User:Rfcooke/The New Inquiry

The New Inquiry (TNI) is a space for discussion that aspires to enrich cultural and public life by putting all available resources—both digital and material—toward the promotion and exploration of ideas.

Editors and founding members of TNI host both formal and casual salons periodically in New York City, fostering the development of ideas in private, extra-market domestic settings. The public face of TNI is a [www.thenewinquiry.com website] that functions as a group-blog, online journal and scrapbook open to active TNI members and the larger public through a submission process.

History
The New Inquiry was founded by Rachel Rosenfelt, Mary Borkowski and Jennifer Bernstein in December of 2008 as a roaming salon in New York City, dedicated to community building between artists and intellectuals outside of institutional affiliations, professionalism or political affiliation as a response to the unique historical moment of young creatives grappling with the 2008 economic crisis. TNI's mission statement claims, "Thinkers and writers of our generation face an unprecedented set of cultural realities. The growing supply of career academics has flooded the university job market, and 21st century technologies have thrown traditional media into crisis. Although the future of higher education and print remains obscure, these cultural sea changes have yielded one definite side effect: an abundance of young writers and thinkers resolved to pursue a public intellectual life for its own sake—a pursuit ordered and enabled by Internet technology."

Taking their cue critic Scott McLemee's 2007 article in Bookforum, "After the Last Intellectuals," TNI participants and contributors are dedicated to creating "a space for discussion might appear in which it would be possible to move in more than one dimension" with a variety of projects and initiatives furthering a new cultural order in the age of new media.

Rachel Rosenfelt, Rob Horning and Sarah Leonard comprise TNI's current editorial board.

Salon and Symposium
In an effort to continue the tradition of intellectual life in the private sphere, TNI editors conduct informal discussions on various subjects of wide interest. The salons are open to the public, with attendance capped at 20. Attendees are self-selecting, and tend to be passionate, erudite, and engaged. At the announcement of the topic of the forthcoming salon, editors distribute a thoughtfully curated reading list to TNI's community members and targeted area-experts, who have one month to read and think about the selections. The readings are accessible and diverse to ensure that all participants have an entry point into the conversation. Previous salon topics have included Rebellion (with Albert Camus’ The Rebel) and Anarchy (with “The Use Value of D.A.F. Sade” by Georges Bataille, “What is Authority?” by Mikhail Bakunin, 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “On the Origin of Inequality” and the “Social Contract”). On March 6, 2010, we held our most recent salon on Conservative Thought, which was the impetus for the first issue of TNI's premier topic-based publication, The New Inquiry Symposium, scheduled to be released the fall of 2010. The choice of topic was motivated by what we felt to be an endemic lack of curiosity in higher education and many urban centers, where even the most open-minded groups consider the notion of “conservative thought” a contradiction in terms.