Ayesha A. Siddiqi
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Articles by Ayesha A. Siddiqi
Late Empire Life Extension
The following is adapted from my book, if you’d like to read my book, stay tuned for updates here or on my social profiles (@AyeshaASiddiqi and here). For publishing inquiries please contact myself and Erik Hayne.
Making, measuring and verifying world records is no easy feat at Guinness World Records
Monsieur Mangetout — that's Mr. Eats Everything in French — is famous for eating a plane, earning the Guinness World Record for world's strangest diet. His record is one of tens of thousands on the books at Guinness World Records where, every year, applications are reviewed under a meticulous auditing system. Guinness World Records editor-in-chief Craig Glenday has met the shortest, tallest and fastest, along with the people behind jaw-dropping human feats, during his decades in the role.
Sand • Protean Magazine
The Quran says God made humans out of clay and jinn out of fire But I am sand in the machinery of the world– waiting for lightning to turn me into glass. In spite of me, perhaps to spite me the machinery churns. If I were glass I could earn a name, like Mirror. I pray for lightning. Storms hiss against my heat until I forget heat. I pace against the steel and it loses shape. One day down the gaps the grains of me fall. Before I can apologize winds carry me far.
Sustainability | Free Full-Text | Drivers, Challenges and Outcomes of Environmental Management System Implementation in Public Sector Organizations: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence
This is an early access version, the complete PDF, HTML, and XML versions will be available soon.
Review: Lamb (2021)
In American stories, the stage at which a couple has children is used as a timestamp for the decline of the relationship. To become a parent is examined, not as a state two people share, but the transformation of someone into something less desirable: a mother or father and the loss that comes with it. After kids, they say, “the spark” is gone. Pregnancy and child-rearing are portrayed as circumstances that make women sexually unavailable to their partners who go on to—apparently inevitably—cheat.
Veronica’s profile • Letterboxd
X 2022 ★★★★ funny that this is a horror film nostalgic for the genre's now pretty distant past–specifically 1974's original TEXAS CHAIN SAW and 1972's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT with a few fun nods to kubrick–that itself reaches back to ti west's earlier show of genre literacy, 2009's THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, down to the bouncy waves we first saw on jocelin donahue's doomed babysitter.
Advice: Short and Simple
I've always wanted to become a teacher (since high school), but I'm afraid of reproducing the trauma that was caused by some former teachers. I desperately do not want to lose my patience with kids/students. But I don't know if that desperation is enough to keep me present. It feels like I'm avoiding my interests or possible passions as harm reduction.
Advice: How Can I Convince My Family I Shouldn't Get Married Right Now
I live in Pakistan with my parents, I am financially independent and contribute to the family expenses. I haven’t been able to move out partly because some things did not work out and partly because I worry no one will be able to take care of my parents after me. In the past year, I have been accepted at a really nice funded program. I also have been trying really hard to make a career in screenwriting but I am always told there are no opportunities in Pakistan.
Ana Fabrega co-creator of Los Espookys
Since the series debuted in 2019, HBO’s Los Espookys has become a favorite for its stylish characters and wry humor. In the series, the titular group is contracted to help people meet life’s challenges.
Tick Tock Diets
When you have no complaint against a prevailing order, institution, or individual, you maintain your sense of safety in proximity to that order, institution, or individual, and you can feel important by legitimizing them. And isn't it nice to be needed, to have a role so essential that simultaneously requires so little? People often describe the “persecution complex” of those that defend the status quo. But it’s a preemptive identification. Most people don’t feel like victims.
Advice: "I've been told I'm awkward. How can I relax around people?"
What can I do to improve my self esteem and relax around people? I’ve realized some painful aspects of my social anxiety through a recent breakup. She knew about my social anxiety and refused to let me blame the lack of physical chemistry on that, but I know that plays a big role in it. I realized it’s difficult for me to speak with not just strangers but anyone I want to impress such as coworkers or my partners’ parents.
Memento Millenial
Ayesha: Every cultural object has a ratio of amount it should entertain vs amount it should be analyzed. I think there's a hard limit to how much Sally Rooney’s novels merit analysis. People kept trying to use her books to make some larger comment about “culture today.” Their attempts look goofy because they’re reaching so hard. However, the attempts themselves can be analyzed towards wider cultural observations. As ever I’m more interested in what the trend is informed by than the trend itself.
Cyclone Bhola: The Disaster That Re-Made South Asia — Jamhoor
The cyclone in 1970, though not always recognized, was instrumental in the independence of Bangladesh In October 2017, shortly after Hurricane Maria, considered the deadliest ever typhoon to slam the island of Puerto Rico, a video of then President Donald Trump went viral on news media.
How Do I Make Up For My Lost Years
Starting with a severe depressive episode in college, and for pretty much the next ten years after, I was in a slump barely getting through each day. I ended up dropping out of school. There were a lot of low points but eventually I started working as an illustrator. Living in a cheap city and having some savings meant I was able to get by without having to try very hard. I just turned 30.
Review: Snabba Cash
America has long been home to stories of the voraciously ambitious. The rags to riches fables occur both in our fictional narratives (Gordon Gecko) and real ones (Jordan Belfort). But as America faces the natural endpoint of its individualist avarice, the “rags to riches” stories are more often inverted, with just as few steps before a plunge into poverty. Sweden is experiencing a different arc.
76 Years Ago Today The US Became The Only Nation To Use A Nuclear Weapon
Dwight Eisenhower- “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Admiral William D. Leahy “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.
Advice: "Where do I go from here?"
I am at an end of a journey and don’t know where to go next. All my life, it has been shaped with “get an education so you don’t suffer”. I am a first generation American/student. It was always go to school, go to school, go to school, and now that I’m weeks away from getting my bachelor’s degree.... I don’t know what to do. I don’t have anything lined up and I can’t get away from the imminent fear that I have failed myself, my family, and myself again. Where do I go from here?
"Sorry for your loss"
My brother’s birthday is in a few days. He would’ve been 25. Since he died I’ve found solace in ghost stories. Not because I believe in ghosts, but because we have to believe in death. There’s no denying its rule. Every tv show or book or memoir featuring a death that I would have previously considered too sad to turn to is now a dear companion iterating the banality of bereavement. I take comfort in that. Grief just means having something in common with the rest of the world.
Advice: "How do I feel again?"
How do I learn to feel again? A decade ago I unexpectedly fell in love. A friend of a woman I occasionally went on dates with decided she wanted to go out with me instead of letting her friend not commit. So over the course of her last two weeks in the area we had a whirlwind romance. She was the only person who could ever convince me to skip work to spend more time with her. She came out as bi. Eventually, she left the US and we tried to keep it alive long distance via skype and e-mail.
13 Truths
The things that you “waste time on”…there’s a reason you’re drawn to them, explore the root of that impulse and follow where it takes you. Trying to anticipate what’s best for future you will not help you make decisions, taking care of what’s best for present you will. That’s the person whose needs you can answer. The difference between fear and intuition is that the latter is information about a situation you’re in and the former grows out of a hypothetical you’re anxious about.
Mother's Day
A post shared by Ayesha A. Siddiqi (@ayeshaasiddiqi) May 2018 My mom, the teen in this photo, would always insist on taking care of all household chores explicitly because she wanted her family, especially her daughters, to be as free as possible to work towards their own goals. When I think back to my childhood and all the times after dinner I went back to whatever I was reading instead of doing the dishes, I’m both embarrassed and grateful.
Color Wars
January 2017 In 2014 Anish Kapoor secured exclusive rights to Vantablack - the blackest black ever created, able to absorb 99.9% of all light. Kapoor's 'exclusive rights' to this hue angered fellow British artist Stuart Semple who took his revenge by banning Kapoor from PINK, which Semple claims is the pinkest pink ever created. Anyone purchasing PINK had to sign a legal declaration insisting Kapoor wouldn't have access.
Barbie's World
January 2017 I came across Barbie's vlog the other and found it riveting. The view counts rank in the millions and the messages are generally positive. She describes personal challenges from her bedroom, even offers makeup tutorials and interviews. The above is a screen grab from a video about overcoming fears to audition for the role of Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream. To people my age and older it looks like an uncanny approximation of a relatively recent trope...the YouTube video blogger.
Review: A Promising Young Woman
When so much of life is organized around dodging male violence, it’s nice to relax with a movie in which the only source of violence is a woman, and the only target is a man, or many men. It doesn’t matter what he did. He probably had it coming. Rape revenge films sometimes spare us the trauma of the assault, but they never spare us the satisfaction of seeing the assaulters sliced and ruined.
Interview: Harsha Walia on the New Pillars of Border Imperialism
If you’ve ever encountered the words “border imperialism”, it’s because of Harsha Walia, who coined the framework. Her critical analyses of modern border enforcement has transformed scholarship on the subject. During my guest editorship of High Snobiety I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her. Our conversation covered the links between abolition and the no borders movement, the way flow of capital determines flow of people, and how Covid exposed the farce of passport control.
60 Minutes reports: prescription drug price fixing
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker reports on a lawsuit (link to broadcast) against dozens of generic drug manufacturers. According to the suit, the price of hundreds of generic prescription drugs jumped in a single year—and plaintiffs say the drug makers colluded to do it. Manufacturers have denied allegations of collusion. It's not the first time 60 Minutes has reported on the exorbitant expense of prescription drugs.
How Amanda Bynes Became Her On-Screen Antagonists
A young actor’s fall from stardom to a pity inducing 20-something is often traced through clichés about substance abuse and theories on celebrity. We can’t assume insight into a person we don’t know, whose circumstances we can’t imagine. But examining Amanda Bynes’ present condition through her career reveals a strange role reversal. One in which Bynes becomes a distorted approximation of the characters she played against.
Can the White Girl Twerk?
The presumed generic whiteness of the mainstream U.S. audience means that white consumers decide not only what blackness is, but also what they want out of it There’s a famous scene in the 2004 Wayans brothers’ comedy White Chicks: The opening bars of piano introduce Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and the car full of white girls squeals in delight before launching into the cloyingly earnest lyrics. Later a black man sings the song and, that’s it, that’s the whole joke.
Our Brand Could Be Your Crisis
IT'S apt that the title of We Are Your Friends is 50 percent pronouns. Who those pronouns address is the key to why it’s so special, and why it may have bypassed the audience it should have reached. In just a few years, millennial will no longer be synonymous with twenty-something. The widely reviled 2015 movie about an EDM DJ and his friends anticipates their nostalgia.
Waifs And Wifeys | Four Pins
Menswear loves girls in menswear, rarely women; certainly never large women displaying any sign of strength. Outside of navy knit
RUPTURES: Between the City and the Art World
In partnership with TNI editors Jesse Darling and Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, with JKNET, Paul Maheke, Raju Rage, and Takeshi Shiomitsu The first installment of Ruptures is a contamination of the corporate in the form of an artist led conference in the Boardroom of the Association of British Insurers in the City of London.
Some Housekeeping
To our cherished readers and subscribers, If you currently have a subscription, you need to re-subscribe now. If you’ve never held a subscription, please consider it. TNI’s continued existence depends now more than ever on you. The New Inquiry is entirely reader supported. For us that was the only route towards editorial independence. We publish work that through its critiques (whether of Israel, big data, liberalism, or capitalism) disqualifies us from many sources of funding.
Announcing Derica Shields, Sam Lavigne, and Anwar Batte
The New Inquiry is incredibly proud to introduce our newest contributing editors Derica Shields, Sam Lavigne, and Anwar Batte. Derica Shields is a writer, editor and film curator based in London. Her research interests include black visual art, film and futurisms. She is the co-founder of The Future Weird, a film screening and discussion series where she curates experimental and speculative films by black and brown filmmakers. Sam Lavigne is an artist and programmer based in Brooklyn.
TNI Welcomes Keguro Macharia
We are so excited to introduce a the newest blogger at the New Inquiry. Keguro Macharia is a writer and professor based in Kenya. His new blog, Wiathi, is titled after the Kikuyu word for freedom/self-determination and will feature his thoughts on cultural production, Kenyan law, queer politics, and the black diaspora. His inaugural post links #kasaraniconcentrationcamp, #Gaza, and #Ferguson and asks: How do the disposable survive? and On Quitting which appeared in Vol 32: Back To School
TNI’s Co-Founder and Publisher Headed to Verso Books
We’re very excited and proud to announce that TNI’s co-founder and Publisher Rachel Rosenfelt will be joining our longtime friends and collaborators at Verso Books as Creative Director. Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world and offers a catalog we often turn to here at TNI. We look forward to Rachel’s work furthering our shared commitment to the most forward thinking writing from around the world.
Waifs And Wifeys
#Menswear loves girls in menswear, rarely women; certainly never large women displaying any sign of strength. Outside of navy knit ties and Nick Wooster’s short suits, #menswear reserves a particular taste for skinny ingénues turned languidly away from the camera in OCBDs. Often reblogged piecemeal—thigh gap legs in New Balance’s, bony shoulders holding up Bathing Ape—photos of these girls circulate with questions of appropriateness shrugged off.
We Did It! - The New Inquiry
Thank you! Because of readers like you we reached our goal in time to have it doubled by an anonymous donor. I can’t overstate the role of our supporters in ensuring the continued existence of The New Inquiry. This needed boon to our operating budget will allow us to dramatically improve the reader’s experience of TNI, with a sleeker website and the flexibility to commission more essays, features, and experimental writing. Stay tuned for all the updates these funds will allow us to make.
An Open Letter from Our EIC
Since its inception five years ago, The New Inquiry has published everything — blogs, essays, features, supplements, and magazines — for free. No paywalls, no ads, and no-string pulling benefactors. And now, we are presented with a unique opportunity that will help us continue it that way. If we can reach $25,000 in July donations, an anonymous donor has vowed to match our efforts.
We’ve Doubled The Content, Help Us Double The Donations
Thousands of subscriptions, 30 magazines, and three supplements later The New Inquiry is committed to remaining ad and paywall free. It’s a decision that maintains our editorial independence as we aspire to enrich cultural and public life by putting all available resources—both digital and material—toward the promotion and exploration of ideas.The commitment that keeps us free from string-pulling benefactors also places our fate in your hands.
Ms. America
Lana Del Rey's 'Merica is one with just as many symbols, but it requires far less cognitive dissonance. For those who came of age during the war on terror, for whom adolescence was announced by 9/11 and for whom failed wars, a massive recession, and a total surveillance apparatus were the paranoid gifts of our adulthood, Lana Del Rey gives us a patriotism we can act out. Hers isn't a love song to America; it’s a how-to manual.
Ms. America - The New Inquiry
Lana Del Rey’s ‘Merica is one with just as many symbols, but it requires far less cognitive dissonance.This is the introduction to Ms. America, a free supplement on Lana Del Rey. Look at the table of contents here, or click the image to download.
Prescription Strike
The CIA’s use of vaccine programs as cover for covert operations in Pakistan has endangered aid workers and undermined the fight against polio “We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms.
Lupita Nyong'o: free spirit
Field slave Patsey sits humming to herself making cornhusk dolls, her long fingers trembling slightly as she braids the fibres, the raised scar tissue on her cheek the result of a jealous outburst from her master’s wife. The scene, one of many moments in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave that Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o performs with devastating veracity, was Nyong’o’s own idea. “There was something childlike to me about Patsey,” the 30-year-old says when we meet at a small café in Brooklyn.
Comment: Drone comic
I understand the premise and the motivation for posting it. The people sharing the comic are saying they’re far too smart to be taken in by facades of progress (as we all should be). And they may be urging others to do the same. But at this point, no one seeing this image isn’t already aware that the most violent industries and agencies of empire wouldn’t be improved, or even changed, by greater diversity behind its weapons and among its ranks.
Rihanna On My Mind: Chatting About the “Pour It Up” Video
by Susan Elizabeth Shepard, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, and Sarah Nicole Prickett The other day, after Rihanna’s new video for “Pour It Up” came out (embedded below, NSFW), we started chatting about it on Twitter. There was too much to say. Here, we discuss why Rihanna is better than Miley, why Rihanna is better than Nicki, and why Rihanna is better than Jesus. This conversation took place in a Google Hangout and has been condensed and edited. Sarah Nicole Prickett: Hii, does this work?
Why Kanye is Right, And Kimmel emblematic (with image, tweets) · pushinghoops
if your main beef w one of the biggest artists in the world is that he isnt 'humble', you're a racist. WHY should he be? name one reason.
Prescription Strike
The CIA’s use of vaccine programs as cover for covert operations in Pakistan has endangered aid workers and undermined the fight against polio “We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember ... I ... I ...
How Amanda Bynes Became Her On-Screen Antagonists
A young actor’s fall from stardom to a pity inducing 20-something is often traced through clichés about substance abuse and theories on celebrity. We can’t assume insight into a person we don’t know, whose circumstances we can’t imagine. But examining Amanda Bynes’ present condition through her career reveals a strange role reversal. One in which Bynes becomes a distorted approximation of the characters she played against.
Bikini, Kill
image by imp kerr Don't hate the slayer, hate the game Harmony Korine's camera crooks one finger at your tongue, beckoning you to follow it along the bodies of its four stars. Its opening scenes feature both guys and girls dancing and drinking in pure abandon on a hyper saturated Florida beach, but linger on the (mostly white) girls. Their breasts, slick with Bud-spray, move in time to Skrillex.
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