Ill-Starred Lives
Elephants Castor and Pollux went from marquee attractions to menu items during the seige of Paris in 1870.
Vagina Analogues
The revolution in female sexuality made possible by vibrators finds its sinister counterpart in the revolution in warfare made possible by unmanned aircraft
Nobody Knows You're a Drone
For a citizenry subjected to technologically enhanced surveilance, watching the watchers will prove a veritable game of drones
Border Control
For artist and director Alex Rivera, drones are the medium and the message
Search for a Method
Hard numbers meet soft power when it comes to tallying Pakistani drone-strike deaths
Enigma Deviations
Codebreaker and pioneering computer scientist Alan turing’s life and death illustrate how spies often feel the need to encrypt their personal lives
Agents Without Agency
The spylike pursuit of information rather than knowledge makes us function less as thinkers than processors, personal computers — and inefficient, low-powered ones at that. We are not the subjects who know things or intentionally produce knowledge; we are instead means of circulation — objects through which information passes with more or less noise in
Our Man in Great Neck
An American grandparent recalls infiltrating the Soviet Union disguised as an ordinary tourist from Long Island.
The Secret Shopper
“Inattentive,” “rude,” and “dumb” service workers damage the value of their bosses’ product in subtle acts of psycho-social sabotage so pervasive that an entire industry of mystery shoppers has sprung up to combat it
Everybody Have Fun Tonight
LMFAO’s music provides an endless party with no real cause for celebration, turning fun into a forced march through the hyperreal
Model Behavior
[r]Image by imp kerr[/r] Gender determines the shape of our fantasies. Good little boys are supposed to dream about changing the world, but good little girls are…
Desiring Machines
The various tendencies subsumed under the New Aesthetic label point to a future in which the objects of our affection develop affection for us
Belles Lettres
The extent to which the looks of women writers figures in appraisals of their skill indicates how thoroughly gendered the notion of “genius” remains
Graphic Interface
New Inquiry editor Samantha Hinds sat down with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff in the green room of Engadget TV for a discussion that ranged from Occupy Wall Street to his new graphic novel, A.D.D., about a team of speed-addled young gamers.
Anatomy of a Dissection
A few months ago, I dissected a squid. The squid was unsurprisingly strange: all tentacles and ooze and sets of sharp hidden teeth. But the dissection was strange, too.
Collateral Damage
Former Los Angeles Times book critic Susan Salter Reynolds and writer and editor Willie Osterweil talk about what it means to be a working writer in a precarious economy and how it has changed the nature of written culture and book reviewing.