This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
Posts Tagged: The New Inquiry
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
For The New Inquiry, Nehal El-Hadi questions whether we will ever see technology that opens up the preservation of black life rather than simply documenting black death. Mina Hamedi chases the Northern Lights over at Arcturus. Here at the Rumpus, Celeste Mohammed explores her conflicted feelings toward a white artist painting black Caribbean farmers.
...moreThis Week In Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...more
The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
The individuality of body horror is its signature attribute. Nothing is more intimate than one’s own body, and by extension, one’s own physical suffering.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreDeclared Fit
My affective response is not appropriate to the questionnaire. I drop tears on it. My face is hot and red above it. My body is full of the wrong kind of information. Not data. Not paper print out. The typed questions before me should not elicit this much sadness. For The New Inquiry, Katie Lew […]
...moreThe Story of A New Name
Earlier this week, Aaron Brady wrote presciently in his column for The New Inquiry about the ethical implications of revealing Elena Ferrante’s identity. He pointed out that in searching for her “real” identity, reporters were forgetting that one of the greatest things about Elena Ferrante is her fictions, and that at the heart of it, they are still […]
...moreShhhh…
In a world of noise, let the message of Teju Cole’s surreal short story over at The New Inquiry speak for itself: “But it is so weak!” the people shouted. “It is not beautiful, or intelligent, or brave, or well-dressed, or charming, or gifted in oratory. How can it grow in strength and influence so?” And if […]
...moreHope Floats
For The New Inquiry, Autumn Whitefield-Madrano does a close read of hope—what it is, what it isn’t, and the furtive, metered ways that women and cosmetics companies partake in it: I long to see a greater embrace of hope. Not necessarily the creams and potions and, yes, the jars; those are incidental to the essence of […]
...moreDrawing a Line
Because borders are so weird, words proliferate. Along with arbitrary, nonsensical violence—and strange, unpredictable exceptions—people talk a lot and lots of papers get filed, even as all of it is, in practice, evacuated of meaning. For The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady thinks through the poetics and the “Kafka-esque” violence of borders. His thoughts culminate in […]
...moreHarvesting Our Desires
What can the medium of the video game tell us about our collective desires as a society? According to Alfie Brown’s essay for The New Inquiry, a lot actually. The author details how our fascinations with apocalypse gaming and pastoral farming simulations reflect two distinct responses to the hopelessness of capitalism: Their picture of a […]
...morePlease Sir, I Want Some More
At The New Inquiry, Christine Baumgarthuber sketches the elitist history of food writing over the centuries before praising digital media’s impact on food culture: In a food blog—or any blog, for that matter—the global nature of the Internet pervades and informs the local act of writing. This engenders new territories of knowledge. The fluid nature […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on her new book The Cosmopolites, the citizenship market, nearly getting deported in the Comoros, and learning to show up and wait.
...moreOrphans in Literature
At The New Inquiry, Alison Kinney examines the use of orphanhood in literature and what attracts readers to this narrative. She goes on to discuss the similarities and differences between orphans represented in literature, like Jane Eyre, and orphans in our real world: Fairy tales of stolen infants resonate with those of us who come from […]
...moreAfrican/American
Although all-things “African” had been exalted in my house, this was not the case for project kids at P.S. 40, nor the “best of the brightest” at P.S/I.S. 308. It was at those places where I learned that there was a world’s difference between how we’re raised, and how we grow up. Yahdon Israel writes […]
...moreUnmaking the Sex Myth
At The New Inquiry, a take on Rachel Hills’s new book The Sex Myth, which explores anew the position of sex in our culture and in our personal identities.
...moreFan Fiction, Feedback Loops, and Literary Leakage
The New Inquiry has a smart analysis of fan fiction that examines its workings as a literary genre and as a form of reorienting, affecting, and queering a text: It announces a relationship to a source text that is infatuated, made dizzy, and vulnerable to betrayal. From this vulnerability, fanfiction seizes the objects of its affections and […]
...moreA New Tool Based On Old Racialism
While concerns over the accuracy and invasiveness of the technology are important, the primary fear I have is that the technology available today masks a form of gender and racial stereotyping with the scientific authority of genetics. Heather Dewey-Hagborg considers the implications of a new law enforcement tool called “Forensic DNA Phenotyping” in an essay over […]
...moreWho Digitizes the Books?
Of course books don’t digitize themselves. Human hands have to individually scan the books, to open the covers and flip the pages. But when Google promotes its project—a database of “millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide”—they put the technology, the search function and the expansive virtual library in the forefront. The laborers are […]
...moreSteady Dissonance
Teju Cole’s got a penchant for prose that lingers; over at The New Inquiry, he delivers once again: When I have a nap or something, J.D. said, and I fall asleep (these words in English, all of a sudden, and not in French; but only these words), at that moment, in a sort of half […]
...morePart of the Journey
The New Inquiry interviewed Okwiri Oduor, winner of the Caine Prize. She says about past stories: I think they’re the kind of stories that would be published in an anthology by the UN about women’s rights or something. That’s not what I’m doing right now. I’m glad I wrote them, because they were part of […]
...morePoems from Guantanamo
In 2010, French poet Frank Smith took the transcripts of the initial combatant status review tribunals from Guantanamo and turned them into a book of poetry. The New Inquiry looks at Vanessa Place’s recent English translation of Smith’s Guantanamo.
...moreThere Are No Universal Books
There’s been much debate about the merits of trigger warnings on college campuses recently. Such suggestions drew the ire of both conservatives and liberals, with one college professor going so far as to offer a mock syllabus containing warnings on historical events. Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writing for The New Inquiry, suggests that the larger problem is with the […]
...more