The New Inquiry
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Declared 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…
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The 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…
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Hope 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…
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Drawing 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…
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Harvesting 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…
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Please 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…
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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.
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Orphans 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…
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African/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…
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Unmaking 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.
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Fan 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,…