The New Inquiry is a cultural and literary criticism magazine, challenging the bourgeois press and its failure to reckon with reality.

The New Inquiry

We medicate based on data. Answers fed into machines that let the doctors keep us healthy. As a result, gay men from communities of colour can now see themselves represented in ads for sexual health and HIV medication. Marcos Santiago Gonsalez studies the impact of data-driven healthcare on race and personal freedom.

Rhett Samuel Price

Blue dream: sex, data & medicine

No more male-only scriptoriums! Women were at the heart of medieval intellectual life. Robert Davis, writing for Lady Science – the multifaceted collaborative writing project focused on women in science, technology, and medicine – and published in The New Inquiry, reveals the crucial role played by women in the writing and production of early Medieval manuscripts.

Andy Field

Women Scribes: The Technologists of the Middle Ages

When an undercover operative falls in love, who is to blame? Hannah Black, writing in The New Inquiry, examines the meaning of a love lived insincerely after the infamous case of policeman K.

Penny Andrews

K in Love: The romance of an undercover policeman

Acting on instinct, hunting people down, watching them live their lives like a Predator in the sky. The 2015 Whistleblower of the Year and air-force veteran Brandon Bryant remembers his time spent pulling the trigger for military drones.

A sensor, darkly: pulling the trigger for a military drone

Margrethe Bohr’s contribution to her husband’s work on quantum physics is undeniable. Megan Shields Formato, writing for Lady Science, published in The New Inquiry, illustrates the hidden female contribution to historical scientific breakthroughs. 

Melissa Moran

Crafting Quantum Theory: Margrethe Bohr and the Labor of Theoretical Physics

A pet dog seemed like an unlikely choice for Jacob Bacharach, who was never really an “animal person”. But, writing in The New Inquiry, he tells the part-hilarious, part tear-jerking story of how a beagle named Pippi became an unlikely companion in his journey of healing after the death of his younger brother. 

Ron Butler

Like a dog: our pets are like heroes who risk betrayal

How quickly can you disrupt an industry and automate your own workforce? Francis Tseng and Willie Osterweil, writing in The New Inquiry, explain the thinking behind their new dystopian Silicon Valley videogame: The Founder.

Karl Miller

The founder: how to play the dystopian Silicon Valley video game

With the advent of machine learning and image recognition software, the act of seeing is today being shared between both humans and computers. The photographer Trevor Paglen, writing in The New Inquiry wonders what happens when the images start looking at us. 

Jonathan Booth

Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)

Bridget Keown writes in The New Inquiry about how the representation of women during The First World War, as gendered bodies within a strictly controlled patriarchy, affected how their trauma was heard and respected.

Gina Mellotte

Fear, Pain, and the Representation of Women’s Wartime Trauma

From Tony Soprano to Dr. House and not to mention Sherlock Holmes, television is filled with characters who pursue their own goals at the expense of others.

Why we love sociopaths

Lorraine Boissoneault writes in The New Inquiry to explain the science of what makes pain so personal.

The Science of What Makes Pain So Personal

Can love be separated from the idea of the couple? A contemplation of the tension between selfhood and romance.

The loves of others: is romance only for couples?

Why do we expect the police to provide security?  

Alex S. Vitale, writing in The New Inquiry, looks at the often unsavoury origins of police forces, where control superseded protection.

The myth of liberal policing

Exploring how Silicon Valley's elite coopt history for their own autocratic ends.

"If Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, "could overcome being a slave for 40 years, and completely change a slave culture and defeat the French, the British, and the Spanish, and free the slaves of Haiti 65 years before they were free in the United States," writes Ben Horowitz in Culture and Revolution, "then you could change your company and make it great." John Patrick Leary, for The New Inquiry, examines.

The poverty of entrepreneurship: the Silicon Valley theory of history

There are two kinds of structural lonelinesses.

Do we only care about loneliness when it affects the privileged and powerful? Amba Azaad, for The New Inquiry, examines how differently we treat epidemics based on which sections of the population they affect.

The malignant melancholy

Must a genius always be alone? Exploring Sontag and solitude.

Emily Cooke highlights in The New Inquiry, the life of the celebrated American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag who craved the ability to work alone, but like many writers who operate in total solitude, did so at a great personal cost.

Sharon Bott

The lonely ones

"The story of rap can’t end with white people getting ahold of it." 

Bijan Stephen, writing in The New Inquiry, explores how rap has come to dominate the global music industry and what this means for the art-form and those that profit from it.

Capital Flows: the story of rap, art, and money doesn’t and can’t end with white people getting ahold of it

Buying organic food and listening to the right podcast is only part of the story. 

If class is no longer indicated by wealth but by modes of thinking, then why do the rich keep getting richer? Charlotte Shane critiques in The New Inquiry, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s book "The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class."

Diana Holguin

So you think you’ve got class?

"An unabashed exploration that steers her outlaw body.”

Raquel Gutiérrez celebrates the work of the late Laura Aguilar whose photography shone a light on marginalised Lesbian Latina communities.

"Aguilar’s artistic corpus is only now circulating in institutional ways. The Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell retrospective travelled to Miami and opened at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum six weeks before Aguilar’s death. Aguilar’s 1993 photograph ‘Will Work For,’ a self-portrait centring Aguilar holding a cardboard sign that reads 'Artist Will Work For Axcess,' in front of a building with the word GALLERY prominently displayed reminds us twenty-five years later of the cultural precariat’s means towards eking out a life. Aguilar endured as much danger alive as the opportunities her oeuvre will have in her death. Aguilar’s prescient images brought to life the crumbling edges brown artists are compelled to navigate, the terrain she moved through as her name came to national and international platforms."

Memories of a dyke bar in East LA: for Laura Aguilar

“The narrative we spin for girls is that they’re doomed to look in the mirror and not like what they see.”

But what they see is often not the reality. Autumn Whitefield-Madrano discusses in The New Inquiry her shifting perceptions of her body’s unshifting features, and shares advice from her ongoing journey towards self-acceptance.

My own private beauty myth: things I once believed to be true about my appearance

Technological innovation is not an inherent good for disabled people

Especially when the focus is on cure and not care. Taeyoon Choi, writing in The New Inquiry, looks at the nuances that should surround the development of tech for disabled people.

Artificial Advancements: the indequacies of 'accessible' tech

Social media allows the folly of childhood to remain suspended in eternity.

Kids are uploading their adolescence in real-time, and the Internet refuses to forget. Will it change the way we live as adults? Molly Knefel writing in The New Inquiry takes a look.

Molly Ward

Permanent records: our digital pasts, forever

Lizard People. Ancient Aliens. Freemasons. Who really runs the world? Conspiracists cling to the comforting notion of a world controlled by a rational agent. But Jarrod Shanahan, writing in The New Inquiry, suggests that the true ruling power is actually beyond anyone’s control. An autonomous and ever-present force: Capitalism.

Rex Anderson

I Want to Believe: who runs the world?

What if US pollster in chief, Nate Silver, had built an entirely new universe to test his election predictions? Nic Murray, writing in The New Inquiry, imagines Nate Silver’s tribulations in a world where Hillary Clinton won.

Malk Williams

The Silver Lining: Nate Silver’s tribulations in a world where Hillary Clinton won

The publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origins of Species’ in 1859 paved the way for a new understanding of human nature as constantly changing, evolving. With this idea came the hope of disrupting class, gender, and racial hierarchies: “If species and geology are not fixed, than neither are human systems of oppression.” Olivia Rosane, writing in The New Inquiry, pays tribute to May Kendall, the 19th century English poet who challenged the status quo through her remarkable poetry of Evolutionary Feminism.

Andi Arndt

Rhythms of Change: The Victorian Science Poems of May Kendall

After stealing thousands of dollars worth of cash and merchandise, Luke Martinez was offered an alternative to incarceration: home-monitoring.

Homeward bound: when the prison has no limits

A post-modern powerhouse, Foucault’s work resonated with a wide variety of readers. But some aspects of his thought are rarely discussed today. Christopher Chitty, writing in The New Inquiry, rediscovers Foucault’s late anarchic lectures and his insistence on paying attention to the voices of the oppressed. 

Foucault’s addendum: freedom and revolution

If you don’t go and see the new Star Wars film, are you even part of modern society? Rob Horning, writing in The New Inquiry in December 2017, meditates on the obligations of culture and the conscious act of conforming. 

Save the world: on the duty to see The Last Jedi

Why do we feel the need to colonize what lies beyond our pale blue planet? Space is cold and empty and won’t solve any of our problems. Sam Kriss, writing in The New Inquiry, sings the virtues of the committee to abolish outer-space. 

Nick Camm

Manifesto of the committee to abolish outer space

From 16th century Belgium to contemporary Mali, images and inanimate objects have always been the targets of religious destruction. Teju Cole considers the act of iconoclasm and the motivations behind violence against art, buildings and other inanimate icons.

Scott Ciscon

Break it down: why religious fanatics destroy objects

In the future, will we be governed by Dictators or CEOs? Willie Osterweil argues that we have reached the end of liberalism and what comes next will either be rampant ethno-nationalism or borderless corporate utopias.

Liberalism is dead: what comes next?

“Ice cream is exquisite,” observed Voltaire. “What a pity it isn’t illegal.” Christine Baumgarthuber, writing in The New Inquiry, examines the delicious histories of our favourite frozen delicacies. 

It ought to be called vice cream

In the 19th century, women may not have been as free as men to travel and explore distant lands, but they didn’t let that stop them. They could make the same journeys from the comfort of their homes. Courtney Stephens, writing in The New Inquiry, interviews Shane McCorristine on the specifics of 19th- century female clairvoyance, in light of his monograph, Spectral Geographies of Arctic Exploration, a study on supernatural narratives and arctic exploration in the Victorian era.

Collaboration

The Magnetic North: on 19th century female clairvoyants

Is the notion that a man can ruin a woman’s life with his unwanted penis a completely misogynist one? Charlotte Shane recounts her own experiences of sexual mistreatment and examines whether the establishment of the seriousness of rape has stigmatized intelligent discussion of it. 

Ashley Klanac

Live through this: on rape and victimhood

A flag is so much more than a piece of cloth. A. Maureen Tant, writing in The New Inquiry, discusses how the American flag is a weighty symbol of patriotism, behind which black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or otherwise “non-normative” Americans stand hidden, voices muffled.

Symbolic Threats: worshipping the US flag hides the violence perpetrated in its name 

Shakespeare plays are being staged in maximum-security prisoners, acted out by people incarcerated for crimes worthy of early modern tragedies. Malcolm Harris, writing in The New Inquiry, asks what is expected of prisoners during these performances and what this tells us about freedom and our attitudes towards those behind bars.  

Drama for cannibals: The bard behind bars

We are all brands when we date. Ana Cecilia Alvarez, writing in The New Inquiry, explores how dating profiles turn suspects into prospects, and prospects into buyers. 

Matchmaking: on online-dating profile strategies

When you think of violation of privacy, you think of your sexts being leaked, not your homeless shelter application being shared with the police. Sam Adler-Bell, writing in The New Inquiry, explores the often lethal implication of privacy invasion for the poor and marginalized.

Privacy for Whom? Two new books show that for the poor, privacy has never been on offer

When films use shocking scenes without advancing the plot, it’s normal to wonder why they bother.

Simon Mattacks

When Game of Thrones stopped being necessary

The digital universe has created an obsession with things that are supremely analog, like sepia tints, token typewriters and camping trips. Nathan Jurgenson, writing in The New Inquiry, argues that this fetishization of real-life is mistaken, the digital world is real-life now. 

The 'in-real-life' fetish

Carmen Petaccio, writing in The New Inquiry, wonders: what if the idea of a universal basic income was just a way for billionaires to appease the revolutionary potential of the poor? 

Universal basic bullshit

The Internet has delivered on its promise of a community for the blind. Jonathan Mosen, writing in The New Inquiry, reveals the digital world’s unseen power.

Michael Bott

Out of sight: the online blind community

At Tesla, everything feels like the future except for them. The factory workers often suffer injuries and work in unsafe conditions in order to meet demanding production quotas. Aaron Neiman, writing in The New Inquiry, studies the relationship between work and pain on Elon Musk’s technological frontier.

Aaron Landon

A pain in the back: the factory workers building Tesla's future

Is human life so awful that we should stop making more of it? Rhys Southan, writing in The New Inquiry, interrogates the antinatalist philosophy of David Benatar, who believes that humanity should stop reproducing once and for all. 

Life: Why Bother?

Theft might be wrong, but so is corporate greed. Charles Davis argues that it's okay to steal from the very rich.

Steal this article: why theft is just

What do the words “radical” and “revolutionary” really mean today? Bobby London, writing in The New Inquiry, wonders if true socio-political change is possible, or if we simply reinforce what we already know, destroying each other along the way. 