VOTE, VOTE, VOTE FOR ANTIGONE (AND FOR ME)

A pleasant surprise: My essay on ‘Antigone Across the Ages’ has been nominated for the 2012 3QD Arts and Literature Blog Prize. The full list of nominations is here. The field of 62 entries will be winnowed down to 20 by a public vote. The 20 then get narrowed to six by 3QD editors. And from the six the judge Gish Jen chooses the top three. So do vote for me (the nominations are in alphabetical order of blog name, so my essay on Antigone languishes half way  down the list under ‘Pandaemonium’). Voting is only open till 6 March. Last year my essay on ‘Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”‘ won the 3QD Politics and Social Science prize. So, who knows?

THERE MAY BE NO HIGGS BOSON YET. BUT PANDAEMONIUM HAS BECOME TOP QUARK.

Or rather my post on ‘Rethinking the Idea of ‘Christian Europe’” has. It has won the 3QD 2011 Politics and Social Sciences Blog Prize. My thanks to Three Quarks Daily, to the judge Stephen M Walt and to all those who voted for the essay in the first round.  In a week in which David Cameron again insisted on the rootedness of British culture and values in the Christian tradition, it is heartening to have won with an essay such as this. Congratulations, too, to David Graeber and Corey Robin, whose essays On the Origin of Money and Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism, respectively, were also 3QD winners.  Finally a word about Three Quarks Daily:  it is an indispensible site, the first one I look for every morning, a wonderful guide to some of the best and most original writing on the web. If it does not already nestle among your bookmarks, it should.

SOMETHING ELSE TO NUDGE

My essay on ‘Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”‘ - the original post, not the subsequent New Humanist article - is in the running for the 3 Quarks Daily Politics and Social Science Prize (the full list of nominations is here). Over the next week 3QD readers can vote for their favourite post, reducing the field to 20. 3QD editors will then pick out their favourite six, from which this year’s judge, Stephen M Walt, will choose the top three. So go on, vote for my essay.  The nominated posts are in alphabetical order and ‘Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”‘ is #30 on the list. My thanks in advance.

GIVE IT A NUDGE

My essay on ‘The Myths of Christian Europe’ has made it on to the leaderboard for The Browser’s best articles of October. But, there, it is currently languishing in mid-table, the West Brom of blog posts.

So, go on, vote for it, give it a nudge, propel it up the table. You might even perform an authentic miracle, turning West Brom into Man City.

FISHING IN THE ARCHIVES

Last week the Orwell Society launched the 2012 Orwell Prize with a debate on ‘Writing the riots’. There are three Orwell prizes – for books, journalism and blogs. I don’t have a book out this year (and if I don’t start writing a bit faster, I may not have one out next year either). Much of my journalism is published in Norway and Sweden and so not eligible as it is not in English. But I do have Pandaemonium, and it is ostensibly written in English (some may, of course, query that). So, I’ve been thinking about whether to enter Pandaemonium for the Blog Prize, the judges for which are, incidentally, Suzanne Moore and Hopi Sen. It seemed a good opportunity to sift through the archives to find my favourite posts from the past year, to create my own personal possible Orwell longlist as it were. I’ve only included original posts, not transcripts of talks I’ve given or essays first published elsewhere or the extracts I’ve been running from my book in progress. I’ve fished out 20 (I can enter a maximum of 10 for the Prize) and here they are in chronological order:

PANDAEMONIUM ON THE ROAD

It’s Bastille Day. And to celebrate I’m off on a road trip through France. So not  much blogging for a while. But a lot more fun.

 

HELLO WORLD

About ten years ago, I published a blog called work in progress. Like many a blog, it took up too much time and effort and eventually fell by the wayside. (I took it offline; I might eventually put the archives back online.) But the itch to blog never left me. The arrival of Twitter only made the itch worse. Hence this, my second blogging life. Whether this one lasts any longer than my previous effort remains to be seen. The archive of my work is still at kenanmalik.com. There will be some overlap between the two sites but this is mainly for shorter posts, thoughts and scribbles that won’t fit there. So, welcome to Pandaemonium, Milton’s ‘high capital / Of Satan and his peers’. Comments are open.