A Very Serious Letter from the Editors

We are delighted to share this issue with the Columbia College community!

Next Fall, we are looking for submissions on the theme of OBSESSION. We hope you will interpret this theme in your unique way and use the summer to prepare something special.

Below, you will find remarks from our editors, given under extreme duress, or possibly fabricated by our underpaid intern who wishes not to be named. Maybe they are merely AI hallucinations.

JS: Call me Sullivan. In the beginning was the Word, and then came The Criterion. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is when it was founded, what the lousy wartime was like, and how the editors were occupied and all before the website was born, and all that David Copperfield kind of stuff, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. Ladies and gentlemen of the readers, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of art. So we beat on, words against the algorithm, borne back ceaselessly into the semester.

Anthony - “Gerbil fight ring for rent. Serious inquiries only.”

Erica - “Writing is fundamental!”

Sam - “Every second made me want to shove my brain through a shredder, 10/10 would do again.”

Sadie - “If I died and went to the Underworld, it’d take me years to realize I wasn’t still alive begging people to submit to the Criterion.”

Brooke - “‘Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.’ -Edgar Allen Poe, and the ‘exquisite horror’ is seeing the silence of my phone waiting for submissions.”

Star - “Shoutout to my cat, Stella. She didn’t do anything but she wanted credit.”

Morgan and Savannah gave comments that were too intelligent for our mortal minds to comprehend.

Where the magic happens…