The New Inquiry
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A 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…
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Who 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…
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Steady 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…
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Part 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…
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Poems 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.
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There 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…
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Mapping Two Centuries of Literary Cities
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…
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The Rise of a New Socialist Literary Scene
Facing 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…
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All the Shades of Black and White
Writing 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…
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Women Who Run with the Wolves (and Pandas and Gorillas and Whales)
It’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…
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Melissa Petro on The Writing Cure
Melissa 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…
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White Girls and Cultural Appropriation
White 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…