The New Inquiry

“Though it is the subtext of savagery that animates narratives around witches, white women who take up the mantle of witch magic rarely understand themselves to be engaging in Indian or savage play.”

For the love of Mariah Carey.

An expose on the Maine Department of Correction Industries woodshop and other prison-based businesses like it, which frame their exploitive inmate manufacturing programs as rehabilitative when in reality they’re more like state-sanctioned slavery.

Moira Wegel on FitBit activity trackers and the nature of confession.

“Loving a crazy person forces you beyond all conventional measurements of worth or meaning.”

As American audiences tire of big budget spectacle, Hollywood has begun to tailor its blockbusters for the ever-expanding Chinese market.

Inside the business of corpse-repatriation insurance:

It is said, by people who would know, that at its peak, Colombia’s infamous Medellín drug cartel was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands to wrap around bricks of cash. The arithmetic of human excess begins to acquire mythic status when money becomes nearly impossible to count and we are left to communicate chiefly through estimates and legends, like the one in which Pablo Escobar set fire to $2 million in cash to create a fire for his daughter when they were on the run and she got cold. During Colombia’s dark and bloody 1980s, the cartels’ pecuniary abundance was not only the stuff of legendary proportion. Death, too, became grimly innumerable—and at the intersection of cartel, guerrilla, and paramilitary violence was the question of how to respond to the ubiquity of death.

A book review that imagines the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a dystopian novel:

The author (or authors) writes under the ungainly nom de plume of The American Psychiatric Association—although a list of enjoyably silly pseudonyms is provided inside (including Maritza Rubio-Stipec, Dan Blazer, and the superbly alliterative Susan Swedo). The thing itself is on the cumbersome side. Over two inches thick and with a thousand pages, it’s unlikely to find its way to many beaches. Not that this should deter anyone; within is a brilliantly realized satire, at turns luridly absurd, chillingly perceptive, and profoundly disturbing.

On the authenticity of online friendships:

“When someone asks me how I know someone and I say ‘the Internet,’ there is often a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d met through a benign but vaguely kinky hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The first generation of digital natives are coming of age, but two strangers meeting online is still suspicious (with the exception of dating sites, whose bare utility has blunted most stigma). What’s more, online venues that encourage strangers to form lasting friendships are dying out. Forums and emailing are being replaced by Facebook, which was built on the premise that people would rather carefully populate their online life with just a handful of ‘real’ friends and shut out all the trolls, stalkers, and scammers. Now that distrust of online strangers is embedded in the code of our most popular social network, it is becoming increasingly unlikely for people to interact with anyone online they don’t already know.”

What it’s like for a teenager to try to emancipate herself:

“Child Protective Services is meant to protect children from abusive homes and provide safe alternatives with consistent monitoring but often the system fails children. I only knew that the institution was a machine, one capable of destroying lives and spirits in its rigid methodology. And I felt it had failed me. I resolved to do anything to avoid it. And after years of living under the spotlight of the Child Welfare System, I wanted to be free.

“My chance came in the form of two law students. After an intense impromptu conversation on a park bench, they scribbled down a number for their professor and urged me to give him a call. When I did, he told me the person who could help me was Bob Schwartz.”