Dear Reader,

We have all kinds of good news and we also need a small bit of help from you. Let me start by giving you the news.

***

First, with the help of our amazingly talented summer intern Henry Molofsky we have now completed a comprehensive design review of 3QD. Over the last eight months we examined many different blogs and websites for ideas and also solicited ideas for improvements from experts and from a select group of 3QD readers (and also our writers). We then discussed every single idea and debated whether it would be good for us or not. In the end, some ideas were rejected and others were approved resulting in a final design document which specifies the changes we will be making. These are underway and being implemented and tested as we speak. Here are just some of the improvements you will be seeing soon:

• We will be switching to a new comments platform (and will import all 60,000+ older comments into it as well) which will allow commenting on comments themselves, editing comments, email alerts when the post (or your comment on it) receives more comments, and many other advanced features.
• Much better integration with all kinds of social media, including Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons on every post. Also integration with other social media such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.
• A new more contemporary look and feel, including a wider main column and redesigned right-hand column with much less clutter. The menu bar will be redone as will many other things but I will leave the details of this as a surprise to you. I have been working with some world-class graphic designers on this aspect of our redesign.
• The Monday archives have been fully updated already (see here) and will soon be integrated into a redesigned and much better-organized Mondays page.
• There will be a new 3QD Prizes page with all information related to our prizes.
• The “Search 3QD” bar will soon actually work properly. (A pet peeve of my own!)

And there is more which you will see very soon.

***

Second, we are very excited to announce a collaboration with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to our readers quarterly online symposia on topics of international peace and justice. DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. While their work is by its nature confidential and therefore not well known to the public, they and their remarkable successes are very well-known to actors in the field of conflict resolution. For example, DAG has recently played a central role in coordinating the International Verification Commission for the Ceasefire in the Basque Country, which will verify the ceasefire declared by Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) on January 10th 2011. The DAG/3QD Peace and Justice Symposia will consist of a well-known international figure presenting a thesis which will then be critiqued by two respondents who are also experienced in the field of international diplomacy. The original writer will then present a final rebuttal. For the first DAG/3QD Peace and Justice Symposium (which I am excited to announce will be published on 3QD on Monday, the 3rd of September), the distinguished participants are:

• David Petrasek: Formerly Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, David Petrasek has worked extensively on human rights, humanitarian and conflict resolution issues, including for Amnesty International (1990-96), for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-98), for the International Council on Human Rights Policy (1998-02), and as Director of Policy at the HD Centre (2003-07). He has taught international human rights and/or humanitarian law courses at the Osgoode Hall Law School, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at Lund University, Sweden, and at Oxford University. David has also worked as a consultant or adviser to several NGOs and UN agencies.
• Gareth Evans: Australian Foreign Minister 1988-96 and President of the International Crisis Group 2000-09, co-chaired the International Commission on State Sovereignty 2001, is a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, and is the author of The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Brookings Institution Press 2008, 2009). He is Chancellor of The Australian National University.
• Kenneth Roth: Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's leading international human rights organizations. Roth has also served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world. He has written extensively on a wide range of human rights abuses, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations.

The DAG/3QD Symposia will take place every three months.

***

Third, thanks to the leadership and organizational and research skills of our summer intern Zujaja Tauqeer, we have finalized and put into place a detailed plan to generate enough revenue through advertising and other means to become self-sustaining over time. In the meantime, we have also applied to various grant-making foundations for funds. Unfortunately this is a process which takes time and we do not yet know how much funding we are likely to receive.

***

So, finally to the request: to put all these changes into effect and to continue to do all that we do (the daily curating of the web, the Monday magazine of original writing, the quarterly 3QD prizes, the new DAG/3QD quarterly symposia) we have a current shortfall of approximately $6,800. We need you to help us raise these funds immediately to allow us to move ahead with all our plans for improvement.

Will you please take a moment to make a donation right now?

Thank you in advance. I am excited to reveal the new and improved 3QD to you as soon as possible. We are almost there!

Yours,

Abbas

Angus Fairhurst. Three Double Pages From a Magazine, Body and Text Removed. 2004.

Paper collage.

More here and here.

From The New Yorker:

With the choice of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney adds more to the Republican ticket than youth, vigor, and the possibility of carrying Wisconsin—he also adds the ghostly presence of the controversial Russian émigré philosopher and writer Ayn Rand. Although she died thirty years ago, Rand’s influence appears on the rise on the right. As my colleague Ryan Lizza noted in his terrific biographical Profile of Ryan, Rand’s works were an early and important influence on him, shaping his thinking as far back as high school. Later, as a Congressman, Ryan not only tried to get all of the interns in his congressional office to read Rand’s writing, he also gave copies of her novel “Atlas Shrugged” to his staff as Christmas presents, as he told the Weekly Standard in 2003.

Two years later, in 2005, Ryan paid fealty to Rand in a speech he gave to the Atlas Society, the Washington-based think tank devoted to keeping Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy alive. He credited her with inspiring his interest in public service, saying, “[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” (One of the trustees of the Atlas Society, Clifford Asness, the co-founder of AQR Capital Management, a twenty-billion-dollar hedge fund, is one of the many outspoken Wall Street financiers who has shifted political sides, denouncing Obama, whom he supported in 2008, for interfering with capitalism by bailing out Chrysler, and by imposing tighter financial regulations after the 2008 economic collapse).

More here.

Religion is often presented as the guardian of moral values. The problem with this, says the author and broadcaster, is that it diminishes what it means to be human. He draws on Plato and a medieval Arab poet to explain why.

Interview of Kenan Malik in The Browser:

Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion which teaches us morality. How would you respond?

Throughout their history, one of the great selling points of religions – in particular the monotheistic religions – has been their importance as a bedrock of moral values. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. “To remove God,” as the theologian Alister McGrath has put it, “is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality”.

Looking back on history, one might question just how successful God has been as “the final restraint on human brutality”. What really concerns me, however, is the way that religious concepts of morality degrade what it means to be human by diminishing the importance of human agency in the creation of a moral framework. From a religious perspective, it is the weakness of human nature that ensures that God has to establish and anchor moral rules.

In truth, morality, like God, is a human creation. Even believers have to decide which of the values found in the Torah or the Bible or the Quran they accept, and which they reject. What God provides is not the source of moral values but, if you like, the ethical concrete in which those values are set. Rooting morality in religion is a means of putting certain values or practices beyond question by insisting they are God-given.

More here.

Santiago Zabala at Al Jazeera:

Perhaps rather than God, as Martin Heidegger once said, it is art that can save us. After all, artistic creations have always had political, religious and social meanings that also aimed in some way to save us. Certainly, they also express beauty, but this depends very much on the public's aesthetic taste, which varies according to the cultural environment of each society.

But when the political meaning is manifest, aesthetics (our sensations and taste) lose ground in favour of interpretation (knowledge and judgment); that is, instead of inviting us to contemplate its beauty, a work calls us to respond, react and become involved. As it turns out, art – as a channel to express reactions to significant issues – has sometimes worked better than historical or factual reconstructions.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica is the example we all have in mind: painted as a response to the Spanish nationalist forces' bombing of a town in the Basque country, it was used not only to inform the public but also as a symbol of all the innocent victims of war. This is probably why “aesthetics”, a term coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, refers not only to the study of art but also to sensory experience coupled with feelings regardless of the nature of its object. But can contemporary art, whether through music, conceptual installations or cinema actually save us from the damned circumstances, atrocities and injustices we live among?

More here.

Mohamad Bazzi in the New York Times Book Review:

In recent years, America has succumbed to a peculiar form of Shariah-phobia. According to this narrative, covert jihadis are working to usurp the law of the land and replace it with Islamic rule. A caliphate will rise on the ashes of the Constitution, Americans will be forced to pray in mosques and judges will mete out stonings and amputations. “Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Newt Gingrich told the American Enterprise Institute in July 2010. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.” During the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate weighed in on the Shariah threat. In November 2010, Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the use of Islamic law in court. A federal appeals court blocked the amendment, but more than two dozen other states have considered legislation to restrict judges from consulting foreign and religious laws.

To Gingrich and his supporters, Shariah is a monolithic system of medieval codes, set in stone and bent on world domination. But in “Heaven on Earth,” a carefully researched history of how Islamic jurisprudence has evolved since the seventh century, Sadakat Kadri challenges the notion that Shariah is based solely on cruelty and punishment. He explains how the body of law developed alongside different strains of Islamic thought — tolerance versus intolerance, forgiveness versus punishment, innovative versus literalist. Kadri argues that over the past 40 years, governments that aspired to instill an Islamic identity have imposed austere interpretations of Shariah, ones that run counter to a millennium of transformation and universality.

More here. Also see 3QD's Feisal Naqvi's take here in the Express Tribune.

Darran Anderson in 3:AM Magazine:

In 1298, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo found himself in a Genoese prison, having been seized at the helm of a war galley during the Battle of Curzola. There he met the chivalric writer Rustichello of Pisa to whom he related tales of his travels along the Silk Road into Asia in the previous decades. The resulting manuscript The Description of the World or The Travels of Marco Polo became a literary sensation, being reproduced across Medieval Europe. Such were the extravagant claims in this “great book of puzzles”, many were taken to be fabrications and Polo earned the nickname “the Man of a Million Lies”. It was doubted by some that he’d even travelled at all except around his own evidently vast imagination.

The accounts did however contain many genuine discoveries alongside exaggerations, half-truths and myths (‘How the Prayer of the One-Eyed Cobbler Caused the Mountain to Move’ for example) mixed together without differentiation. We can now pour scorn on his claims of desert sirens luring the unwary to their deaths, colossal birds who fed on elephants, idolaters “adept in sorceries and diabolical arts” who could control sandstorms or witnessing Noah’s Ark perched on a mountaintop where the snow never melts. At the time, these were scarcely more unbelievable than his claims of “stones that burn like logs” (coal), paper currency, seeing the highest mountains in the world (the Himalayas) or visiting vast golden cities hung with the finest silks yet we know these now to be fairly accurate descriptions.

The backbone of Polo’s travelogue is made up of his visits to various Oriental cities (Baudas, Samarcan, Caracoron and so on) culminating in the opulent palaces of the Chinese Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, at whose court he was a guest for 17 years. His recollections of the centres and their populaces range from the mercantile (lists of industries and natural resources) to the fanciful; cities where the inhabitants are perpetually drunk, where men ride around on stags eating birds, where marriages are arranged between ghosts or the great Kaan in his marble palace drinks wine from levitating goblets. Often Polo would add boasts and hyperbole (“no one could imagine finer” is a recurring phrase) and even suggest he was holding back for fear of arousing incredulity in the readers (“I will relate none of this in this book of ours; people would be amazed if they heard it, but it would serve no good purpose”) which only served to further his ridicule. When he was on his deathbed, a priest giving last rites asked Polo if he wished to confess to exaggerating his recollections to which he replied, “I did not reveal half of what I saw because no one would have believed me.”

Will Hutton in New Statesman:

How do you successfully break a mistaken and destructive intellectual consensus? Common sense has it that Britain is a front-line developed country that, as a precondition for a return to growth and full employment, must first succeed in lowering its public and private debts, dramatically and simultaneously.

Every assumption in that sentence is wrong. Britain is not a front-line developed economy. To deleverage simultaneously is to invite protracted depression. The challenge instead is to develop our economy as much as make it grow, and to ensure that overall demand, notwithstanding the overhang of private debt, grows consistently.

However, it is the other nonsense that defines public policy and the terms of our national conversation. It’s a system of thought that needs to be despatched in its entirety to the outer darkness. We should begin thinking in completely different terms and categories. The question is: how?

Paul Krugman, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson try to do exactly that in their latest books. Elliott and Atkinson’s thesis is that such epic economic mistakes have been made over the last generation, compounding those of the past 100 years, that the productive sinews of Britain’s economy – and its ability to renew that productive capacity – have shrunk to such a degree that Britain can no longer be considered a developed economy. In all sorts of ways – from its reliance on foreign direct investment to its faddish celebration of empty-headed, if charismatic, leaders – it displays the characteristics of a developing economy. It is wedded to a “no-strategy strategy”, as Elliott and Atkinson put it, followed by a political, financial and business elite that appears to be in denial about the country’s circumstances and needs.

Andrew Scull on Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield's All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders, in the LA Review of Books:

The modern psychopharmacological revolution began in 1954 with the introduction of Thorazine, hailed as the first “anti-psychotic.” It was followed in short order by so-called “minor tranquilizers:” Miltown, and then drugs like Valium and Librium. The Rolling Stones famously sang of “mother’s little helper,” which enabled the bored housewife to get through to her “busy dying day.” Mother’s helper had a huge potential market. Drug companies, however, were faced with a problem. As each company sought its own magic potion, it encountered a roadblock of sorts: its psychiatric consultants were unable to deliver homogeneous populations of test subjects suffering from the same diagnosed illness in the same way. Without breaking the amorphous catchall of “mental disturbance” into defensible sub-sets, the drug companies could not develop the data they needed to acquire licenses to market the new drugs.

In a Cold War context, much was being made about the way the Soviets were stretching the boundaries of mental illness to label dissidents as mad in order to incarcerate and forcibly medicate them. But Western critics also began to look askance at their own shrinks and to allege that the psychiatric emperor had no clothes. A renegade psychiatrist called Thomas Szasz published a best-selling broadside called The Myth of Mental Illness, suggesting that psychiatrists were pernicious agents of social control who locked up inconvenient people on behalf of a society anxious to be rid of them, invoking an illness label that had the same ontological status as the label “witch” employed some centuries before. Illness, he truculently insisted, was a purely biological thing, a demonstrable part of the natural world. Mental illness was a misplaced metaphor, a socially constructed way of permitting an ever-wider selection of behaviors to be forcibly controlled under the guise of helping people.

Hussein Ibish in Bookforum:

If anybody asked me, particularly in a plaintive tone of desperation, for a comprehensive backgrounder on the uprisings that have convulsed much of the Arab world since December 2010, I’d have no hesitation in pointing them to The Battle for the Arab Spring. Lin Noueihed, a Reuters editor, and Alex Warren, a consultancy expert, have joined forces to produce a remarkably far-reaching and exceptionally precise summary of the uprisings generally, but unfortunately, referred to as the “Arab Spring.” Particularly for the uninitiated or those seeking a synoptic but relatively detailed account of what has and hasn’t happened in the Arab world in the past year and a half, their book fits the bill perfectly. Dutifully and methodically, Noueihed and Warren cover all the bases. Everything is here that a specialist would expect to be provided to a popular audience seeking guidance and information, and very little that is obviously crucial is missing.

But this great strength is also the book’s most fundamental weakness. The Battle for the Arab Spring often reads like a list of lists, or a particularly well-executed Wikipedia entry, whose authors have established a logical, straightforward set of categories for its subject, and then dutifully filled them in with the appropriate facts, citations, and observations. This makes The Battle for the Arab Spring often surprisingly flat and difficult to read, particularly for anyone with a strong background in recent Middle East affairs. The combination of almost suffocating predictability and unerring reliability produces very little with which such readers can engage. Turning its pages often involves a sigh of exasperation, as the authors check box after inevitable box.

From MSNBC:

The prevalence of female pronouns — she, her, hers, herself — in American books could be used to track the changing status of women in the 20th century, according to a new study, which found the he/she ratio after the late 1960s mirrored advances in gender equality.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, and her colleagues analyzed more than a million books on Google's Ngram Viewer for the use of gendered pronouns published between 1900 and 2008.

For every “she” found in this sample between 1900 and 1945, there were about 3.5 “hes.” The gap then grew during the post-World War II era, increasing to a male-to-female ratio of about 4.5 to 1. But the use of female pronouns in books began rising in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, the male-to-female ratio of pronouns in American books dropped to 3 to 1. And by the 2000s, it was 2 to 1. The researchers believe these changes occurred in step with rapid advances in gender equality — evident in other factors such as more education and more participation in the labor force — starting in the late 1960s. “These trends in language quantify one of the largest, and most rapid, cultural changes ever observed: The incredible increase in women's status since the late 1960s in the U.S.,” Twenge said in a statement from Springer, which published the research in its journal Sex Roles. “Gender equality is the clear upside of the cultural movement toward individualism in the U.S., and books reflect this movement toward equality. That's exciting because it shows how we can document social change.”

More here.