We’re running a series on our website over the next couple of months, entitled “When Janey Comes Marching Home Again,” featuring photographs and recorded interviews with female veterans of the Iraq War. Creator Laura Browder and photographer Sascha Pflaeging have a total of forty paired photographs and interviews, of which we’ll be featuring a dozen online, and some in our Fall 2008 issue. In the introduction to the collection, Browder writes:

The first time I heard a woman describe her time in Iraq in glowing terms, I was taken aback. Marine Colonel Jenny Holbert told me that being in charge of public affairs for the second battle of Fallujah was “probably one of the biggest events of my life, other than birthing two children.” Colonel Holbert’s enthusiasm for deployment was only one of many surprises I encountered over the course of conducting forty-six interviews with women soldiers, sailors, and marines across the eastern seaboard.

Though male soldiers have long been the subjects of documentary photographs and oral history interviews, it is rare that women have had a chance to relate their experience of combat. If we listen to them, these women—these mothers and wives, these soldiers and veterans—will unsettle our fixed ideas about Americans at war and add dimension to the often flawed or fragmentary pop culture depictions of women in the military: as novelties, but not as real soldiers.

You can listen to the first five in the series now, and keep an eye on that page, where we’ll be adding new interviews weekly.

1. The American Human Development Project has published its first report, entitled The Measure of America. The report includes such fun factoids as “More families with children are homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression” and “The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s people - but 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.” Pick and choose from a wealth of disturbing trends:

A baby born in Washington, D.C. is almost two-and-a-half times more likely to die before age one than a baby born in Vermont. African American babies are more than twice as likely to die before age one than either white or Latino babies.

Or, if you prefer: “State and federal prison inmates average just eleven years of schooling.” What do to with this information besides jump off a bridge?

The. . .Project’s mission is to stimulate fact-based public debate about and political attention to human development issues in the United States and to empower people to hold elected officials accountable for progress on issues we all care about.

2. While the uneducated are languishing in America, people with medical degrees are adding “art scholar” to their resumes. Some are even dropping out of their chosen profession to blog for a living.

3. Sam Anderson prepares us for the next chapter in Barack Obama’s speechifying candidacy:

A major reason that Obama’s rhetoric seems to soar so high is that our expectations have sunk so low. . . . Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7.

Will Obama have to start hiding his intelligence in order to connect with the next wave of voters? Plus, a design expert comments on the infamous New Yorker cover.

4. Is Paris becoming a cultural backwater?

Today, to France’s worry, Paris is no longer the place to be. . . .Its temples to the arts are indeed filled.

But the worshippers these days are consumers, not creators. They are mainly foreign tourists who come to see the eternal Mona Lisa, post-modern American artists, the French Impressionists and Moliere. The city chemistry that produced rawness, dynamism, change and challenge seems absent.

Is my baguette getting stale? Is my Monet poster curling up at the corners? Where will I buy my brie? These are end times. I bet the Amazon River is silting over too.

5. Walking with an Essayist by Bonnie J. Rough. . .And writers, don’t pretend you’ve never tried to intellectualize dog poop. (via Bookslut)

6. For God’s sake, people. Listen to the man. The internet is our friend. Unless, of course, you plan on running for office one day. “Would you still vote for someone after viewing a photograph of him passed out in his own vomit?” Maybe. Also, please stay offline unless you can commit to defending your popularity from minute to minute, freshman.

7. The answer to the modern feminist’s conundrum about balancing work, family, personal ambition, and dirty laundry might just be to “run your house like a man.”

8. Finally, literary critics aren’t dead; they’re rock stars.

1. Literary agent Nathan Bransford asks writers if they’d keep writing if they knew they’d never, ever be published, thanks to the services of a psychic. There are 195 responses, with a great many people insisting that the hypothetical psychic is just wrong.

2. A New Jersey judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by literary agent Barbara Bauer against Wikipedia after unkind comments about her appeared on her entry. The entry, since deleted, pointed out that she’d appeared on the Science Fiction Writers of America’s “twenty worst literary agencies” listing as a result of regular complaints about her. As a factually-accurate statement—she did appear on the list—it’s not particularly good grounds for a lawsuit, but it was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that came to Wikipedia’s rescue.

3. The latest installment of the Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry Off the Shelf”, an NPR podcast, features an interview with poet Richard Tayson about the time he got in a bar fight over Walt Whitman’s sexuality. Tayson wrote about the run-in in our all-Whitman Spring 2005 issue.

4. The Brits are becoming increasingly alarmed about UT Austin buying up all of their writers’ archives. The university’s Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities has famously deep pockets, thanks to oil deposits under the university, and they’re able to outbid just about anybody to expand their collection. That’s leaving England’s literary heritage sitting in boxes in a warehouse 7,000 miles away, and the Ransom Center has no intention of making any of their collection available electronically:

[Director Tom] Staley’s conservatism extends beyond his literary taste. He does not want to place the Ransom’s archives online. He believes, quoting Matthew Arnold, that “the object as in itself it really is” can never be replaced by a digital reproduction. “Smell this,” he told me one time when I was in his office, as he picked up a manuscript box from the Edwardian British publisher Cecil Palmer. We inhaled the scent: tobacco, mold, dust. “See, there’s information in the smell, too,” he said.

Those with diminished olfactory senses need not apply for access to the archives. (Via Inside Higher Ed)

As an infrequent contributor to the VQR blog and a current world correspondent based in sunny Portugal, I feel compelled to comment on the New York Times’ recent story about Lisbon’s emergent arts scene. When I moved to Cascais for the summer, I had no idea that I was riding a tidal wave of cultural endeavor, but here I am, thirty minutes outside of the hippest place on earth.

The Times article examines Lisbon’s fashion renaissance through the lens of Storytailors, a design house devoted to unique, fairy tale creations.

Opened in 2007 by the young design duo João Branco and Luis Sanchez, Storytailors isn’t so much a retail outlet as a cabinet of wonders where the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm haunt the racks.

In an interview featured on the atelier’s website, the designers say their clothes enable clients to “wear their own imaginations.” They are interested in the “non-childish” aspects of traditional childrens’ literature. They want to manifest myths, tales, and “the imaginary” on the human form. Their work was originally inspired by a poem entitled “Datilografia” by Fernando Pessoa, which explores the poet’s relationship with his childhood dreams.

Granted, I am a sartorial skeptic, confused by all things shiny and expensive, but I like the idea of translating literature and language into something you can wear down the street. Storytailors’ seasonal collections have names like “Cheated Child” and “Enchanted Forest.” Their “EUphyra: words of a medusa that wanted to fly” collection is divided into chapters I and II.

Surrounded by such inspiration, it’s not impossible that I’ll return to Virginia outfitted as the “Queen of Roses.” But whatever I come home wearing, it will certainly be a far cry from the martial style of Salazar or from that cumbersome hat made out of fish.

Our summer issue is showing up around the country now. After two issues with unusual covers (our winter cover was handed over to Chris Ware and our spring cover to Art Spiegelman), things are back to normal, with VQR looking as VQR-y as ever. This issue is titled “No Way Home: Outsiders and Outcasts,” and we’ve got a series of stories along that theme.

A sort of a subtheme of this issue is poets writing nonfiction. Pulitzer-prize winning poet (and VQR Contributing Editor) Natasha Trethewey revisits her home town of Gulfport in “The Gulf: A Meditation on the Mississippi Coast After Katrina.” UVa professor and poet Greg Orr contributes “Return to Hayneville,” the story of his recent revisit to the small southern town where he was kidnapped and held captive for his role in a civil rights march. And Hunter College teacher and poet Tom Sleigh writes about his trip to Qana, the Lebanese village where twenty-eight people—mostly children—were killed by an Israeli bombardment in July of 2006.

It’s not all poets, though. Regular contributor J. Malcom Garcia spent time in Jena, Louisiana recently, getting to know folks on both sides of the recent racial dispute there, and he explains how the town was affected by the sudden, unwanted attention from the rest of the nation. Photographer Gabrielle Weiss captured some brilliant photographs of some of Jena’s residents, too. James Kirchick visited Orania, the only all-Afrikaner enclave of South Africa, and learned about their efforts to “maintain culture.” Also, Jason Motlagh writes about Maoist separatist rebels in India, Dimiter Kenarov visits the Roma of Bulgaria, Daniel Alarcón is sent to the middle east on a government-sponsored poetry reading tour, and David Enders explains the unique plight of Palestinian refugees in Iraq.

Our fiction also fits into the theme of outsiders. Nina McConigley provides “Cowboys and East Indians,” about being caught between the cultures of India and Wyoming. (You can learn more about Nina by listening to Scott Carney’s piece about her for NPR’s “Day to Day,” which aired in March. Sana Krasikov’s “Asal” is about being the other woman in a polygamous marriage. And Kanishk Tharoor writes about the life in Bagdad in the week before it was sacked by Hulagu Khan in “Tale of the Teahouse.”

The poetry in this issue is all under the umbrella of “A Rose from Jericho: Israeli and Palestinian Poetry.” A dozen poets contributed to this collection, including Mahmoud Darwish.

And, of course, we have book reviews (Jack Fischel on Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke” and Oscar Villalon on David Gilmour’s “The Film Club”), plus our usual assortment of brief reviews. Finally, there’s Ross MacDonald’s “Dead-Eye Comic,” which always rounds out our issues.

In a startling development, the Washington Post reported last week that the Italian government “have started fingerprinting tens of thousands of Gypsies living in nomad camps across the country”:

The measure by Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government, part of the government’s crackdown on street crime, has provoked a storm of protests at home and abroad. Officials have spoken recently of a “Roma emergency” in Italy’s big cities, blaming them for rising crime.

[Interior Minister Roberto] Maroni, a leading member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, said the census will be completed in October. Critics, including the center-left opposition, claim the measure is not a census and is unfairly singling out a minority. Italy has an overall population census every ten years that does not include fingerprinting.

In our Summer issue, Dimiter Kenarov profiles the Roma living in Bulgaria:

I ask Stoyan what is the biggest problem that Bulgarian Roma face. “You can’t define just one single problem because everything is related to everything else,” he says. His Bulgarian is flawless, without a whiff of the accent usually associated with Roma—rowdy vowels amid crowded consonants. “The problem of segregation begins at birth and ends only with death. Romani women deliver their babies in a segregated maternity ward. Romani children attend segregated schools. They live in a segregated neighborhood. The Bulgarian government simply has no need for well-educated, intelligent Roma.” He speaks carefully, methodically. “Out of twenty thousand who live in Nadezhda less than one-tenth are literate. We have no more than twenty people with a high-school diploma. That’s one in a thousand. Out of twenty thousand residents we only have four with a college degree. We live in the Stone Age here in Nadezhda. What is there to change?”