New site to read and discuss the ISG report

The Institute for the Future of the Book and Lapham’s Quarterly, which is edited by former Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, have established a new website that will enable a broad web-based discussion of the report of the Iraq Study Group.
If you go to the site you’ll find the main navigation bar along the top. The greenish buttons there have drop-down menus through which you can access the entire published text of the report, including its appendices. I find navigating through the report’s text using these links considerably easier than navigtaing through it as a PDF file… So that’s already one advantage. But the further innovation that the folks at IF:Book have added is to put a “comments” pane right there on the page alongside the main text, with the possibility of having comments keyed to either individual paragraphs or whole sections of the text.
They see this, rightly, as allowing a whole new role for a text such as a book text, and thus for the entire social role of books.
I’m pretty excited about this. I’m also very happy to keep up a sustained and serious public discussion of the ISG report– especially in light of the attempts of the neocons and others to sweep it under the table or dismiss it as “long ago discredited” (Krauthammer, etc.) Therefore, as you can see when you go there, I’ve been one of the first commenters there; and I am eager to see the project take off as fast as possible.
I believe– and certainly hope– they’ll be opening it to comments from the public very soon, and I’ll let you know when that happens. (Frankly, it would be great if some others of the “invited” commenters they have gotten on board would do their bit to get the project rolling along… So far, there’s just M.J. Rosenberg and me… )
Anyway, head on over there. If you have comments about the project and leave them here I’m sure the folks at IF:Book will read and react to them.

7 thoughts on “New site to read and discuss the ISG report”

  3. We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy
    If you got a Congress candidate talking like this its really damen thing here, did he forgot he himself is an Immigrant? He is not indigenous person what he talking about America, is a mix of immigrants initially from Europe and then the rest of the world.
    Who can claim he is a “Native American” the native only the Red Indians.
    He should go and read the American history very well before he makes his speeches.
    Just to brig to your attentions looks to his supporter who are they?!
    BTW, those congressmen many times rises the issue of Christians minority and their rights and hardship in Arabs/Islamic States claiming that they are targeting by Muslims, so now this man himself doing what the west claiming about Christians in Islamic world which in total not right.

  4. But they paired you with that jackass Rosenberg.
    “I want the occupation to end, which means negotiating an end to it with the Palestinians whether we like them or not [sic!], and thereby preserving a majority Jewish state called Israel forever”
    And these days he’s worries (at TPMStarbucks) that too much democracy in Israel’s neighbors is bad for Israel. He likes Egypt just the way is. The thinking man’s Joe Lieberman!

  7. Rosenberg accused an unspecified group of people at TPMCafe of being racists, anti-semites or self-hating jews. Considering the context, it was clear I was one of those people. He’s a hypocrite and a liar. I played with him by stating things as fact that drove him to fits of indignation, then offered footnotes to his responses. He called me a liar. I gave him a link, sometimes to you, sometimes to US or Israeli government reports.
    He’s a racist wrapped up in bubbe’s schmaltz.
    In the future I’ll remember to hold off on insults. Descriptions are more cruel anyway, but I’m impatient.

Comments are closed.