The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being
A review of Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse...
A Bridge to Somewhere
From the Brooklyn Bridge to One Police Plaza and back again 3:00 pm: The crowd at Zuccotti Park, larger than any day except the one immediately preceding,...
U.S.Ai.
image by imp kerr, photos by author In America, Ai Weiwei isn't a dissident or a rebel, he's a foreign policy asset and an artist of art's...
Reform School
Capitalists will constantly seek to reshape schooling because their labor supply can always be more efficient BY the time most public commentators are old enough to publish a...
The Ektorp Sofa and the New Normal
I was about to recycle the Harry Potter-length 2011 Ikea catalog when the copy on the cover caught my eye: “Hooray for the everyday.” Next to a...
So You Want to Be a #Longreads Superstar
Hongkou Flashers Liu Dao, 2010 Turning essays into #longreads isn't just about the future viability of the form; it's changing the reasons we read and write When...
The White Market
If you judged by TV and movies alone, you'd think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society's every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents...
The Ego's Death Trip
...its passing, and they can be observed and measured. One 2014 study did exactly that. Lead investigator Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist at the Imperial College’s Centre for Neuropsychopharmacology in London,...
Black President
...Obama. Brandon Harris: I want to talk a little bit, before we jump into the various aspects of the screening you held last week, about the national mood as it...
An Interview with Michel Gondry
...A still from Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? New Inquiry film columnist Brandon Harris interviewed French director Michel Gondry about his new movie: Is The Man...
Media and Consumer Desire
...ethos” often disguises a set of sumptuary laws.) Harris quotes Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to show the elaboration of the emerging “consumer sensibility.” There is nothing in this world more delightful...
I'm Not a Philosopher (But I Play One in The Movies)
...Ratio, Brandon Harris looks at new movies featuring philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky The movies play tricks on us. Deception is the rule, suspension of disbelief the prerequisite. Whether...
Naked Criticism
...episode from The Irresponsible Magician—that you have a dream in which the actor Ed Harris plays a madcap minimalist sculptor slash magician slash respected art professor who obtained tenure by...
Can’t See the Wood for the Trees
Are trees worth more standing or chopped down as wood? From Marx’s analysis of wood theft to carbon credit programs, the value of forests as assets continues to shift.
What's the Matter Boss, We Sick?
...with the Americans? Their unreciprocated identification with the plight of the Americans, to me, resonated with Malcolm X’s description of a psychological disposition that was borne of chattel slavery. Speaking...
Tree Sitting
...argue for this proposition. Someone like Malcolm Harris is basically opposed to education, as such, exactly because the classroom represents this kind of subject-making discipline, because the classroom and the...