James Wagner's "highest aspiration"
...simply compromising in order to compromise, prioritizing the continuance of the Union over everything else. “3/5ths” didn’t mean anything, and no one pretended it did. The only important thing was...
Hearing Like an LRAD: When Violence is Speech and Speech is Violence
...LRAD" is that this narrative (which is already always tenuous anyway) completely comes apart, becomes completely unsustainable. It is simply about power. Communicati0n is a means of making you obey...
The Jimmy McNulty Gambit: Mike Daisey and the Thickening Crust of Our Awareness
...to take a massively complicated political-economic-military problem and reduce it to the narrative of a great white savior. See, for example, Greg Mortensen, who is similar to both, in the...
Nice to Meat You
...archetype of creepiness. I’ve been researching the topic for years, primarily by asking people what they think of creepiness. Every definition I attempted was rejected as inadequate, and every creepy...
Fossil Fools
...the health (defined by profit) of energy companies was seen to be indicative of the health of the economy. Part of this was simply size. The production of oil made...
En passant
...in Computer Chess: Are the humans passing as machines, or the machines passing as humans? How much of emotional connection is simply the simulation of it? When machines can feel,...
All Cozy Now
...woman mentioned hearing that the explosions were simply the combustion of gas mains under Boylston Street. I thought of Lowell's now-haunting lines in “For the Union Dead,” a poem about...
On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses
...Birgeneau was so busy re-imagining the space of the university that he simply ceded campus control to the police (albeit through a chain of administrative command so murky as to...
So You Think You’ve Got Class?
Climbing the class ladder in economic irons
Novel News
...Rather than asking why the New York Times—the paper of record, a bastion of free inquiry, and champion of the fact-based community—would employ Bret Stephens, a troll whose relationship...
On the Skin of the World
...grammatical and semantic forms fail to complete, and the flow of clauses and modifiers, roiled by commas, are simply dammed up by periods. It is at these points, where the...
“The Beyblade Strategy” or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection
...fault of their own … That’s tragic. But it is not a sufficient reason to permanently change our society in ways that make it less free, sociable, and joyous.” Dropping...
A Cryptoeconomy of Affect
Can the blockchain finally solve the problem of how to sustain decentralized political momentum without resorting to centralized institutions?
Sunday Reading
...Case Against Passion Walking is Political Looking at a Foreclosure Ground Zero: Jacksonville, Florida Betty Draper Francis Needs Your… Ice Cream? A Few Notes on the Evil TV Ex-Wife Star...
A Black Jack
...like rebel Hatian slaves singing La Marseillaise, it is only possible to realize the lofty ideals of the democratic creed by creating a society free of the corrupting influences of...
We've Doubled The Content, Help Us Double The Donations
...Thousands of subscriptions, 30 magazines, and three supplements later, the New Inquiry is committed to remaining ad and paywall free. It’s a decision that maintains our editorial independence as...