Psychologist Philip Zimbardo is famous for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which undergraduate volunteers were divided up into prisoners and guards. Within days the “guards” became so sadistic, the conditions so terrible, that the experiment had to be halted. Zimbardo is now an expert witness in the court martial of one of the Abu Ghraib guards accused of similar sadism and, in that capacity, he has access to some never before seen photographs of the abuse at that facility.
Zimbardo will be giving a talk today at TED about how good people turn evil and, during that talk, he’ll be displaying those Abu Ghraib photos. Wired interviewed Zimbardo on the topic and included with the interview the video of the photographs that he’ll show at his talk. The images are available separately in a photo gallery. As a warning, some of these images are pretty horrifying — there’s blood, corpses, nudity and, of course, torture.
Brian Williams wasn’t kidding when he talked about the snowstorm. The weather in Cleveland Tuesday night was just as well suited to a Browns playoff game, complete with hordes of enthusiasts nearly tailgating outside Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. They brandished signs, chanted, banged drums, and argued with each other about the relative merits of their preferred candidate. “She has thirty-five years of experience,” one college kid said to another in one such exchange. “But what,” said the other, “does that experience amount to?”
The pundits, meanwhile, were asking what Hillary Clinton’s campaign itself had amounted to, and some were already declaring this debate her “last stand.” As I left my house, The Drudge Report headlined with Clinton’s “fade,” picturing the New York Senator with a scream face more Home Alone than Edward Munch. Sentiments in the debate crowd were similar. A woman sitting near me observed, “This is her last chance, and I never would have thought that six months ago.” Senator John Glenn, Clinton supporter and superdelegate, remarked to an autograph-seeker that his endorsee needed to keep doing what she was doing. But the crowd, estimated between 1,600 and 1,900 people, seemed anxious for Clinton to do something more.
From where I sat–close enough to see the stigmata appear in Barack Obama’s palms–she didn’t do enough. Just after making a compelling and detailed case for her own universal health care plan, Clinton deflated her success with her protest that “in the last few debates I seem to get the first question all the time.” The crowd murmured, even as she added that “I don’t mind.” “What is she doing?” a man whispered to his wife. “She sounds defensive,” one woman remarked during the first commercial break, even when, as I heard another say, “she seems more in command up there.”
When Clinton seemed in command, her exacting attention to detail–the result of those thirty-five years of service she and her supporters tout–distinguished her. But she also made herself look silly, fretting over other details, as when she insisted that Obama ought to “reject” Louis Farrakhan’s support rather than merely to “denounce” him. The crowd snickered at Clinton’s distinction, then applauded (despite requests from Williams and Tim Russert that we restrain ourselves) Obama’s reply, something about the sort of pedantry up with which he would not put. (It has been interesting to read the differing reports of this moment in the blogosphere. From the arena floor it was decidedly a point for Obama.)
Thus Clinton’s conundrum: as much as some pundits–and even Clinton herself–have characterized the campaign as a matter of style vs. substance, Senator Obama has increasingly demonstrated substantive command to bolster the gloss of his campaign. Senator Clinton, to borrow a phrase from her fellow New Yorker, is “liked, but not well liked.” And varied responses to Obama’s success (did I hear Chris Matthews call them “mood swings”?), from “honored” to outraged to sarcastic, have not helped.
Instead, the campaign that once seemed an impeccable election machine now reads as ill-prepared for this extended endgame, dissenting and disorganized. Despite her apparent expertise in the prose of governance, Clinton has failed to sound a consistent voice in the poetry of campaigning. Viewers, as a result, have turned to those disparate moments of emotion–tears in New Hampshire, indignation in Ohio–and come up empty.
Yet Obama, for all the talk of his cult of personality, can seem cool to the point of being aloof. He does not seem to thrive on campaigning either, in the way that Bill Clinton so famously did and does. And it was Hillary Clinton, after all, who lingered on stage signing autographs after Obama had departed. It’s an oversimplification, to be sure, but an interesting dynamic to discuss as you gather around the Kool-Aid pitcher.
It’s too convenient, as well, to suggest that Clinton might have stuck around with the bittersweet relish of the precious few such moments remaining in her campaign. Ohio and Texas are still a week away, and the Convention in August seems, from here, like a summer fantasy. But walking out of the arena, past the dwindling crowds dispersed by the snow and cold, you had to wonder.
VQR editor Ted Genoways was a guest of the Columbia School of Journalism’s Delacorte Lecture Series on February 14, where he spoke for a little over an hour about the Virginia Quarterly Review, the first half of which we have excerpted here as a podcast. Ted spoke frankly about the realities of publishing a small literary journal, though admittedly that’s because he didn’t actually know that he was being recorded.
Nearly every submission that we receive is accompanied by a cover letter that includes a brief biography, many of which are written in the third person. Authors include this because they believe it helps their odds of getting the work published, and the use of third person is presumably to allow us to use the bio in the magazine, should the work be accepted for publication, without us needing to alter a single pronoun. Writers must put a lot of thought into that bio, wondering what intriguing bit is most likely to persuade us to publish them.
(For the record, we don’t (consciously) use the bio as any sort of a metric for publication. It’s the kind of thing that we publish or it’s not. The writing is good or it’s not. We have room in the magazine or we don’t.)
Giles Turnbull explores the challenges of writing a short bio in The Morning News, chronicling the hours he spent writing a 24 word bio. He doesn’t want to be too clever, too humble, too clinical or too stupid. It’s clearly a significant effort for him. I’ve spent more time than I’d care for writing brief bios for speaking engagements and publications, but not this much; perhaps I’m just not as neurotic as Turnbull.
A quick scan of our submissions database reveals nine references to the solar plexus. Seven of these involve people being hit. Only one of the bunch is a poem, a significant underrepresentation for the genre. With the possible rhymes limited to nexus, Lexus, and Texas, that’s perhaps understandable.
The Willesden Herald’s third annual Short Story Prize didn’t go as planned. They required no entry fee, and consequently received 850 entries. None of them were very good. That left Willesden in a bit of a pickle, especially since they didn’t want to give out £5,000 in prize money for mediocre work. Their solution was to take perhaps the most difficult path: they named no winner and gave the money to a charity. Their decision hasn’t been universally well received. Generally, submitting authors feel slighted, while authors who didn’t submit think it’s a fine solution. Willesden writes that they regret some aspects of how they ran the competition, but that they “do not regret running a competition that looks for excellence.”
Q: Did you write the poems about your mom’s death all at once, or was that a dam that burst over time?
A: That poem had a memory of her 26th birthday. I could remember this birthday because my grandmother and I baked a cake for her in the shape of a watermelon cut open. We decorated the cake with 26 black seeds, and that’s the first awareness I had of my mother’s age. There were always these anniversaries. In graduate school during that MFA program, I reached 26. It was stunning to me to reach that age where I was first conscious of my mother’s age.
Virginians should note that Natasha will giving a reading here in Charlottesville at the UVa book store on Saturday, March 9 at 4pm.
Do literary magazine editors ever tire of answering the question, “How many submissions do you receive?” Probably not. [...] But just how useful is knowing such a number? Does it really indicate one’s odds of getting published? Maybe not, because what is so often left out is the x factor: the percentage of submissions received that are so far off the mark—a mediocre sonnet sent to American Short Fiction, or a dashed-off sci-fi tale e-mailed to American Poetry Review—that they are shuffled into SASEs or deleted faster than Bradford Morrow can say, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?”
[...]
The x factor would be truly useful information, though, because knowing it, one could calculate the number of misfires, subtract it from the total number of submissions received, and get a truer sense of the scale of the playing field.
We thought Larimer was on to something with that question, and so a few weeks later we began tracking the x factor ourselves. We let our readers select from a few broad reasons for declining a work, and one of those reasons is that a work is utterly inappropriate for VQR. This system has been in place for ten weeks now.
The x factor is, at VQR, 4.6%. Assuming that this figure can be extrapolated, of the 5,988 works submitted since our reading period began in September, 275 can be assumed to be invalid, leaving us with 5,713 submissions that are, by Larimer’s standards, worth claiming as our total submission volume.
The Virginia Quarterly Review