And with that, I have some sad news. Backwards City Review is suspending operation as of its 7th issue, which is now back from the printer and being mailed out shortly. There'll be more details forthcoming, but for now let me say, on behalf of all the editors, past, past, and future, it's been a lot of fun, and thanks.

We know it's been slow around here. But we've got good news: the second Backwards City Chapbook has finally been released! The book is Marcia L. Hurlow's Green Man in Suburbia, which you can order directly from Amazon.

Marcia L. Hurlow is a native of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, and a professor of English and journalism at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. Green Man in Suburbia is her fifth collection of poems, and if I say so myself, it's clearly the best.

It's a fantastic collection, and we're all very excited about it.

Our reading period was particularly intense, but I promise to post more regularly now.

For now, please enjoy From Lowest to Highest: the levels of greatness a fiction writer can achieve in America, from The Stranger.

A sample:

PONY ON A PONY FARM OF A CHILD OF A BILLIONAIRE: Joy Williams/Mary Robison/Frederick Barthelme/Ann Beattie

Considered "important" and "serious" by most critics, writers, and journalists, but are held back from further greatness by an inability to make grand pronouncements using sociological, political, or psychological terms in an earnest tone that conveys "I am very smart and this is my serious literature." Held back also because they sometimes publish in smaller magazines, some of which don't even contain advertisements from Knopf or American Airlines; because some of their e-mail addresses can be found on the internet; and because they would never consider writing from the perspective of someone in a terrible event that they did not experience. Occasionally mentioned by Used Honda Civics in "Great" Condition (see below) to prove a generalization wrong. Do not make enough money from their books to not have teaching jobs. Too godless and without rhetoric to win a major award or be satisfactorily written about by the important literary critics of our time.

Excerpts from the latest and greatest issue of Backwards City are now up at backwardscity.net. We're extremely, extremely proud of it, even if it does contain the most prominent printing error we've ever managed; we feel it's sort of fitting. (Really, it's not all that prominent, just in one of the contributors' notes—but it eats us up inside. We're perfectionists. It's the OCD that keeps us going.)

Subscribers' issues are going in the mail tomorrow and should be in your hot hands in a few days. While you're waiting, enjoy comics from T. Motley and xkcd, fiction from Fiction Award winner B.J. Hollars and Michael Shannon, and poetry from Mary Grimm, Tim Lockridge, David Shumate, and Charlie Clark.

And when it's time to get maudlin, begin to mourn with the original editors' farewell.

From today's New York Times Magazine interview with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa:

NYTM: Did you ever meet President Reagan?
MVL: Once. I said to him, Mr. President, I admire many things that you do, but I cannot accept that for you the most important American writer is Louis L’Amour. How is this possible?

Uh... maybe because Reagan owned more horses than books.

Today's the last day to file a class-action claim against James Frey. If you bought A Million Little Pieces on or before January 26, 2006, you're entitled to some money. Go here to file before midnight and get some.

If you feel guilty, don't-- you can always use your cut to buy Frey's new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, for which he was reportedly paid one milllion dollars.

The score thus far:
James Frey: 1,000,000
Truth: 0

Update: The Smoking Gun (which originally broke the whole escapade) has the fiscal information here.

The National Science Foundation extols its new Dark Web project, "which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web."

This is where the Dark Web project comes in. Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, [Hsinchun] Chen and his team [Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona} can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.

How, exactly do they plan on analyzing the data?

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

Robot literary critics fighting terrorists? Computer-assisted identification of anonymous authors has been used before, though on a much smaller scale. Don Foster, Shakespeare scholar and "literary forensics" pioneer, developed the field in the 1980s, when he confirmed that the previously unattributed 1612 "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter" signed only "W.S." was indeed William Shakespeare. In 1996, Foster identified journalist Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, a political satire of the Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. (If you insist, you can read all about it in Foster's Author Unknown.)

The problem is that Foster uses computers only for the "search" feature of electronic texts. There's no algorithm that simply finds a match. Foster caught Klein by (among other things) his use of "tarmac-hopping," a compound that appeared nowhere else but in the journalism and fiction of Joe Klein.

The NSF may be over-hyping the Dark Web system. The University of Arizona's website only promises that Dark Web "will include tools supporting search, browse, and analysis capabilities."

It is certainly possible to identify writers by their use of certain words-- David Foster Wallace's use of "ontological" or Hunter Thompson's use of "atavistic" pop into my mind almost immediately. (Any others? Leave them in the comments.) But could a computer do the necessary parsing to positively identify a writer's style?

The world is flat-- and grossly exploitative.

We’ve all taken notice of America’s great quest of more for less, and using whatever means necessary to achieve it. And the word "outsourcing" just makes it seem so fancy and great, right? As you gently pry a red train with lead-based paint out of your child’s hands, maybe you could deign to ponder, “Where, exactly, is the line? And do we care about crossing it as long as we get what we want at a lower cost?”

Perhaps misunderstanding Marx's alienation of labor, we now have the outsourcing of surrogate mothers in India. Now, customer service and tech support-- those are familiar to anyone who's owned a Dell or even thought about Thomas Friedman's mustache (pictured at right), but human wombs? The cost of surrogacy averages about $70,000 in the US but is a fraction of that in India-- just $12,000, which includes medical expenses and the surrogate's fee.

On one hand this seems pretty exploitive, but the $5,000-7,000 surrogate's fee is nearly ten years earned income in rural India. Confined by a patriarchy and a lack of employment options, surrogacy offers uneducated Indian women a chance to have their own money and a future for themselves and their families that probably wouldn’t happen otherwise. When asked if she felt exploited, surrogate mother Sofia Vohra responded, “Crushing glass for 15 hours a day making $25 a month is exploitation. The baby’s parents have given me a chance to make good marriages for my daughters. That’s a big weight off my mind.”

These surrogates are virtual recluses during the pregnancy, as surrogacy is considered risque in rural India-- many villagers don't understand that the process doesn't involve sex and so consider the practice akin to prostitution-- and there is a risk of the entire family being shunned. Further, a large percentage of Indian women are required to sign documents that grant them no paternal rights, unlike in the US, where a surrogate has a small window of time to stake a claim. This puts the biological parents' minds at ease, but also gives backing to the stance that these women, most of whom are illiterate, are being somewhat duped.

Estimated to be a $445-million-a-year business, surrogacy in India is expanding as fast as these women’s waistlines, and parties on both sides of the ocean seem to be reaping the benefits. Even so, is this blatant economic exploitation? In utero imperialism? Or simply a mutually profitable business arrangement?