Jack Murnighan is editor-in-chief of the website Nerve.com and fiction editor of the magazine Nerve, which debuted last week. Jack also got his Ph.D. from the Duke English Department last spring.
How would you describe Nerve?
A smart sex magazine for women and men. Or what Entertainment Weekly referred to us as, which is "the brain of The New Yorker with the body of Playboy."
In what sense is it for women and men? There seem to be more women pictured than men...
The fact of the matter is that it's just much more common for photographers to do nudes of women than men. We have a lot of couples stuff, which is one way of trying to deal with the problem. I think there's an old, hackneyed and incorrect idea that men like to look and women like to read for stimulation. I think that Nerve.com has done a good job of proving that men also like to read and women also like to look.
But Barnes & Noble has your magazine shelved under Men's Magazines.
They told us they were going to shelve it in Lifestyles, and I think there's been a little bit of confusion. It should be next to The New Yorker. We want to be next to Harper's,
How are you related to pornography?
We certainly don't think that we are competing with porn. [But] what we try to do is report on sexuality, so obviously the production and consumption of sexuality for a public audience is part of it. We're not porn, and we're not erotica-neither of those products deal in reality; they both deal in a certain kind of constructed fantasy. And who is actually talking about the reality of sex at all, and more than that, who is doing it in a smart way, and beyond that, who's doing it for men and women at the same time?
Is being in your line of work an advantage or a problem on the dating scene?
Definitely both. I think the minute that I tell a woman that I'm the editor of and have various stories on Nerve.com, then she goes and reads them, and that pretty much draws the line in the sand. There are those who really like it and those who definitely, definitely don't. This is definitely a good litmus test for that.
Did Duke prepare you for this at all?
Duke especially prepared me to be an editor. I often joke that composition classes and editing for a magazine is very similar in that you are constantly trying to bring relatively mediocre prose to a high level while dealing with the adolescent egos involved. [laughs] I really aggressively edit everything and go after my writers and really push them to take the next step. And that's really similar to what you do as a committed UWC teacher.
How do you get the high-profile writers for the website and the magazine?
At this point, we've had four Pulitzer Prize winners, a couple of National Book Award winners, some ultrafamous people like Jay McInerney, the former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, Norman Mailer-once you reach a certain critical mass and people recognize you as a place for good writing and a place where their esteemed colleagues have already published, then you're in.
If Nerve were a movie, how would it be rated?
I think Nerve-The Movie would make the whole travesty of film rating very evident. I'm sure that we would get a XXX rating, and yet we would probably be more instructive and better for young people than the cartoons they're watching.
-By Norbert Schürer
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