The economic downturn left the future of journalism on uncertain terms, but Sid Holt, the Chief Executive of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) declares, “Magazines have never been better.” Our investigative special on the unjust treatment of immigrants in American prisons by Tom Barry is an example of Boston Review’s longstanding dedication to current issues of social interest. Our hard work has earned us a place alongside National Geographic, The New Yorker, San Francisco, and Technology Review. Far from declining, we’re making great progress.

First released in BR’s November/December 2009 issue, Tom Barry’s piece has since been published in the Utne Reader and Texas Tribune, and was the basis of Dan Rather’s report, “What’s Happening Inside Reeves?” on HDNet. If you haven’t already, you can read Barry’s article here.

Spitzer’s formulation is nothing we haven’t heard before. The government intervenes because it has to. It intervenes because it remains the only actor capable of ensuring “integrity, transparency, and fair dealing” among and within companies. Businesses are not governments – and therefore, should not be expected to act like them; the only principle to which they are bound is the bottom line. Governments must act to circumscribe corporations where their actions negatively impact other competitors or the market generally. If these are the premises we hold to be true, then obviously our existing regulatory framework falls short of the mark. But not in the conventional sense. According to Spitzer, our regulatory bodies already have sufficient powers to do the work necessary to punish offenders and prevent systemic failure. The problem, as he sees it, lies not with the framework but with the regulators themselves. And the costs have been dear. While we continue to undergird an unrepentant Wall Street, we have neglected to invest in recovery projects that would employ thousands of Americans in building a 21^st-century economy. With the loss of its 60^th vote in the Senate and midterms fast approaching, one only wonders how much longer the Obama administration can afford to keep taking this middle road, pleasing no one and arguably displeasing more.

Text is never separate from its context, and the historical moment of inception is every bit as important as the biography of its artist, and yet, Dyer’s writing does not just defy genre and category, it defies our standard notion of time in regards to artistic creation. In his article, Wallenstein explains Dyer’s conception of art as an act of creation reliant on previous artistic endeavor as its library, fodder and future all at once. I agree, art is always reacting to, critiquing and borrowing from its predecessors, but Dyer’s writing actively recognizes its part in this never-ending, universal dialectic, conscious of its self-reflexive relationship to what has come before it. An “organized synesthesia” and meta-layers of recognition within his writing itself lift art from our human timeline’s plotted sense of progression, as if his is a conversation between artists and art unaware of the passage of time. In many ways, Wallenstein references a sort of dissolution of temporality in Dyer’s work, works made possible by the relationship between the past and present but very good at leaving the distinction between the two blurry in its wake. Mark Twain once said about the ancient city of Varanasi, the languid destination for an ambiguous narrator in part two of Dyer’s newest novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” Dyer’s mystical setting, ancient but suspended in time, provides an appropriate stage for both his character and the story’s introspective treatment of art.

Wallenstein’s article and Dyer’s writing not only manipulate our notion of time and space but ask us to rethink human creativity, as does Malcolm Gladwell in his new book, “What the Dog Saw,” a collection of nonfiction essays. In his piece, “Something Borrowed,” Gladwell reconsiders plagiarism, but his exploration of the murky waters of intellectual property seeks to answer greater artistic questions, and finds “art-borrowing” to be anything but a black and white case of theft. Gladwell writes, “The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.” This statement helps to illuminate Wallenstein’s message for me, as does Gladwell’s assessment that “Creative property, Lesig reminds us, has many lives…we lose track of where they [ideas] came from, and we lose control of where they are going.” Creation, Gladwell and Wallenstein observe, is an inevitable form of reinvention and reinterpretation.

In response to a previous Footnote blogpost of mine a lady named Marina wrote, “Literature is not purely concerned with the work of art but with the author’s intention, her vision, her process, her hidden autobiography. This is not invasion of the life behind the art but a form of art itself: as Geoff Dyer quotes John Berger saying in a forthcoming BR article by James Wallenstein, the ‘best readings of art are art.’” Having read Wallenstein’s article, I find this to be an interesting application of Berger and Dyer’s dictum. The phrase is certainly relevant to the mechanics of craft and understanding the relationship between authorial persona, technique and creation, but it is also a wildly metaphysical and philosophical assertion that requires us to zoom out a little. Art reflects art before it by way of critique and imitation, determining and becoming subsequent art in the moment of its genesis. The fictional piece, photograph or jazz riff is at once its own precursor and destiny, and as Wallenstein so beautifully communicates, Dyer’s work recognizes itself as both these things, providing for a newly engaging and perhaps disorienting literary animal indeed.

The story of NCTC began on January 28, 2003. During his State of the Union address to the country, President George W. Bush directed that the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) be created. All terrorist threat information analysis was to be merged into one center using the resources from many organizations. On May 1 of the same year TTIC was formally stood up and became the central hub for terrorist threat related information.

Instead of encouraging kids to “say something” if they “see something,” the only activity on the website is coloring in line drawings of Beaker and Lady Liberty. For this I am a bit relieved, but still, if the government is going to the trouble of providing propaganda for kids, shouldn’t they consult childhood educators and create it in language kids can understand?

To this end the FBI does a much better job, with age-appropriate links on its similarly cartoonish home page. However, the (illustrated) Special Agents all appear to be white–which I suppose they were in 1908, but as I was momentarily confused (and this is meant for K-5th graders who may not pause to read the text), the illustration seems misleading. Click over to the easily-accessible “adult” links, and the “Quick Facts” page features a photograph of a SWAT team marching through a leaf-strewn neighborhood in New Orleans while carrying large guns. The caption explains that the FBI SWAT team is helping local law enforcement following Hurricane Katrina. I am tongue-tied. The image is frightening and, provided the context, outrageous. Does this help our kids feel safe?

I encourage you to explore these pages on your own, but in sum, the Defense Intelligence Agency greets visitors with a male soldier in camo, standing at ease, next to links to “Missions” such as Hangman and Air Combat with a promise of “More to come!” Finally, the NSA page, titled “CryptoKids,” encourages “future codemakers and codebreakers” to make their own secret code. The gender-specific CryptoCat (a tiny, navel-baring kitten) and Decipher Dog (a much taller, burly pooch) are statements in themselves.

It would be interesting to look at statistics for how many visits these sites receive, and to find out whether any schools utilize the provided curriculum. Short of a complete overhaul, it would be nice if the government would at least update biased language; consider the following from the FBI page about bomb-sniffing dogs:

You ask, “What is a working dog?” “Is it a dog that does more than hang out at the house all day and bark at the mailman?” “Is it a dog that gets in the car like Mom and Dad and goes to the office?”

Whatever happened to women mail carriers, or all the kids from single-parent families, or with same-sex parents?  As with much in life–especially pertaining to government–I am not surprised, merely disappointed.

Taylor traces his own beloved relationship with Cavafy’s poems. He expresses admiration for Mendelsohn’s new translation of both Cavafy’s completed works and recently-found unfinished ones, appreciating how Mendelsohn conveys the rhythmic cadences absent in previous translations. Taylor both compliments and criticizes Mendelsohn’s attempt to reflect Cavafy’s interplay of vernacular Greek diction with “high” official language imposed on the populace after the collapse of Ottoman rule, reinforcing how translation is endlessly political because languages are so invariably wedded to history. Most of all though, what A Distant Pleasure conveys is how a new translation of a poet’s work can can help the reader approach the poet’s original intentions, imbuing old and beloved poems with new meaning that at once strengthens old affections and offers novel perspectives. As James Longenbach suggests in his own laudatory review in the Times Sunday Book Review, Mendelsohn seems to possess a profound understanding of the essence of Cavafy’s work and to have distilled this essence in his translations.

Security concerns aside, the White House has been at pains to underscore its firm belief that a jury will return a verdict of ‘guilty’. Meanwhile, those detainees deemed too dangerous for release and too difficult for prosecution will continue to be tried before private military tribunals, in spite of the President’s January 22nd Executive Order 13492 which called for their immediate suspension. All this begs the question, why bother making a point about the efficacy of the criminal justice system if you’ve decided the trial’s outcome before it’s begun? After all, presumption of innocence is a foundational part of that system and hence, the opportunity to avail oneself of such system would seem rather the point. What’s more, if public trials are only workable on an ad hoc, when-we-feel-like-it basis doesn’t that undermine the message about their suitability as the proper forum for criminal proceedings?

In spite of its repeated efforts to turn the page on Bush-era policies, the Obama administration has continually found itself at the mercy of political pressure forcing it to curtail its plans somewhat. Even as it signals a new chapter in America’s ‘moral leadership’ abroad, the administration is finding it difficult to navigate the terrain, making some previously undesirable policy options, necessary evils in the pursuit of some presumably greater good. The two-tiered trial system announced by Holder is merely the last in a series of such decisions. It recalls the President’s speech at the National Archives in March on the administration’s revised detention and interrogation policy, where he elucidated several detainee categories, among them those individuals who required so-called ‘preventive detention’ since they are considered dangerous, but impossible to convict. This brings us back to the current debate over terror trials. Like the Bush administration, who believed that terrorists were not normal criminals and hence, should not be tried as such, the Obama administration has reluctantly continued a policy of military tribunals, faced with the hard reality that extending the right to public trial to every detainee would be politically precarious. This inconsistency of rhetoric and reality, between alleged justice and the awkward half-measures actually being implemented undermines the sincerity of this effort. Indeed, if their intention was to reinvigorate faith in the criminal justice system to dispose of criminals, they’ve done just the opposite.

In a radio interview with Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, de la Durantaye admits that left to him, The Original of Laura would have burnt per Nabokov’s request, but at no point in his article does he impose some sweeping, moral verdict in regards to its publication. In fact, he almost undermines the contention of Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to publish his father’s work, claiming that the edited compilation of notes will neither tarnish the writer’s name nor bring new meaning to what he has written before. Tom Roberge comes to the same sort of unsatisfying conclusion in his article on The Original of Laura for Boldtype Magazine, writing, “dead men make no complaints.” While I do not share Dmitri’s “supernatural connection” with the shade of his father, nor do I envision some tormented, ghostly Nabokov wringing his hands beyond the grave, I still wish de la Durantaye had taken a subjective moment to say, “This is wrong.”  So why am I offended? As the daughter of an intellectual property rights attorney, I accept the legality of Dmitri’s inherited possession and his decision to publish.  And yet, I can’t help but feel that despite Nabokov’s inability to teach at Cornell or eat a ham sandwich, his creative undertakings are still his. Having said this, artistic creation is always at the mercy of whomever it comes into contact with – words inevitably lend themselves to gray areas and interpretative freedom. In writing something, you somehow relinquish control over both its meaning and its fate, and regardless of the “should” or “should nots,” nothing ever belongs to its artist alone. While I find the publication disquieting, I am also disturbed by the thought of such rich, if not polished, material sitting in a Swiss deposit box somewhere or burning into tiny particles of nothing. Perhaps The Original of Laura was no one but Nabokov’s to give, but it is now ours for the taking. Here it is, an author’s involuntary gift and our public domain, and the least we can do is read into a writer’s need to destroy drafts and his contemplation of intellectual effacement with the delicacy such a tantalizing parallel deserves.

Morozov’s admonishment of Lih’s philosophical failings may be only a foil for his own failure to grasp the unique nature of Wikipedia. In his article The Charms of Wikipedia published in the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker captures the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia and describes how it is precisely these idiosyncrasies that make the site such a dynamic and vital resource. Proving that one man’s flaws are another man’s charms, Baker explains that on Wikipedia “any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product.” This is not to say that Wikipedia’s founders did not aim to create an accurate source, they did. And while the information on Wikipedia is far from perfect, it is not so far from perfect to justify critics’ complaints (in her article on Wikipedia in the New Yorker, Stacy Schiff cites a Nature survey that found that Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Encyclopedia Britannica’s). Yet to focus too heavily on the question of Wikipedia’s accuracy distracts from the real beauty of Wikipedia, its cultural import. While Morozov may bemoan the insufficiency of the entry on nouvelle vague-director Claude Chabrol compared to that ofTransformers-director Michael Bay, he can’t deny the fact that most people in this country would probably rather watch a film starring Megan fox than Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yet with 13 million articles, Wikipedia is also a repository for people’s diverse and obscure interests. The cite could never be as extensive or as relevant as it is if it were bound to the same restrictive methodologies as more traditional encyclopedias. By preferencing online sources rather than library tomes, Wikipedia both reflects and perpetuates the fact the internet has spawned a generative, fundamentally populist form of knowledge-creation, one that is presently our greatest epistemological tool. To lament this fact as Morozov does is to be sorely out of touch with the contemporary society that Wikipedia reflects with both its methodology and its flaws.

Brewster Kahle recently announced at the Boston Bookfair that his organization, the Internet Archive, was collaborating with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation to provide the Internet Archive’s collection of 1.6 million e-books to users of the OLPC laptop at no cost. On May 15^th, 2008 the director of the OLPC announced that the organization would no longer only be using a distribution of the open-source operating system, Linux, but would instead be shipping some versions of the OLPC laptop with Windows as well. The decision prompted controversy within the organization, which had previously been committed to open-source software—that is, software whose code is available for public inspection, and which can be shared, altered, and re-distributed. Richard Stallman argued in the Boston Review’s 2008 Winter edition, that the inclusion of Windows constituted a violation of the organization’s commitment to open-source software.

The issue of open-source software’s role in OLPC returned with the news that the Internet Archive has plans to make its e-books available to OLPC users. The Internet Archive is reformatting all of its public domain books to the Epub format, an open-source e-book format that allows laptops to rescale e-books to fit the screen of the device. Students using the OLPC laptop will no doubt benefit from these free books. They will benefit, however, simply because the collaboration puts free books on their computer screens—not because they read those books with open source software. Some open-source activists adhere to the misguided view that the poor of the world deserve computers with only open-source software or that software companies seeking to profit from the poor are unethical. Elements of this attitude appear in Stallman’s article. There is nothing wrong with trying to profit from the poor as long as that act of profit does not constitute pure exploitation. Moreover, the poor deserve the right to choose a for-profit scheme if they wish, and book distribution companies like Amazon may justifiably promote their proprietary, for-profit e-book architectures in the developing world. The ethics of exploitation aside, pieces of for-profit software that run smoothly may be more valuable to people in the developing world than free, open-source software that does not. We should, therefore, celebrate this collaboration as a step in the direction of expanded access to texts, not as a victory in the open-source movement.