Do we really know which North American cities have been most culturally relevant over the last two centuries? Over at The New Inquiry, Nick Danforth and Evan Tachovsky made an interactive map showing the frequency with which the names of American cities have been mentioned in print in the last two hundred years.
...moreFacing financial inequality and burdened with debt, millennials have discovered Marxism, writes Timothy Shenk for the Nation. And millennial writers are leveraging technology, rejecting old guard institutions, and constructing new forums for discussion: Combine all this with some fondness for navel gazing and with the fortunes of geography—politics aside, New York writers are New York […]
...moreWriting for The New Inquiry, Hannah Black explores race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and the relationship of white, black, and mixed racial identities in modern western culture. Similarly, race-authenticity does not spring up from the mere fact of certain physical features—it has to be mined from others. Mixed-race identities are fissured only in […]
...moreIt’s a trend you may never have noticed, but it exists: “women—attractive, single, childless women—have long been coupled with exotic animals. Gentle women and wild animals are linked in myth and fable, fashion photography and pornography, pulp art and fine art.” A spellbinding essay by Sasha Archibald for the New Inquiry looks at real-life woman–animal pairings and what […]
...moreMelissa Petro, whose Rumpus essay “Not Safe For Work” contributed to getting her fired from a teaching job, writes in this month’s The New Inquiry about what she calls “The Writing Cure”—how writing about traumatic or damning life events offers a cure for often denied or disassociated feelings of victimization and shame. To the writers […]
...moreWhite people clamoring to up their cred by appropriating nonwhite culture do so hoping to be rewarded for choices that are falsely seen as inherent in people of color. In an essay on cultural appropriation for the New Inquiry, Ayesha Siddiqi dissects “the awkward sexism of white supremacy” and what we really mean when we […]
...moreThree of our favorite publications—the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast, and the New Inquiry—are joining forces to create a SXSW panel. Titled “Rebooting Cultural Criticism on the Web,” the panel hopes to address questions like: “How do we make literary and cultural criticism work in new ways on the web? What have we done to […]
...moreIs it possible to write a feminist critique of birth control? Holly Grigg-Spall tries to do so in her new book Sweetening the Pill, but according to our editorial assistant Lauren O’Neal’s review in the New Inquiry, she doesn’t exactly succeed: …the book presents birth control as a simple issue. The only criterion a woman need […]
...moreAt a relatively slim 3700 words, Moira Weigel’s and Mal Ahern’s essay “Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child,” sparked by less-than-enlightened political text Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, manages a comprehensive indictment of misogyny in all the places it’s not supposed to be. Philosophers, hiring managers, radical leftists, humanities professors, boyfriends—you’re all […]
...moreThe riot grrrl movement—and other “angry young women” making music around the same time—validated and celebrated female rage. But what if you feel less rage and more “negative but ultimately weak emotions that do not lead to action” like “envy, irritation, and paranoia”? Laura Fisher tackles these “ugly feelings” in a gorgeous essay for The New […]
...moreAs Kenya’s president-elect, Uhuru Kenyatta, stands trial for crimes against humanity, Kenyan poets have come together to write poems from the perspective of some of the mysteriously missing witnesses. The results are as captivating as they are heartrending. You can read more about the project—and many of the poems themselves—at The New Inquiry. Here, as […]
...moreA fantastic essay at The New Inquiry inspects the recently deceased Chinua Achebe’s place in the Western literary canon. In an interview a few years ago, Norman Rush was talking about the ways he was influenced by African writers, and he mentioned that “No non-African could do what Achebe has done.” And I get what he was saying. But there’s […]
...moreMOOC’s are a word for forgetting that universities have never grown without being planted, for trusting that just as students can teach themselves, universities will magically grow themselves, too. In the 21st century, many universities have been changing their game and debilitating higher education by turning it into a corporate ordeal. There have been feeble […]
...moreThat the Ironman participant may be as vain or as emotionally distressed as a freely directed exerciser becomes irrelevant, because the Ironman race, like a Thanksgiving feast, takes place in the presence of many others pursuing the same extreme pleasure. It has finite, communally agreed-upon bounds. Thanksgiving lasts for only one day; an Ironman has three […]
...more“Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most […]
...more