence, the great bell with which he summoned others to the loftiest feasts of the soul—it lured many…
Rhetoric and Tone: A Debate
Step inside the inboxes of two TNI editors as we debate the niceties of intellectual rhetoric… Once upon a time, Rachel wrote a post on TNI about George…
gifts
When Vietnamese refugees settled in Southern California they found its culture toxic to something they had always taken for granted, their family life. It’s a…
The Text of Revolutions
graemebooks: Hannah Arendt on a German commemorative stamp from 2006. “In recent times, when revolution has become one of the most common occurrences in the…
The Art Of Fiction: On Writing And Revenge
mkarmstr: [Thomas LeClair] Have you spent a good part of your writing life getting even? [William Gass] Yes… yes. Getting even is one great reason for writing.…
Coming & Crying
An interesting project to be aware of: Coming & Crying. Coming & Crying is an effort by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell to publish…
Kafka in Translation
A Message from the Emperor trans. Donna Freed An Imperial Message trans. Willa and Edwin Muir The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death…
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION by Charlie Kaufman (From the Being John Malkovich script book.) They asked me to write an introduction to this screenplay. I told them I…
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library—where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative…
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