July 2013

It has become an accepted motif of the day, perhaps even a cliché, that data about our lives are captured and harvested in multifarious ways. The rise of powerful new media infrastructures has made this escalation of data harvesting possible. These infrastructures have become the backdrop to everyday life,...

Juliana Hatfield. Photograph by Christian Kock From The New Inquiry: In the fall of 1991, a 24-year-old Juliana Hatfield had just broken up her college band, Blake Babies, a mainstay of Boston’s fertile indie rock scene, and finished recording her solo debut, Hey Babe, now many years out of...

We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees...

Keeping tabs on the so-called Bárcenas affair, Spain’s ongoing corruption scandal, has been a bit like watching the slow-motion replay of a calamity. We already knew what happened, more or less: the country’s real estate bubble was produced through a toxic combination of the large-scale reclassification of “rural” land...

Erik Stinson by Elias Tezapsidis Erik Stinson is a writer of short fiction and poetry, an essayist, web artist and associate copywriter. His most collection of stories, Tropic Midtown, came out on the 18th of April and is available here. The line of Stinson’s creative products are superblurry anyway...

Years ago, reviewing Dambudzo Marechera’s collection of stories and poems, The House of Hunger, I called him the Zimbabwean Keats. I don’t want to recant the estimation of the power of his work such a moniker implies, but it should be said that Marechera was no slight, mild-mannered, generous...

Aphoristic Twitter seems an appropriate medium for what Montaigne called the ‘essai’ - literally, ‘the try-out’ - the ancestor of today’s personal essay. We tweet ideas about philosophy and politics alongside thoughts about what we had for breakfast. Something about Twitter is ‘tentative’ - linking the English sense of...