Patriots
As summer wanes, we find the globe seized by multiplying superstorms. In the ever growing man-made catastrophe of climate change, these crises unfold along strictly drawn borders. Hurricanes,...
View ArticleFan Fiction
Few creative traditions are as widely derided as fan fiction. No dismissal of Fifty Shades of Grey was complete without the comment, sneered: “You know it was originally Twilight fanfic?” Those who...
View ArticleJobs
Zadie Smith recently described a Manhattan social encounter in the New York Review of Books’s NYR Daily by pointing out that among the crowd (which included Smith in a “denim jumpsuit,” a person with...
View ArticleBad Faith
Bad faith: a magnanimous euphemism. To accuse someone of acting in bad faith is to assume that their motives are duplicitous. It avoids calling them a con artist outright. Before it was a cliché, bad...
View ArticleChemistry
Almost four years after the declaration of a crisis, Flint, Michigan, still does not have clean water. In 2014, the state of Michigan switched Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River,...
View ArticleClassics
It’s been clear to most people for some time that the world we live in is ending. This has always been true. And a microcosm of this always-unraveling apocalypse is the long comedown of August. As...
View ArticleInsiders
The New Inquiry is new again. For seven years we’ve been delivering monthly PDF issues to subscribers’ inboxes: We began with Precarity and ended with Classics, and in between there were Cops, Dicks,...
View ArticleService
A noun that becomes slippery in action, service speaks to the way our lives are verbed. Like the paradox and impossibility of giving a genuine gift that Derrida wrote of, acts of service are often...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Escape
How the hell do I get out of here? The answer is sometimes a door, sometimes a drug, sometimes a decision to blow your whole life up. Sometimes it gets dark. But that’s because the question of escape,...
View ArticleBad Vibes
“Good vibes only.” Melania could have put the phrase on a camo Zara jacket and worn it to a “Be Best” fundraiser, where “Good Vibes”—an old playlist on someone’s Spotify, copy-pasted from the Obama...
View ArticleMen
When O. J. Simpson and Tony Soprano last met up, they had a lot of masculinity to talk about. They didn’t want to talk outside. It was cold. They each got in their cars and drove around. Each other’s...
View ArticleLIES
When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the black critic Stanley Crouch said, “Beloved was a fraud. It gave a fake vision of the slave trade, it didn’t deal with the complicity...
View ArticleFrenemies
Serena and Blair are BFFs (Best Frenemies Forever). Even in the meme format, they look past each other. One version goes like this: “Help me,” says Serena, “I’m lost.” “GPS, girl,” says Blair. But GPS...
View ArticlePandemic
The universal truth of COVID-19 is that it has prompted no universal experience. Despite early-stage assurances from “global leaders” like the WHO that we were, all of us, “in this together,” the...
View ArticleAssets
The breakdown of the political economy and the means of value production have led to cultural and ideological confusion about what is valuable––and the resulting vacuum in consensus has positioned...
View Article
