Dans le Rouge
...Some students are beginning to reason, quite understandably, that if they're going to be arrested anyway, they may as well be a bit more ambitious. It’s just as easy, after...
Psychology's One and Only Thesis
...which are invisibly etched all the tendencies of human behavior. When it comes time for him to write a novel, imagine him holding that crystal up to one eye and...
The Other Foot
...parents. Apparently they come from money. Lots and lots of money. It doesn’t give kids a good message, you know? Who can afford a pair of designer shoes when you’re...
Namaste Inc.
...of Indian identity. To the support center’s customers, authenticity is, well, a bit too Indian. Yet too Indian is how many Indians themselves may come to feel in certain circumstances....
Beyond Avant-Garde
...bother to look at. And some commentators might be inclined to regard early adopters of social-media apps as avant-garde consumers, seizing on new possibilities for gratification, evasion, and status distinction....
Don't Stop Beliebing
...split is absolutely there in the pop avatars themselves. Bieber, effectively commanding an army of the most technologically advanced tweens in human history, sings “I will never say never/ I...
Migratory Words
...to connect with people. In Evaporating Borders, that last poem for me is basically what makes the film. Can you talk a little bit about the poem? My translator Zahra...
Race, Recognition, and Exotica
...even though I’m usually only called exotic by men, and usually when the context makes me think I’m being sexualized just the teensiest bit, there’s a part of me that...
Live Through This
...McElroy points out, “there can be as many motives for rape as there are for murder and other violent crimes ... Rape is every bit as complex.” Insisting that no...
American Sajaegi
...the efforts of passionate volunteers to improve their favorite artists’ chart position and another, different type of campaign that tends to be waged in secret by “marketing companies” working at...
Dinner with Lydia Maria Child
...Ticknor. Exercise of his “influence in the literary and fashionable world” did cause sales of her “unfortunate book” to pick up, and she found herself “a little wee bit of...
Scam or Die
The New Inquiry editors discuss last year’s so-called “Summer of Scam” and its endless aftermath
Against Students
...Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that? An earlier version of this essay was posted at the blog feministkilljoy What...
Guest Post: Gone Swimmin'—African American Women and Hair
...a portrait artist and maybe a little bit of a wannabe writer currently residing in Cleveland, Ohio. Check out her art blog at Mary-Elizabeth.net. Olympic bronze medalist Lia Neal might...
"A sort of post-colonial studies joke": Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation
...a little bit superfluous? If my primary reference point for The Stranger is already the critique that is sometimes made of this Algerian-born French writer—the “perverse arrogance” that Achebe once...
Requiem for My Potential Hotness [Guest Post]
...my crush’s girlfriend wore. I compulsively plucked my eyebrows until they were gone. But like the slim person who looks back at old photos and thinks, I can’t believe I...