The New Inquiry

The IRL Fetish

The idea that we can no longer access unmediated “real life” is a pretense that allows us to congratulate ourselves for our disconnection.

Jun 28, 201210 min read

The New Inquiry

Onesies

Here at The New Inquiry, we worry that we haven’t published enough content on pieces of clothing that – in and of themselves – constitute outfits. That ends now.

Jun 25, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

The Zentai Project

Three students at the University of Maryland dressed in latex Zentai suits and visited the National Gallery of Art, where they posed in front of (and as) art.

Jun 24, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

Bathrobe Boy

I don’t have a novel in me, but a novel has me in it. Although I consider myself a writer, I’ve never seriously considered writing The Great American Novel. Sometime in college, I set a more modest…

Jun 25, 20126 min read

The New Inquiry

The Question of Pain

The genius and demons of Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling

Jul 5, 20128 min read

The New Inquiry

Enigma Deviations

Codebreaker and pioneering computer scientist Alan turing’s life and death illustrate how spies often feel the need to encrypt their personal lives

Jun 22, 201212 min read

The New Inquiry

"a weapon to hurl against the membrane of hermetic reality and consensual oppression"

TC: You’ve said that you were mentored by early net artists but chose not to engage in coding or the network architecture, which was part of their practice, how come? JD: I speak a little ‘MySpace …

Jun 20, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

"We stepped outside that circle for a long time, in a lot of ways. But it wasn't reality."

Think about that for a moment. Can that really be true — that the number of smokeballers blowing 95 mph and up has tripled in five years? Even other pitchers have a hard time comprehending th…

Jun 19, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

"the working classes forsook their joints of mutton"

If Victorian working-class men and women didn’t live particularly well, at least they ate and felt reasonably well. Between 1850 and 1870 deaths attributed to starvation and malnutrition accounted …

Jun 18, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

Camp Walker

Our reporter in South Korea sneaks onto the base to see what an amicable military occupation looks like.

Jul 4, 20128 min read

The New Inquiry

Yids

Jenna Brager reviews Leela Corman’s graphic novel Unterzakhn, mining tenement life and for a Jewish identity without Israel.

Jun 21, 20127 min read

The New Inquiry

The Plague Years

From Bieber videos to gang violence to blog posts, all metaphors point to virus.

Jun 17, 201215 min read

The New Inquiry

Dans le Rouge

In French, the phrase is ‘Carrément dans le rouge,’ meaning ‘squarely in debt.’ That’s why hundreds of thousands of students and union members involved in Quebec’s education…

Jun 15, 20129 min read

The New Inquiry

"writing as a father seems to license some very dodgy rhetorical moves"

If anything it was The Pregnant Widow, the successor to House of Meetings, that was greeted as a return to form, but as a reader who constitutionally enjoys Amis I found the whole enterprise baffli…

Jun 14, 20122 min read

The New Inquiry

Relatable Transitional Objects

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama establishes Alison Bechdel as the most important cartoonist working today

Jul 3, 201212 min read

The New Inquiry

Spies Mixtape

In conjunction with TNI Magazine #5, Spies, The New Inquiry A/V presents the Spies! Playlist, featuring Friends, Japandroids, The Fall, Zebra Katz and more.

Jun 14, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

Agents Without Agency

The spylike pursuit of information rather than knowledge makes us function less as thinkers than processors, personal computers — and inefficient, low-powered ones at that. We are not the subjects …

Jun 18, 201211 min read

The New Inquiry

Spook'd

The New Inquiry’s Malcolm Harris and The Los Angeles Review of Books’ Evan Kindley talked with Spook Magazine’s one-man editorial team Jason Parham about the new publication&#8217…

Jun 12, 20125 min read

The New Inquiry

Violence in ENGL 329: The 19th Century English Novel

The phantom Canadian girlfriend of the Ivies did significantly go on strike, at last, for a week, in a few departments, when bros from Connecticut found their Billy Budd lecture blocked by someone …

Jun 20, 201214 min read

The New Inquiry

Wes Anderson's Arrested Development

He has his critics, but it’s lonely not to fall in love with Wes Anderson.

Jun 11, 20129 min read

The New Inquiry

"If they find out, I’m fucked"

Production-wise, Boucher, who makes all of her own beats, is obsessed with experimental hip-hop. “I love Timbaland, Jedi Mind Tricks, Dungeon Family, Outkast, and Gatekeeper—they’re all amazing,” s…

Jun 9, 20121 min read

The New Inquiry

Our Man in Great Neck

An American grandparent recalls infiltrating the Soviet Union disguised as an ordinary tourist from Long Island.

Jun 8, 201213 min read

The New Inquiry

"we continue to refer to it as the future"

Advances in biometric identification mean that while a device that can search out an individual by his or her brainwaves is not yet on the market (at least publicly), searching out a person by face…

Jun 7, 20122 min read

The New Inquiry

We Mock What We Don't Understand

How the paranoid logic of nuclear deterrence became a laughing matter and authorized the even crazier madness of consumerism

Jun 29, 201214 min read

The New Inquiry

The Ways We Don’t Talk About Wealth

By the end of 2012, I will most likely have made just shy of a million dollars in three years. It’s not pure profit, but for a girl who felt dizzy when she first made $40,000 in a year, it’s a stag…

Jun 14, 20129 min read

The New Inquiry

An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement

Excerpts from The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement.

Jan 17, 201317 min read

The New Inquiry

The Suit

Recently I came across a twelve-part essay on fashion by a French novelist and intellectual. It was a predictably tweedy take on the act of getting dressed: dry, humorless, and smelling faintly of …

Jun 25, 20125 min read