Black Arts Boomerang
...can re-construe police brutality as "justifiable accidents", while community defense efforts are distortedly framed as resisting arrest and incitement to riot. Jordan’s question—how to settle scores, how to push the...
Humid, All Too Humid
...Earthquakes in Japan, Thailand, Chile, Pakistan, Haiti, etc. were the result of global warming? Only pseudoscientists have answers, which are about as compelling as religious fanaticism. And those condemned Bangladeshis,...
Everything in Its Place
...devoid of baggage, of emotional connection and sentimental attachments, a life committed entirely and passionately to purging. The high point of her existence, and anyone's, is the "tidying festival," a...
Un(der)seen Cinema: Tomato Is Another Day
...as an unparalleled bit of Dadaist pranksterdom and parody whose pun-heavy critique of Hollywood writing and directing styles, at six and a half minutes long and eighty-two years old, still...
A Sensor, Darkly
Bryant, who was named the 2015 Whistleblower of the Year by the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, is an air force veteran. His memoir originally appeared in Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, which will be published next month by Duke University Press. The essay collection was edited by Lisa Parks and
Short Circuit
...(via Boston, Chicago, and Memphis) a bit over a decade ago, but Weintraub’s cinema is an altogether more sophisticated thing visually, playing on The New Talkies tired theme of youthful...
Chubz: the Demonization of my Working Arse
...now, to a better place; blood is returning to his face, and his stoned eyes flicker with comprehension. I bite my lip, I love the sleaze. He smiles at me,...
Feinting Spells
...“magical realism” came into vogue in the late 60s and 70s, when the West’s monopoly on the literary started facing serious competition, around the time a Colombian writer named Gabriel...
Love Bites
...two, and even three, hours in the chair." "Caries of the teeth is unusually common among the insane," observes Theodore H. Kellogg in A Text-Book on Mental Diseases (1897), "and...
The Impermanence of Beauty Work
...It’s not quite flow, because I think of that as being more about being engaged in the activity itself. While I might be thinking a little bit about, say, whether...
The New Inquiry Vol. 55: Testing
...the university system as both constantly struggling and in competition with the private universities which are taken as the benchmark of academia against which all others must be evaluated. “We...
Editors' Note, Vol. 34: California
...such real-estate bait-and-switches. People elsewhere are heavily invested in how the state appears, its lucrative fantasy coming to dominate and determine conditions on the ground. But the best real estate...
Nice to Meat You
...and for a brief, uncanny moment, they were honest about it. I am not the first commentator to be drawn almost involuntarily into the territory of creepiness. Most notably,...
Uncertain augury
...bit, but feebly. The hawk sat still, looked down at the gathering crowd, who were all saying, hawk, or eagle, and all taking pictures. The hawk went back to tearing...
Dark Pages
...intended to be a bit gimmicky, it has the effect of bringing into sharp contrast the rhetorical differences between the two documents. Where the reports are clear and detailed, almost...
Lucky Number Seven
...external circumstances can more drastically affect the lives of working-class individuals. At age seven, Sue, Lynn, and Jackie giggle, squirm, and fall all over each other. They lack the composure...