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In addition to starting the magazine, the charity, which is based in London, is helping ministries of education in Arab nations work with top consultants to provide advice on teaching, the use of educational technology, and other topics. It also plans to translate some 5,000 textbooks into Arabic and make them available free online. The collection, Mr. Khalil said, contains the "seminal works" in economics, sociology, and 12 other academic disciplines. He estimates it will cost more than $50-million to obtain copyrights and translate the books.

The magazine will feature original articles by reporters in the region and aggregated content from other news media. Stories will be in both English and Arabic, and it will offer a biweekly electronic newsletter. In the future, Mr. Wheeler hopes the publication won't have to depend on grants and donations, but will survive largely on money earned from job and other advertisements.

I don't think a publication about higher education can really be neutral about academic freedom

the government intends to implement an "insular nationwide intranet" isolated from the global internet and heavily regulated by the government. If successful, Iran will have accomplished something few other nations could: full control over its citizens' modern communications

If Iran were to insist on censoring obscenity, it could take different measures - like those employed by Saudi Arabia, which installed a sophisticated keyword filtering system. Though the kingdom's restrictions are severe and infringe on freedom of expression, its filtering system is at least more transparent than Iran’s. Or better yet, it would offer free home-filtering software free of charge to every family, as Jordan's Ministry of Information and Communications Technology recently did. Instead, the government seeks to tear its citizens away not only from the global internet, but from communicating with their families and friends abroad. Such a move will be damaging not only to citizens, but to the country's economy, unsustainable without global connectivity. Those with doubts need only look to Egypt: When that country cut off access to the internet in January 2011, the economy lost an estimated $18 million each day. 

From West to East, dozens of nations have found some reason or another to implement new restrictions. In the United States and Europe, it's copyright. In India, the world's largest democracy, the impetus is religious insults. Across Southeast Asia, the justifications vary, but, as in most of the world, the underlying reasoning appears to have more to do with controlling a nation's populace than with excuses given on the surface. Will Iran succeed in sequestering itself from the online world? For a time, perhaps. But as most authoritarian leaders eventually learn, there are red lines - some which may not seem so apparent at first - that the population won't let them cross. For Iranians, access to the internet may be that line.

Bloggers and their readers reacted angrily and quickly to the court decision, with nearly 9,000 users of the social-networking website Facebook joining a group called “Do not touch my blog” in less than two days after the decision was announced. Similar campaigns have also been created on other websites, such as Twitter

No company’s copyrights should come before me expressing my thoughts

“We would not see such a phenomenon [like this court decision] in more developed democracies, such as in the EU countries,”

The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made America a nation of fans and moviegoers. The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage common people to identify themselves with the stars and to hate the “herd,” and make it more and more difficult for them to accept the banality of everyday existence.

The modern propaganda of commodities and the good life has sanctioned impulse gratification and made it unnecessary for the id to apologize for its wishes or disguise their grandiose proportions. But this same propaganda has made failure and loss unsupportable.

The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history.

On the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people, as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment.

The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.

The modern prince does not much care that “there’s a job to be done”—the slogan of American capitalism at an earlier and more enterprising stage of its development; what interests him is that “relevant audiences,” in the language of the Pentagon Papers, have to be cajoled, won over, seduced.

At the same time that public life and even private life take on the qualities of spectacle, a countermovement seeks to model spectacle, theater, all forms of life, on reality—to obliterate the very distinction between art and life. Both developments popularize a sense of the absurd, that hallmark of the contemporary sensibility. Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality.

To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions. In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for himself, the new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay.

Our over-organized society, in which large-scale organizations predominate but have lost the capacity to command allegiance, in some respects more nearly approximates a condition of universal animosity than did the primitive capitalism on which Hobbes modeled his state of nature.

Excerpted from The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, by Christopher Lasch. Copyright © 1979 by Christopher Lasch. Used by permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.