Salon.com > The New Inquiry

Salon.com > The New Inquiry http://www.salon.com Thu, 23 May 2013 01:58:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 When the Internet was for strangers http://www.salon.com/2013/02/17/when_the_internet_was_for_strangers_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/17/when_the_internet_was_for_strangers_partner/#comments Sun, 17 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13202897

The New Inquiry

The Internet of 2006 was not much different than it is today, mainly less: a bit slower, sparser, less open for business, like your hometown before the strip mall got put in. It was on this Internet that I met my best friend, Austin (not his real name). I was taking some time off from college in Portland, Oregon and had become an active member of a Portland-based online DIY community called Urban Honking. Urban Honking featured a stable of blogs about studiedly eclectic subjects like rap music, vegan cooking, and science fiction, but I spent most of my time on the message board, where a few dozen mostly twenty-somethings traded music recommendations and outlandish project ideas. At the time I was making stupid comedy videos and I’d share them with Urban Honking as I finished them. Austin was also an active Urban Honking poster, and a few months after I joined he sent me an email from his Yahoo! Mail account.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/17/when_the_internet_was_for_strangers_partner/feed/ 7 What does OKCupid want? http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/single_servings_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/single_servings_partner/#comments Sat, 16 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13203134

The New Inquiry

You don’t have to look very hard for the determinism in Dan Slater’s Love in the Time of Algorithms. It’s right in the subtitle: “What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.” This follows in the tech-pundit tradition of book titles like Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators and Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, titles which grant anthropomorphic agency to technology, taking us all off the hook for what it has “made” happen. Readers of these books are absolved of having to do anything in particular to address the way technology is developing; they let us kick back and fantasize about how much our lives are going to change while we make no effort to change much of anything. They let us have our status quo and eat it too.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/single_servings_partner/feed/ 1 A fresh view of George Orwell http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/lets_take_another_look_at_george_orwell_shall_we_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/lets_take_another_look_at_george_orwell_shall_we_partner/#comments Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13195805

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

It’s hardly as though his profile needed a boost, but what the hell. George Orwell’s publisher Penguin recently declared the inaugural “George Orwell Day” on January 21, the anniversary of his death. Organized in conjunction with the Media Standards Trust, a London-based NGO which runs the prestigious Orwell Prize for political journalism, the commemoration would be an opportunity to reflect on the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most influential political writers. And, of course, to buy his books: To mark the happy, possibly superfluous occasion, Penguin has reissued several of Orwell’s political works, with attractive new jackets designed by David Pearson. Orwell’s 1945 essay Politics and the English Language is perhaps the least known of the five reissues (the others are the novels and 1984, and the memoirs Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in Paris and London). It is, however, arguably the most significant from the point of view of the work of the Media Standards Trust, and its publication as a discrete volume — at 26 pages it is more a pamphlet than a book, but it does have its own ISBN number — does full justice to its importance as Orwell’s major statement on literary style in political writing.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/10/lets_take_another_look_at_george_orwell_shall_we_partner/feed/ 10 The baker’s lament http://www.salon.com/2013/02/05/the_bakers_lament_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/05/the_bakers_lament_partner/#comments Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:32:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13191326 I used to be a pastry chef. It didn’t last—doing what you love for money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, folks!—but it was an intensely gratifying experience. My very first gig was at a vegan restaurant more than an hour by subway away from my apartment, but I thought nothing of hopping on the train after my magazine job finished for the day, arriving at the restaurant, baking until near-dawn, getting an hour of sleep on the ride home, showering, and going back to my magazine job. I did this two or three times a week for months, and despite my cross-eyed fatigue, I loved the process. I loved—and still love—watching the magic of chemistry and labor. Chemistry: the rising of cake, the shortening of crusts; labor, measuring, the mixing, the juggling of pans, the exquisite feeling of slicing a pear just so and swirling the slices atop a tart. People always said to me, “Oh, I couldn’t be a pastry chef—I’d gain so much weight”; the truth is, professionals rarely eat what they create. That’s not where the pleasure is, even for a sweets lover like me. The joy lies in the creation.

The New Inquiry

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/05/the_bakers_lament_partner/feed/ 2 Spain dances with chaos http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/spain_dances_with_chaos/ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/spain_dances_with_chaos/#comments Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13106211

The New Inquiry

Among the global superbrands radiating out from Madrid’s famous Puerta del Sol, the real growth industry is also Spanish history’s cornerstone commodity: gold. There are about 15-20 guys, none of them white, wearing sleeveless yellow fluorescent waistcoasts over their winter sweaters, plastered all over with the all-caps legend COMPRO ORO. I buy gold. Five hundred years after Spain subjugated large portions of the world and built its palaces on plundered gold and silver (by the 16th century, the equivalent of US $1.5 trillion’s worth), selling the family jewels has become a grim zeitgeist boom economy through bitter necessity.pictures by author

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/spain_dances_with_chaos/feed/ 24 What makes a meme http://www.salon.com/2012/10/28/what_makes_a_meme/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/28/what_makes_a_meme/#comments Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13054427 Biden-laughs and Ryan-abs, Big Birds and binders and bayonets: There is something fascinating when an event as stodgily ceremonial as the presidential campaign is run through the lulz-filter of social media, secreting a hallucination of phrases and images and videos and, of course, gifs. An army is at the ready to spin off a gag at every turn, to propagate the joke to maximum scope; digital arpeggiations of candidate goofs and campaign blunders are transmitted from host to host through a mere caress of the touch-sensitive screen. Watching debates with that second screen of fast-moving social media streams and text-input boxes begging our thoughts has positioned many of us as hunters for the most shareable, memeiest content, ready to pounce at something, anything, and in the process, changing the overall narrative of an event. We’ve developed a kind of meme literacy, a habit of intuiting in real time the potential virality of a speech act — to hear retweets inside words.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/10/28/what_makes_a_meme/feed/ 3 Frank Ocean’s sexuality is beside the point http://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/frank_oceans_sexuality_is_beside_the_point/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/frank_oceans_sexuality_is_beside_the_point/#comments Tue, 23 Oct 2012 23:21:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13050160

The New Inquiry

Nineteen-year-old Christopher Breaux fell hard for another straight-acting boy who wouldn’t love him back, confessing his love in a car parked in front of the girlfriend’s house. Like many a millennial, he took to Tumblr to share his feelings about a love he described, with portentous adolescent drama, as “malignant.” But the queerest song released so far by the artist now known at Frank Ocean hasn’t been an ode to boy-on-boy love and lust but a corrosive satire of “traditional” American marriage in the era of Kim Kardashian and Newt Gingrich. If hip-hop is the CNN of the ghetto, then “American Wedding” aims to be its TMZ as well, replete with celebrities and courtroom hijinks, muscle motors, and divorce settlements, with Ocean ruefully rubbernecking at all the car crashes en route to the good life.

“American Wedding” has attracted the proprietary attentions of paleo-rockers the Eagles, whose radio staple “Hotel California” the track is based on. But the real story here isn’t about the sampling wars. It’s about a scapegoat generation struggling to find a path through the crumbling infrastructure of the American dream.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/frank_oceans_sexuality_is_beside_the_point/feed/ 4 Literary realism is dead http://www.salon.com/2012/10/20/literary_realism_is_dead/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/20/literary_realism_is_dead/#comments Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13046555 We’ve waited seven years for Zadie Smith’s NW, the same number of years it took Joseph O’Neill to write Netherland and for Tom McCarthy to place Remainder with a mainstream publisher. It’s been four years since Smith pitted these two books against each other in her much ballyhooed (and occasionally derided) New York Review of Books essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” where she put all her bets for the novel’s future on the darkest horse in the race, the anti-lyrical avant-garde.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/10/20/literary_realism_is_dead/feed/ 18 Burning Man is grey http://www.salon.com/2012/10/14/burning_man_on_its_last_legs/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/14/burning_man_on_its_last_legs/#comments Sun, 14 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13039642 On the dry lake bed in Nevada where the Burning Man festival is held every year, white-out conditions turn tunnel vision into a torus, wrapping the observable world around you in a tight feedback loop. The world is the color of a dead television channel if you are the electron, caught glowing somewhere between the gun and the glass. You are climbing a ladder in the wind, and you suddenly cannot see the ground. The fusion heat of the sun is stolen, diffused into the air around you, and replaced in the sky by a simple white disc, a blank sky sigil of NASA-ready interplanetary ruin porn. And then your vision suddenly sharpens again as you cut your leg open on exposed rebar, and you’ve never seen anything quite as clearly as your bright red blood mixing with alkaline dust in the dry, widened channels between your brittle receding skin cells.

So what is Burning Man like? It’s not special. It’s simply what happens when gearhead artists, new agers, and frat types get together to build resilience tech in the desert together. Badly. It is easy enough to describe in principle, but harder in practice.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/10/14/burning_man_on_its_last_legs/feed/ 44 Rise of the celebrity economist http://www.salon.com/2012/10/07/rise_of_the_celebrity_economist/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/07/rise_of_the_celebrity_economist/#comments Sun, 07 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13031496 A year after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Paul Krugman took his fellow economists to task over a host of professional and intellectual failures. With the New York Times as his pulpit, he began his omniscient narration: “The central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess. Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong,” he wrote. “They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality… to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets… and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.”

Despite this indictment, economists have not only retained their prominence in the years since the global financial crisis; they have expanded it. Media-savvy economists have only grown in number, disseminating nuggets of user-friendly economic theory and technocratic liberalism in newspaper columns, blogs, and econo-centric podcasts. Krugman, along with Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, and Jeffrey Sachs have become household names as swaggering political pundits.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/10/07/rise_of_the_celebrity_economist/feed/ 11 “Last Resort”: “24″ in the age of Obama http://www.salon.com/2012/09/29/last_resort_24_in_the_age_of_obama/ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/29/last_resort_24_in_the_age_of_obama/#comments Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13025273 ABC’s new series "Last Resort" presents race in a fashion that is entirely bracing, especially given the other options in the faux-post-racial mediaverse that we now inhabit. The faux-po media reifies the retrograde choices that have resulted in the production of a largely monochromatic cultural landscape in the service of a putatively unthinking market that supposedly craves markedly less diversity across television, film, and fashion than was available during the 1970s. Or, to put this more directly: Our current media offerings represent a profound loss of nerve, a collective lack of daring on the part of casting directors, show-runners and magazine editors. "Last Resort’s" protagonist, Capt. Marcus Chaplin (played with characteristic intensity by Andre Braugher) might serve to upend the status quo of the faux-po mediaverse by offering a version of Black masculinity that harkens back to depictions quite common during the Carter administration, but rarely seen since.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/09/29/last_resort_24_in_the_age_of_obama/feed/ 15 Suicidal dogs and bipolar wolves http://www.salon.com/2012/09/26/suicidal_dogs_and_bipolar_wolves/ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/26/suicidal_dogs_and_bipolar_wolves/#comments Wed, 26 Sep 2012 22:56:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13022464 New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris talked with science historian Laurel Braitman about her work on animal personality and taste. Braitman is a 2012 TED fellow, finishing her PhD at M.I.T., and the author of the forthcoming book "Animal Madness."

Malcolm Harris: Anthropomorphism has become this huge sin for scientists studying non-human animals, but you haven’t been shy about using the phrase “animal personality.” Why foreground the contradiction/controversy like that? Do biologists and anthropologists need to reexamine the taboo?

Laurel Braitman: Anthropomorphism – the ascription of human characteristics to other animals – has been problematized for a long time, certainly within the behavioral sciences. I think it’s high time we do away with the taboo. Some of the people doing the most interesting work about other animal minds have already done this, because it’s limiting. It’s impossible to look at them without using a human mind. If we’re trying to understand the behavior of another animal who is in some ways very similar to us and we refuse to use our own experience as a place to come from, I think that’s actually poor science. If we’re looking at a gorilla and that gorilla is acting sad in some of the same ways that we know ourselves to act sad, then refusing to acknowledge that link makes us less apt to understand the gorilla at hand.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/09/26/suicidal_dogs_and_bipolar_wolves/feed/ 6 Will drones replace commercial air travel? http://www.salon.com/2012/09/16/will_drones_replace_commercial_air_travel/ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/16/will_drones_replace_commercial_air_travel/#comments Sun, 16 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13011543 It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three of four of us, not a word spoken.

The New Inquiry

We might be tempted to read this epigraph, taken from Don DeLillo’s short story “Hammer and Sickle,” as a testament to the sublimity of human aviation. In fact, this scene is conjured from the perspective of maximum-security prisoners who are on work detail, cleaning up the tarmac of an Air Force base while jet fighters thunder indifferently around them. Like so many of DeLillo’s descriptions of air travel, the ostensibly simple beauty of human flight just barely conceals a hideous underbelly.

Now we can imagine a similar scene wherein the aircraft themselves are “unmanned” or piloted by remote control. They might be drones. “Unmanned aerial vehicles” represent an increasingly contested nexus for public and secret discussions about airspace, privacy, police jurisdiction, and remote military targets. And they’re bleeding into everyday life.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/09/16/will_drones_replace_commercial_air_travel/feed/ 12 “Breaking Bad”: White supremacist fable? http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/breaking_bad_white_supremacist_fable/ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/breaking_bad_white_supremacist_fable/#comments Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:54:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13009682 If you judged by TV and movies alone, you’d think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society’s every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don’t ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone’s Savages — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn’t the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation’s subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/breaking_bad_white_supremacist_fable/feed/ 38 When I tried policing the NYPD http://www.salon.com/2012/08/29/policing_the_police/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/29/policing_the_police/#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2012 18:11:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12995976 I will always remember the first time a cop lied to me. Or rather, the first time that I knew beyond a doubt that a cop was lying to me, sitting right there in the interview room with a tape recorder in front of him.

It was early in my tenure as an investigator at the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the city agency established in 1993 to investigate allegations of misconduct against NYPD officers. The case was a fairly straightforward stop-and-frisk incident near the massive New York City Housing Authority complexes along Avenue D in Manhattan. The complainant, a man in his early 20s, alleged that a plainclothes cop had stopped, frisked, and searched him after he stepped out of a bodega. He’d given a guy a cigarette, and before he knew it, the cop came up from behind him, grabbed him by the coat, and after a quick scuffle, pushed him against a wall.

I’d already interviewed the cop’s unusually forthcoming partner, whose testimony matched the complainant’s. That’s how I knew the cop was making stuff up. Lots of stuff.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/08/29/policing_the_police/feed/ 1 Riding in elevators with Helen Gurley Brown http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/helen_gurley_brown_2_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/helen_gurley_brown_2_salpart/#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:22:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12981295 Six years ago, I was waiting for an elevator when Helen Gurley Brown walked up next to me. This wasn’t terribly unusual; I worked for an offshoot of Cosmopolitan at the time, and our offices were housed in the same building. What was unusual was that she was alone, and that I was dressed well.

I’d only begun dressing well a few months prior to our elevator run-in; depression had kept me in baggy hoodies and ill-fitting jeans between the ages of 24 and 29. As my 30th birthday neared, I realized I was hitting the age where I just might be putting patterns into place that would stick with me forever. I broke up with my boyfriend, chopped my sloppy bob in favor of a pixie cut, lost 30 pounds—and much to my surprise, found that sometimes I enjoyed being looked at. On this particular morning, I was wearing my favorite of my array of dresses and had matched it with heels that, for me, were wildly impractical. Perhaps most importantly, I’d just had the pleasure of a certain variety of overnight guest, so my bronzer wasn’t the only thing lending me a glow.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/helen_gurley_brown_2_salpart/feed/ 5 Stars earn stripes, dupe audience http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/army_realness_from_nato_to_nbc_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/army_realness_from_nato_to_nbc_salpart/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:25:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12973946 Stars Earn Stripes is a freshly pressed NBC reality television series which debuts its two-hour premiere on August 13, or 'Monday after the Olympics at 8/7c!' as its promotional spots blared all throughout the station’s Olympic Games coverage. The emphatic promise of militarytainment—a real NATO ex-general, real ex-Navy SEALS, real ex-Delta Force commanders, real ex-Green Berets, real celebrities, etc.—outranks previous shows of its ilk. It also makes the Pentagon Channel look like the army version of the perpetuated congressional yawn that is C-SPAN.

Here is the show's self-description:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/army_realness_from_nato_to_nbc_salpart/feed/ 12 Punk’s cultural revolution http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/punks_cultural_revolution/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/punks_cultural_revolution/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910549 Russia Today, the politsiya and Western punks alike all want to know: Who is Pussy Riot, when is their next gig, and where can I get their album? Despite having no releases or merchandise for sale, no tour dates, no Myspace or even recorded music, the band of masked women who perform only aggressive guerrilla shows has achieved a level of punk legitimacy not reached since the era when the combination of bleached hair and three chords was on its own automatically scandalous.

The days of the Fraternal Order of Police suing the Crucifucks, Tipper Gore taking on the Dead Kennedys, and black metal goblins burning churches are long past. Punk is now no more a social threat than some leftist fringe group selling poorly designed newspapers. And yet, with three of its alleged members now imprisoned and facing seven-year jail sentences, the pastel-balaclava-wearing, sloppy-guitar-playing riot grrrls have become an icon of a brewing cultural revolution in Russia.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/punks_cultural_revolution/feed/ 13 Lessons from Israel’s Occupy http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/lessons_from_israels_occupy/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/lessons_from_israels_occupy/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:54:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12721861 Last fall, a series of articles in outlets ranging from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to Time and the New Republic examined the exploding Occupy Wall Street movement in light of what the authors recognized as similar phenomena in Israel. The New York-Israel connection seemed obvious, and Haaretz even ran a piece on “The Israeli ex-settler at the center of Occupy Wall Street,” which described the role of Kobi Skolnick, who grew up on the national-religious settlement of Itamar, just five kilometers southeast of Nablus in the West Bank of Palestine. Once arrested in a right-wing protest against the Oslo Accords, Skolnick was now a tattooed, self-described “man of peace” — and an Occupy Wall Street activist in New York.

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