We have made two recent upgrades to The 3NR that we hope will improve your user experience.

First, we have installed IntenseDebate, a feature-rich commenting system that includes comment threading, commenter profiles, reputation points, and robust connections to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can now log-in to The 3NR using an Intense Debate account, a WordPress.com account, Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID. Victory Briefs Daily has been using IntenseDebate for several weeks and the user experience is excellent. Even if you don’t make use of any of the new features, the IntenseDebate system should make for a more elegant commenting experience for all of our users.

Second, we have begun caching the site to increase its responsiveness and cut down on the time it takes to load pages. Our goal is to eliminate downtime and ensure that our content is always available when our users need it. If anyone notices any problems with the site during this transition, please let me know — bill@the3nr.com.

Thanks for your continued support.

As you can see, we have freshened things up for the new season. If you hate the new theme, we welcome constructive suggestions — this is a work in progress and hopefully we can improve it over time.

In addition to the redesign, we will soon be unveiling a new podcast-specific site that will hopefully play nicer with iTunes and other podcast aggregators. The first podcast of the season will be recorded and published sometime this week; if there’s something you would like us to discuss, please let us know in the comments.

The last few months have been hectic for all three of us and our publishing schedule suffered as a result. With Scott and I settled in to our new jobs and our new city, we plan to once again provide a lot of new content each week for our loyal readers and listeners.

On behalf of Scott and Roy, thanks for your support!

It’s taking a bit longer than I had hoped. New target publication date is June 27.

The deadline for submission for the Last Word is a little more than a week away- June 1st.  Updates below

Continue reading →

The Last Word seems to be progressing nicely. Here are answers to some commonly asked questions, and at the bottom a list of topics that people have volunteered to cover in case you were still thinking of writing something.

If anyone would like to try designing a logo that would be sweet as my ms paint skills leave something to be desired.

Publication

-will be for free online through the 3nr

–I am going to use the creative commons share alike 3.0 which basically means people can use anything in the journal for further academic work, distribute it freely etc.

-the font garamond will not be used in any way shape or form

Review Process

There will be 2 separate reviews of each article- one for spelling/grammar/style, and one for content. The 2 reviews will be conducted by different people. After review authors will get a chance to fix/resubmit for publication. A lot of people have volunteered to review so this process will be pretty quick I think. Submitted articles will be commented on in word using the comment function.

Topics being covered- Theory articles- most of which have someone arguing for each side

-intrinsicness

-plan inclusivity

-consultation

-functional/textual competition and word pics

-conditionality

High school topic papers

-Foucault/agamben and police

-Butler on Afghanistan

-Gender critics of IR

-US leadership

Non policy debate topics- Here quite a few people emailed me about the exclusion of other kinds of debate but so far very few have put their money where their mouth is.

A lot of people have expressed interest in writing something for the 3nr from time to time. For anyone interested in publishing something about debate I am starting a new debate journal entitled “The Last Word”. The idea behind this will be to publish articles that deal with current argument and theory innovations/trends in policy debate- for the first edition focusing on the upcoming high school topic. Rough submission guidelines are below, if you would like to contribute something email scott@the3nr.com. Please post any questions in this thread so if people have similar questions they will be able to see the answer.

Update- The Last Word will also accept articles about LD or Public Forum. Since I know nothing about either of these if you would like to be an editor for LD or Public Forum please email me.

Continue reading →

In the near future we will be recording a podcast and a malgorcast, so if you have questions that you haven’t posted yet do so here.

If you attended this past weekend’s tournament at Woodward Academy, you hopefully were provided with a paper copy of a survey that the 3NR is conducting at the season-ending national championship tournaments. While the number of surveys that were returned by competitors was impressive, many students who competed at Woodward did not get a chance to fill out and return their form.

In the interest of creating as large a sample size as possible, I have created an online version of the form that can be filled out electronically. If you attended the Woodward tournament but did not submit a survey, please take a few minutes to fill out the electronic version (below the fold).

Others are also welcome to complete the survey, but a separate call will be issued next month to those that will be attending the NDCA Championships and the TOC. One main goal of this project is to compare the responses of 1st and 2nd year debaters with those in their 3rd and 4th years so accurate demographic information is essential.

If you would like to fill out the form, it is embedded below the fold.

Continue reading →