Mutual Congratulations

John Gallaher, winner of BR’s 12th annual poetry contest, has a new review up… of a book by another of our favorite people, Rae Armantrout, whose poems “Win” and “Money Shot” were featured in our January/February 2009 issue.

On his blog, Nothing to Say & Saying It, Gallaher writes that Armantrout’s poems are

both objective and subjective, in a constant state of assertion and interrogation [which] makes for a richly complex perspective, one teetering at the very brink of elusiveness, a vantage point of seeing and saying that is truly hers alone.

As for Armantrout, who judged our 2009 poetry contest: she has just received a National Book Award nomination for her collection, Versed.

Health Care Round-up

This summer health care reform is all over the news, and politicians back home in their districts during the recess are encountering all sorts of interesting characters. The Washington Post characterized a recent spate of town hall meetings, held by legislators to discuss the subject with their constituents, as “[having] transcended their original purpose [to] become a kind of professional wrestling for the civically engaged.”

Following up on Sam’s post, and on all the craziness going on in town halls, here is a sampling of past Boston Review on health care. The magazine has been covering health care issues for over a decade, in a manner hopefully closer to chess, or perhaps poker, than professional wrestling. But don’t take it from me – I’m a rugby person, myself.

Also: see if you can spot the brother of a White House official in this list (hint: the official in question is sometimes called “Rahmbo.”)
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Boston Review: now worth 50 points!

BR recently got a shout-out from poet Steven D. Schroeder of St. Louis on his blog, Sturgeon’s Law.

Schroeder has decided that the best way to stay optimistic about the poetry business is

to regard it as a big game

and has set up a preliminary scoring system so that poets can keep track of “who’s winning.”

Apparently, winning the Discovery/Boston Review prize is worth 50 points!

That score puts us on par with The National Poetry Series, with getting a book published by a major university press or respected independent press, with inclusion in a Norton anthology or Best American Poetry, with having a poem published in The New Yorker, and with getting tenure as a professor in a top-tier program.

Thanks for the love, Steve. Good luck in the po-biz.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting those 50 points for yourself, make sure to late a look at the guidelines for the Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest – the deadline is January 15, 2010. Also, definitely check out last year’s winning poems:

• Briget Lowe’s “The Wild Boy of Aveyron Stands Up During a Dinner Arranged by the Doctor”
• Jynne Dilling Martin’s “Repercussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio”
• Jeffrey Schultz’s “J. Steals from the Rich and Uses the Money to Get Drunk Again”
• Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo’s “Bright Burial”

Minimum Wage Round-up

As an unsigned editorial in The New York Times pointed out today,

An estimated 2.8 million employees will get a raise on Friday, as the federal minimum wage rises from $6.55 an hour to $7.25. Another 1.6 million whose hourly pay hovers around $7.25 are also expected to get a boost as employers adjust their pay scales to the new minimum. The raise is badly needed. It is also wholly inadequate.

In honor of this much needed but totally insufficient increase in pay to much of low-wage America, here is a collection of past Boston Review articles that look at wages and inequality in the United States.

• Inequality Matters: Nancy Birdsall on globalization’s failure to “lift all boats.” (March/April 2007)




• American Sweatshops: Jennifer Freeman on organizing American workers in a global economy (Summer 2005)




• The American Jobs Machine: Erik Olin Wright and Rachel Dwyer take a close look at those left behind in the Clinton-era “jobs boom.” (December 2000/January 2001)




• For a Living Wage: Arnie Graf and Jonathan Lange examine the political reasons behind the decline in real wages (Summer 1997)




• Solving the New Inequality: Richard Freeman kicks off a New Democracy forum on economic disparities in the U.S., with responses by Frances Fox Piven, Heidi Hartmann, Paul Krugmann, Michael Piore, James Tobin, James Heckman, and Ernesto Cortes, and a reply to the responses from Freeman (December/January 1996-1997)

Cyberwar hysteria? Reading Morozov against recent attacks

I found Evgeny Morozov’s article in the latest BR to be a compelling argument against cyberwar hyperbole, and I thought his call for a focus on infrastructure needs rather than on overblown claims Internet terrorism was a sound one.

A friend in NYU’s Computer Science department pointed out after reading the article that he was troubled by the author’s tendency to put the weight of responsibility for cyber-security on “end-users,” that is, consumers of software systems and platforms, rather than on those who designed the systems. I think this point is valid, and while perhaps Morozov’s emphasis on user action is to be expected in a time so focused on individual responsibility rather than systemic accountability, I too am skeptical of blaming individual Internet users for any security problems they may encounter. The solutions that Morozov espouses —

be careful, and avoid trafficking data in open spaces

– are somewhat over-simplified, and while his caution about believing government hype about cybersecurity may be justified, he may be going too far in obscuring the real steps that governments can take to protect their citizens and their own classified data.

Of course, the moment I was ready to turn the page on Internet terrorism, the news media became saturated with coverage about North Korean cyberattacks on South Korea and the US. Read the rest of this entry »

Prison Reform: In BR and On the Hill

As Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate this past weekend, Guantanamo may be America’s most infamous “prison problem,” but it is far from our only one.

Our sentencing and incarceration system is broken. With the U.S. having only 5 percent of the world’s population and yet almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we are imprisoning people at nearly five times the world average; according to Lithwick,

approximately one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, jail, or on supervised release.

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who famously served as Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and was at one point thought to be under consideration as Obama’s running-mate, has introduced landmark legislation to retool our prison system. Called the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, Webb’s bill would set up a commission to examine the American criminal justice system and make recommendations about how to best reform it.
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Walcott v. Padel: Media Coverage of the Oxford Poetry Professer Saga

By now most of our readers will have come across one or another story about the controversy surrounding this year’s election of the Oxford professor of poetry. One of the top picks for the prestigious award, Derek Walcott, withdrew his name from the running after Oxford academics were bombarded with e-mails about Walcott’s alleged sexual harassment of students. Walcott had been favored to win the award, but after he stepped out of the running, the honor was given to Ruth Padel, the first woman to ever receive it. Within a matter of days, though, news outlets were reporting that Padel herself had been involved in the campaign to spread the word about the allegations against Walcott; though she disavowed involvement in the campaign to notify Oxford academics, Padel admitted that she had tipped off two journalists to the matter over e-mail. She has since resigned as Oxford professor of poetry.

Most of the media coverage has focused on Padel’s actions, and on whether the two e-mails she sent to journalists notifying them of accusations against Walcott constituted reason for her to step down from the position. Reading articles in The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Times Online, what sticks out to me is a question unasked by any of the major news outlets covering this story: should the allegations against Walcott have factored into the committee’s decision-making process, and, if so, was there reason for Padel to suspect that without her action the committee might not take those charges into account?
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