I live in the Baltimore MD/Washington DC corridor in the United States and am retired from a career as a sales engineer. See my professional biography for more information.

I blog relatively infrequently at frankhecker.com on a variety of semi-random topics that I happen to be interested in, including Howard County, Maryland (where I live), and politics (after a fashion). I posted frequently on Cohost before its demise; this site preserves my most significant Cohost posts. I also have a separate blog in which I post my math homework, although it’s on indefinite hiatus. Finally, I’m a staff writer at the Okazu yuri/GL news and review site.

You can contact me via email at frank@frankhecker[.]com. I’m @frankhecker.com on Bluesky, @hecker@mastodon.social on the fediverse, and @hecker on X (fka Twitter). I also have a minimal Facebook presence, but I no longer post there.

Frank Hecker is now retired from a career as a sales engineer.

In his last position, as Principal Sales Engineer for the Federal sales group of Infoblox, Frank supported the sales of Infoblox products that enable US government agencies to use DNS and related core network services in groundbreaking ways to reduce management complexity, successfully defend against evolving security threats, and ensure high availability.

Previously at IronKey Frank supported sales of IronKey Enterprise mobile secure storage products and the IronKey Trusted Access product to help prevent online banking fraud and provide secure online access to web applications. Prior to that Frank was Director of Grants and Programs with the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization promoting choice and innovation on the Internet through its support of the Mozilla project (home of the Firefox web browser) and related initiatives.

Prior to joining the Mozilla Foundation Frank was a sales engineer with Opsware supporting sales of Opsware IT automation software and services to the Federal government. He has also worked for CollabNet, supporting sales of CollabNet services relating to open-source and other collaborative software development, and for Netscape and America Online as Director of Systems Engineering for the Netscape government sales group in Bethesda, Maryland.

At Netscape he was sales technical lead for the Netscape/DoD worldwide site license, the FORTEZZA, FIPS 140-1, and Netscape Security Services projects, and many other sales activities; he was also a key contributor to Netscape’s decision to release source code for the Netscape browser, and was appointed one of three Netscape Fellows.

His professional interests include information systems security, web and Internet technology, and the technical, business, and public policy aspects of open-source software. He was the winner of the 2009 Catalyst Award for his work in promoting open source accessibility, was named one of Washingtonian Magazine’s “top 100 leaders of Washington’s tech world", and was featured in the documentary film Revolution OS. He blogs and hosts other personal writings at frankhecker.com.

This completes my Math Academy education in single-variable calculus, with Calculus I and Calculus II supplementing the material I learned in Mathematical Foundations II and Mathematical Foundations III.

As I usually state: Not everyone will share my opinions on Math Academy, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful or interesting to at least some people.

Skipping school

According to my activity log, I averaged just over 35 XP per day, with a lot of variability (standard deviation of over 25). I didn’t do any work at all on 18 days and did less than 10 XP on another 4; that’s almost 2 days a week when I skipped out on doing Math Academy. On the positive side, out of the 22 quizzes I took, I had to re-take only 12—far from perfect, but much better than what I was able to do in Calculus I.

Between “skipping school,” covering more new material, and a lot of reviews of material from previous classes (see below), it took me over three months (97 days) to finish Calculus II, considerably longer than I hoped when I began the course.

Just the facts, ma’am

I noted in my last update that I was starting to use Anki to try to remember the host of formulas related to trigonometric and hyperbolic identities, derivatives, and integral. Alas, this was not as successful as I’d hoped it would be.

The primary problem is that I have yet been able to make Anki reviews a daily habit: I’ll remember that I haven’t reviewed my cards in a while, do a session, and then forget to do it the next few days.

This problem is in turn probably due to two other factors: First, the sheer number of cards shown as needing to be reviewed is daunting, although most of them are for decks I don’t care about. Second, and I think more important, is that my Anki practice is disconnected from my Math Academy activity.

That’s why (once again) I’d like to see a Math Academy course focused on more advanced mathematical facts, as opposed to the kind of “math facts” course that’s been mooted, one intended for students learning multiplication tables and other common prerequisites. I think the chances of seeing such a more advanced course are relatively small in the next two or three years, but perhaps the Math Academy folks will have time to consider it at some point.

“Review hell”

A common complaint by people on the Math Academy discord server is that the number of reviews they have to get through is overwhelming, especially toward the end of courses. “Review hell,” some call it, frustrated that they aren’t seeing many new lessons compared to reviews.

I can put some numbers to that frustration: in the course of taking Calculus II, I had 87 lessons for Calculus II compared to 234 reviews of previous material (both in Calculus II and previous courses), about a 2.7-to-1 ratio of reviews to lessons.

I can also understand why people are frustrated: it’s annoying to be told that you’ve almost completed a course only to see review after review and only one new lesson. However, I also think that having lots of reviews is just a natural consequence of Math Academy having enabled you to complete lots of courses in a relatively short time.

Consider: in less than a year I completed 5 Math Academy courses, including a re-do of a comprehensive high school mathematics curriculum, the equivalent of a complete “Linear Algebra I” university course, and a fair amount of material from university-level courses on multivariable calculus and probability and statistics.

Of course I have a lot of material to review, how could it be otherwise? And I want to review that material; otherwise I’ll forget it all and the time (and money!) I spent learning it will have been wasted. So, you won’t catch me complaining about “review hell.” While I certainly don’t welcome seeing review after review appear in my queue, I recognize that they’re an important part of the Math Academy experience and I feel a sense of satisfaction when I can finish one without errors, knowing that I just helped solidify my knowledge of the subject.

Slowing down, taking a break

A major reason for my slowness in finishing Calculus II (I had originally planned to finish by the end of 2025) is that I’m working on a separate (and unrelated) project that’s taking up a lot of time. I’ll be doing that at least through the end of February, so I’ve decided to cut my daily XP goal from 40 down to 30 for now. I suspect I may also end up skipping a few days.

However, at some point I should have more time (perhaps much more time) and I’ll be ready to re-engage with Math Academy more fully. As I’ve previously mentioned, I plan to next take Multivariable Calculus and then Probability and Statistics, with a goal of finishing both this year. I have no idea what new Math Academy courses will be available after that, but I’m sure I’ll find something suitable.

That’s it for now, my next update probably won’t be for a few months.

My progress thus far

Here’s where things stand after one year: First, I’ve completed the following courses:

• Mathematical Foundations II
• Mathematical Foundations III
• Mathematics for Machine Learning
• Linear Algebra
• Calculus I

I’m also 91% of the way through Calculus II. I had hoped to combine this post with a post celebrating my completion of Calculus II, but unfortunately I got sick in late November and ended up skipping several days of Math Academy work in December. I should finish up Calculus II later this month.

I’ve accumulated a total of over 19,500 XP, averaging about 53 XP per day over the course of the year. If you ascribe to the Math Academy rle of thumb equating 1 XP to 1 minute of focused work, then I’ve spent about 325 hours working on Math Academy lessons, reviews, and quizzes, the equivalent of two months of a full-time job.

Why I’m doing this

A few weeks ago someone on X or on Discord asked me what my ultimate goal was in doing Math Academy. My initial interest, as I’ve written, was prompted by my failure to study linear algebra to a point where I knew what eigenvalues and eigenvectors were. But that wasn’t my ultimate goal.

The reason I started trying to learn linear algebra (way back when) was as an adjunct to learning probability and statistics. And that in turn was motivated by my desire to get to a point where I could read social science papers and understand the techniques being used. I’ve always enjoyed writing blog posts about various topics for which academic literatures exist, and I’ve always been frustrated by having to skim over the sections in papers where they discuss things like study designs, statistics methodology, causal inference, and the like.

So my goal is to be able to get to a point where I can go through books like Bayesian Data Analysis or Statistical Rethinking, follow the math and the R code, and maybe even try out some of the techniques on things I’m interested in for which I can get data.¹

A related goal is to improve my R and Python knowledge. I can do exploratory data analysis in R (including using ggplot2) and can do Python coding to a low intermediate level. I’d like to skill up to a more advanced level in both languages.² I‘m really looking forward to Math Academy adding a computer science course, but as noted below I’m not expecting to see it any time soon.

Math Academy then and now

As noted in my very first Math Academy post, I started my Math Academy journey not by enrolling in the service but by reading Justin Skycak’s book-in-progress The Math Academy Way and taking copious notes. That reading convinced me that Math Academy had what looked to be some reasonably sound learning science behind the service, and was therefore worth trying out.

The current version of the The Math Academy Way is about 12% more in length than the version I read originally, and is still not finished: There are five chapters marked as “in progress,” and 12 pages of “notes for future additions.” I suspect it will be some time before we see a complete first edition of the book.

The same can be said of the Math Academy service itself. The service is still described as having “beta” status, with no clear indication as to when it might shed that label. As with Gmail (which was labeled as “beta” for 5 years even as Google onboarded tens of millions of users), it’s possible that Math Academy won’t reach 1.0 status for a while.

That’s really just a minor semantic issue. The Math Academy service has been reasonably stable for the year I’ve been using it. The only thing out of the ordinary I’ve noticed is that the system takes a relatively long time to respond (several seconds at least) when you complete a lesson or a review. This may indicate increased system load due to more people using the service. Alternatively, it may (or may also) reflect the fact that choosing the next action may be increasingly time-consuming for students like me who‘ve already traversed a significant portion of the overall Math Academy knowledge graph. (In particular, I can imagine that deciding what topics have been reviewed thus far, including implicit review, may take a while.)

To my recollection, the only major product feature that’s been added during the past year is the “gravity” feature, which allows students to designate topics that they want to focus their learning toward. Math Academy then prioritizes lessons on the paths in the knowledge graph leading to those topics. Gravity is a beta within a beta, as you have to request access to it. I haven’t used the feature myself, because my interest is in completing entire courses, but the feedback I’ve seen on X and Discord is generally positive.

Most of the effort of the Math Academy team seems to be going toward creating new courses and making the backend and UI changes that will be necessary for at least some of those courses. To the best of my knowledge, the only completely new course added in 2025 was Discrete Mathematics, a university-level course.³ However, there were multiple updates to existing courses, including the addition of many free response questions, for which the student needs to type in an answer instead of selecting from multiple choices.

Several other courses were mooted as potentially appearing in 2025, including Differential Equations, Machine Learning (proposed as a two-part course), Computer Science (also proposed as a two-part course), and Abstract Algebra in the university-level courses, and SAT Test Prep and ACT Test Prep in the high school courses. Of those, the only one that appears likely to be released in the near future is Differential Equations.

There were also significant updates and expansions planned for SAT Math Fundamentals and Mathematics for Machine Learning. To my knowledge the Mathematics for Machine Learning expansion has not yet been released; that will presumably be done in conjunction with release of the first Machine Learning course. As for SAT Math Fundamentals, per Justin Skycak on Discord, “We added about 115 new ‘missing middle’ topics that appear on the SAT but are not covered in any standard school curriculum. For scale, 115 topics is roughly half the size of a full-year course like Algebra 1.”

The Math Academy team remains relatively lean. The only named individuals known to be employees are Jason Roberts (UI and backend development), Justin Skycak (analytics and algorithms), Alex Smith (content development), and Sandy Roberts (technical support and general administration). There’s also a group of people (presumably contractors) creating lesson content; their number and names are unknown.⁴

As discussed on one of Jason Robert’s and Justin Skycak’s podcasts, they don’t follow a set schedule for development, but rather concentrate their development efforts on whatever part of the product seems most urgent to focus on at the time. As a result there is no fixed roadmap for future courses, and I think it’s fruitless to speculate on what might be released when.

Speaking of podcasts, there are now a whole series of Math Academy podcasts featuring Jason Roberts, Justin Skycak, and (occasionally) Alex Smith. Some of them have interesting insights about the origins of Math Academy and its internal workings, but they’re pretty long and often rambling; making transcripts of them and having an LLM summarize the transcripts might be the best way to approach them.

Beyond Math Academy

As a result of using Math Academy, and especially of reading The Math Academy Way, I picked up a few other interests in 2025.

The first is PhysicsGraph, an online education service inspired by and modeled on Math Academy. I wrote an earlier post about the PhysicsGraph quantum computing course; I plan to write another post about their Physics I course. The PhysicsGraph folks are being much more aggressive than Math Academy in introducing new features in the UI and elsewhere; whether Math Academy will be inspired to adopt some of them is an open question.

Since I was following folks from Math Academy, PhysicsGraph, and related ventures on social media, I also stumbled upon the early reviews and articles about Alpha School. As it happens, Alpha School uses Math Academy as part of its educational software stack, thus highlighting another aspect of the Math Academy business model, i.e., licensing the service to schools instead of just serving individual subscribers. I wrote about the first podcast by Joe Liemandt, the funder of Alpha School and related ventures, and plan to write more about Alpha School in future.⁵

Finally, all this got me interested in developments in learning science, and so I started following Carl Hendrick, an academic working in the field who’s had some involvement with Alpha School. He has a newsletter that I’m subscribed to, and is also co-author or co-editor of several books on teaching and educational psychology, at least one of which I plan to read this year.

That’s it for now, I hope to be back here with another update in a few weeks once I finish Calculus II.

The much-heralded AI revolution is but the latest in a series of technological revolutions originating from Silicon Valley: the integrated circuit and the personal computer, the Internet and the World Wide Web, smartphones and streaming video, search engines, online commerce, and social networks. These revolutions have made many of their creators immensely wealthy and (as has often been the case with the newly wealthy) eager to flex their muscles and acquire social and political power to match their economic power.

They are a would-be ruling elite, but do they deserve to be? This is not a question of whether or not it is good to have billionaires. There will always be an elite to govern us, the question is rather whether they are a positive force or a negative one. That in turn depends on the values they hold and their effectiveness as rulers.

In his article “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite”¹ and a subsequent post,² Tanner Greer takes the measure of this would-be elite and finds them wanting. He reads a book advertised as the thoughts of their best and brightest and concludes that it most resembles “a series of TED talks sloppily sewn together,” with ideas that “at no point . . . rise above the intellectual level of the average TikTok reel.”

Greer chastises them for the emptiness at the core of today’s technologists’ view of the world: no guiding moral vision, and a deep reluctance to state what they stand for and what (and who) they stand against: “They demand a pulpit for America’s technologists but never summon the courage to state what gospel they should preach.” He also offers a diagnosis of what they need to be a true and effective elite:

a political coalition to which it owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence; an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests; and finally, a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large. Absent the first two, a leadership class lacks the power to lead; absent the latter two, it lacks the ability to act as a class.

Elites then and now

Greer grounds his criticisms in the history of the US after the Civil War, a war that demonstrated the industrial superiority of the North and bound together as a coherent class those whose efforts were key to creating that superiority. They were the seeds of a “techno-nationalist elite” that went on to make the US the preminent world power and create the modern world we take for granted, a world so different from what came before that in retrospect we can see the year 1870 as the “hinge of human history.”³

Some might complain that the 19th-century techno-nationalist elite had more favorable circumstances in which they lived and worked, starting with the unifying experience of victory in war. In contrast, we have social-media-driven polarization and alienation, ethnic strife, drives to promote one’s own group above others in a pitched battle over a perceived zero-sum future, and looming above it all the threat that the machines will soon assume control and treat us as either pets (at best) or pests (at worst).

But this is to gloss over the challenges faced by 19th-century America and the context within which the new elite had to operate: widening economic inequality, grinding rural poverty and foetid urban slums, recurring panics and depressions, rampant corruption in public life and business, a political compromise that granted the Civil War’s losers carte blanche to recreate an apartheid regime destined to last almost a century, brutal wars with native tribes, violent suppression of labor unrest and anarchist and other violence in response, and a population drowning itself in drink.

Thus present troubles are no excuse for the failure of a would-be elite class to take on the role that many among it think it suited for.

As Greer notes, creating and sustaining the earlier techno-nationist elite was a generational task. Perhaps our present-day technologists think that they cannot afford to take the long view, that the Singularity is just around the corner and the best we can do is shape its contours a bit before it’s too late.

But what if the Singularity is delayed, perhaps indefinitely? What if we are actually looking at a decades-long period of ongoing social, economic, and political disruption in the US and around the world? Then it would be nice if our would-be ruling class put a bit more time and effort into thinking how they might govern and to what ends, and then worked to put those ideas into practice.

This post is my own attempt to provide a guide to doing that—inevitably an inadequate attempt, but an attempt I felt compelled to make after reading Greer. I sometimes write as “we” in what follows, not because I myself am or could be a member of such an elite, but to put myself in others’ places and imagine what I might say and do if I were.

What America stands for

Before we discuss means, what about ends, and the values determining those ends? What does this would-be elite stand for? What is their vision for both the America they want to lead and the technological economy and society they are helping create? And, just as important, what are they against? What are the ideas and attitudes they abjure, and who are the enemies they must overcome?

Let’s start with America. What is it as a nation, and what is its place in the world? My candidate: America is a nation dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, built on the proposition that adherence to such principles is the key to promoting the well-being of individuals, their families, and the society in which they live, and that participation in that society should in theory be open to anyone willing to live according to its principles.⁴

America’s role in the world is then to serve as an example to other countries of what liberal democracy can be at its best, a supporter of other liberal democracies against the forces that threaten them, and, finally, a place that welcomes as potential citizens anyone in the world who can embody the true spirit of America and become an American not just in form but in mind and deed.⁵

I also believe that the free market system is the system best equipped to promote the ideals of liberal democracy and to provide the robust economic growth required to promote both individual flourishing and the nation’s capability to sustain and defend itself and its people. Technological progress plays a key role in promoting that system and that growth, and thus is key to the fulfillment of the American project. But, as instantiated in America, both technological progress and the free market must ultimately serve the causes of liberal democracy and the well-being of Americans.

What is our moral vision?

What moral vision do we uphold? The techo-nationalist elite of the 19th and early 20th century were nominally united by their common Christianity. However, it is likely impossible for any one religion to provide a universal creed for today’s would-be elite. Beyond the different religions of those in America today and those coming to America as immigrants—Christianity in its various forms, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on—most of that elite is resolutely secular, even atheistic, in outlook. It would seem that our search for a common moral vision is doomed at the starting gate.

However, again, we should not exaggerate the differences between the present and the past. The Christianity of the 19th century industrialists and the Eastern Establishment was less obsessed with matters of the spirit and more concerned with matters of the world. It was to a large degree embodied in an Episcopalian establishment that was an American offshoot of a English state church serving that state’s ruling class, and fulfilled a similar function for the US techno-nationalist elite. Perhaps the most influential gospel among that elite was the “gospel of wealth” as evangelized by Andrew Carnegie:

The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi gives us, but, while animated by Christ’s spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age, and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner.⁶

A basic moral code for today’s elite can thus plausibly be constructed as follows:

First, a foundational morality as embodied in multiple religions and among most unreligious, one that (for example) sees murder, rape, theft, and fraud as universally bad.

Next, a moral code that aligns with the ideals of liberal democracy: respecting the dignity of each individual as a fellow citizen, promoting the rule of law, and upholding the interests of individuals and families, especially when those come into conflict with those of powerful corporate and state bodies. This rules out supposed exceptions to the base moral code that can be found in clan-based societies and autocracies, for example, honor killings and extra-judicial killings of dissidents and others respectively.

Finally, moral obligations that bind those who enjoy the success afforded by their native talents and their contingent luck, and who are placed in a position to directly or indirectly rule over others. This is the realm of noblesse oblige, of recognizing that what one has achieved is to a large degree determined by factors beyond one’s control, and that that in turn should motivate one to help those less fortunate in their circumstances.

Enemies without and within

If we take as our touchstones liberal democracy and technological advances in support of liberal democracy, who are our enemies?

First are the enemies of liberal democracy: autocracies of various stripes and groups that reject the rule of law in favor of the “rule of the clan.”⁷

Next are those within liberal democracies who are the enemies of technological advances in support of liberal democracy: those who believe that protecting their current status (e.g., as “real Americans”) is more important than economic growth and technological advances, and those who believe that economic growth and technological advances are pernicious and must be sacrificed in the name of equity, “saving the planet,” and other causes.

Finally there is a heresy of liberalism itself that we must suppress: a radical libertarianism that elevates the “sovereign individual” above all else, and disclaims all obligations to one’s fellow members of society beyond the bare minimum of “nonagression.”

Coalition building for techno-nationalists

Having outlined ends, we now turn to means. Of the three elements Greer sees as crucial to creating a techno-nationalist elite, the second is most easily satisfied: “an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests.” That base consists of the public technology companies whose valuations together dominate the US stock market, the private technology companies with equally lofty valuations, and the horde of new startups specializing in bits or (increasingly) atoms that hope to join them. Money is the least of problems for our would-be elite, but money cannot substitute for the other factors Greer identifies.

Let’s turn therefore to the first element: “a political coalition to which [the elite] owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence.” Here our would-be elite’s efforts have been halting at best and ham-fisted failures at worst. (See for example Elon Musk’s thus-far-empty threat to create the “America Party.”) How might they do better?

Greer discusses at length the role that the post-Civil War Republican party served as a political home for 19th and early 20th-century industrialists. Might one of our two major parties serve the same function today?

Unfortunately, both parties are dominated in their different ways by the enemies of technological progress I identified above, those who would sacrifice economic growth on the altars of nativism and equity respectively. As Greer has previously written, the direction of the Republican Party is to a large degree determined by whoever heads it,⁸ and thus support for a techno-nationalist program will depend in large part on the personal whims of GOP leaders.

As Greer also has written, the Democratic Party is driven more by interest groups and less by its leaders’ personal whims. However, despite pundits promoting “abundance,” there is as yet no strong Democratic faction committed to that cause; it certainly doesn’t seem to be popular among younger staffers and grass-roots activists, most of whom are more anti-capitalist in outlook and prioritize considerations of equity over economic growth.

A techno-nationalist “Prosperity Party”?

Where does that leave us? It seems that any successful techno-nationalist coalition must have an effective political party at its core. As the political scientist Lee Drutman notes, “Political parties aggregate citizen and group preferences, and fuse those interests into a consistent long-term program. Without this partisan brokering function, independent actors would float around the political space chaotically.”⁹ This applies no matter how rich and influential these independent actors are.

But the conventional approach to starting a third party is very difficult, given the structural and other impediments to its success—again no matter how rich and influential its backers might be.

Drutman proposes to address this issue through the promotion of “fusion voting,” that is, allowing a given candidate be nominated by two different parties and appear on the ballot under both their names. Their votes would be tallied separately for both parties, and then “fused” to give their final vote total.¹⁰

Thus we can imagine a hypothetical “Prosperity Party,” dedicated to promoting eeconomic growth and technological advances for the benefit of all Americans. It would recruit like-minded Democratic or Republican candidates to also run under its own banner, provide them financial and other support, and see its vote totals reported alongside those of the two major parties.

Unfortunately, there’s a fly in the ointment: Fusion voting as described was quite common in the United States before and during the period in which Greer’s techno-nationalist elite was ascendant. However since that period the two major parties have cooperated to eliminate any such threat to their hegemony by passing legislation that effectively outlaws this practice in all but two states (New York and Connecticut).¹¹

Drutman sees potential legal avenues to overturning these prohibitions, perhaps based on their violating constitutional rights to free association. I doubt this will be a successful strategy; judges owe their positions to the major parties that nominate them, and I predict that instead courts at all levels will maintain the status quo and defer this question to legislators.

A techno-nationalist “Prosperity Society”?

What then to do? There is certainly no obstacle to this hypothesized Prosperity Party running candidates in states like New York where fusion voting is still legal, or in other states like California where it is permitted in special cases like US presidental elections.

But an effective party needs an effective organization, hence a second element of building a techno-nationalist coalition: build a capacity for policy and organizational work outside the two-party structure. Greer has complained about the lack of “nuts-and-bolts policy expertise“ among conservative activists.¹² Such expertise, and the related expertise on how to effectively govern, are exactly what an effective elite needs. This expertise could be applied within the two major parties as well as in support of a new Prosperity Party.

Such an organization would be the techno-nationalist equivalent of an organization like the Federalist Society, except focused on the executive and legislative branches as opposed to (just) the judicial branch. This “Prosperity Society” would recruit and support techno-nationalist activists, policy wonks, potential bureaucrats and political appointees, and (last but not least) potential political candidates who might win Prosperity Party endorsements. If elected, they could then work to roll back prohibitions against fusion voting, so that they would be able to formally run under the Prosperity Party banner while still maintaining affiliations with one of the two major party banners.

A techno-nationalist “prosperity agenda”?

Of course, party organizations and policy shops are useless unless a techno-nationalist agenda can win support from a majority of voters. I suspect there are at least three components to a potentially winning agenda:

• Promoting affordability, especially for housing and healthcare. The split here will likely be between young people and old people, with the latter’s economic well-being tied to a large degree to high home values and generous healthcare subsidies. A Prosperity Party should side with the young.

• Putting in place an immigration policy that promotes economic growth and the effective assimilation of new immigrations into American culture. The Prosperity Party should side with the majority of Americans who are overall positive toward immigration and immigrants.

• Ensuring that the prosperity resulting from technological advances (AI or otherwise) is widely shared. Note that this does not mean trying to enforce economic equality. In fact, it’s quite likely that technology-driven economic growth will increase economic inequality, not decrease it. The goal is rather that all Americans have the means to live lives of dignity and worth, free from precarity, and that through the liberal democratic system they have some reasonable influence over the context in which technological advances occur, as opposed to being treated as mere speed bumps on the road to the future.

Others have written on the above topics at length, so I’ll forgo any further comment on them.

Institutions for techno-nationalists

I now turn to Tanner Greer’s final prescription for creating a techno-nationalist elite: “a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large.” Ideally such institutions would nurture and support prospective members of a new techno-nationalist elite from childhood to adulthood, and from their early careers to the height of their power.

K-12 education for a techno-nationalist elite

Let’s start with childhood. Greer notes the important role played by private boarding schools as “national preparatory academies for the sons of the industrial elite.” Many of these schools still exist and have become a feeder system for Harvard and other elite colleges and universities.

For various reasons I consider it unlikely that these schools will play a similar role for a 21st century techno-nationalist elite. I consider it much more likely that new entrants will evolve to fill this particular ecological niche. As it happens, there are candidates near to hand, namely the growing ecosystem of high-end private schools being established under the Alpha School brand, as well as others modeled on Alpha School principles and licensing its associated TimeBack suite of educational software.¹³

The Alpha School model seems almost tailor-made for incubating a techno-nationalist elite: it combines accelerated academics in the morning (enabled by advanced educational applications developed in accordance with established principles of learning science) with guided instruction in life skills and project-based learning in the afternoon. It’s a veritable factory for equipping young people with advanced leveragable skills (including STEM skills), socializing them in a technology-friendly environment, and giving them a sense of being part of a “culture distinct from the country at large.”

Such a system is not for everyone. As a review of Alpha School notes, upper and upper-middle-class parents in Austin, Texas (the location of the original Alpha School) will likely continue to send their children to traditional exclusive private schools like those Greer mentions: “That is where the elite are sending their kids, why wouldn’t you want your kids in the same place?”¹⁴

The reviewer (later revealed to be Edward Nevraumont) goes on to ask “So who is going to Alpha?” and answers: “Mostly elite non-conformists,” with Alpha School parents comprising a mix of tech employees moving to Austin (e.g., from the San Francisco Bay area), Indian immigrants in tech or small business, and “non-conformist ’new media’ personalities,” typically specializing in tech-related topics.

Nevraumont speculates that “[Alpha School] will need to find a way to break through that niche into the mainstream if they want to truly transform education more broadly.” But whether or not that happens, I think it’s very possible that Alpha School and its imitators could form a parallel private school ecosystem serving a would-be techno-nationalist elite who no longer look to traditional private schools as a path to elite status.

University for a techno-nationalist elite

Assuming that Alpha School or something like it becomes the default for the would-be techno-nationalist elite, what would they do for post-secondary education? In other words, what institution (if any) would be for them what Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League were for the 19th and 20th century techno-nationalist elite?

It’s tempting to propose radical solutions to this problem. For example, perhaps these students will forgo entirely a traditional college or university experience, and instead apply for programs like the Thiel Fellowship that seek to divert talented individuals from university into doing research or creating startups. Or perhaps they’ll avail themselves of specialized educational opportunities like short-term “boot camps” that aim to prepare students to enter the workforce. (One such program, Gauntlet AI, is the source of a large fraction of the Alpha School developers.)

Another possibility is that they will in fact attend universities and colleges, but universities and colleges that (like St. Johns College) emphasize the classic works of Western civilization and (like the University of Austin) aim to act as bastions of free thought.

I think the likelier outcome is that the children of any future techno-nationalist elite will matriculate at an institution that has existed for some time now, that already enjoys an reputation as a focal point for technogy-minded folks, that is located in an area already known for its technology industries, and that is large enough to absorb a good fraction of the graduates of a nationwide network of Alpha Schools and their equivalents.

The most obvious candidate for this role is Stanford University. In this regard, note that the daughters of Joe Liemandt, the billionaire funder of Alpha School, opted for Stanford, and I would not surprised to learn that it is and will be the preferred destination for other Alpha School graduates as well. Having established a reputation as “the Harvard of the West,” Stanford would then become (more than it already is) the Harvard of the 21st century techno-nationalist elite.

Adult institutions for a techno-nationalist elite

Once the children of a new techno-nationalist elite enter the adult world, what “institutions, rituals, and social customs” would continue to bind them together as a unified class? Tanner Greer briefly mentions the Union League Clubs established in New York City and elsewhere, and the marriages that tied elite families to each other.

But Greer omits mention of one of the most important institutions for the late 19th and early 20th century American techno-nationalist elite, namely the Episcopal Church:

This was . . . an age in which, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Episcopal Church enjoyed a social cachet above virtually all other religious groups . . . . The names of fashionable families who were already Episcopalian, like the Morgans, or those, like the Fricks, who now became so, goes on interminably: Aldrich, Astor, Biddle, Booth, Brown, Du Pont, Firestone, Ford, Gardner, Mellon, Morgan, Procter, Taft, Vanderbilt, Whitney.¹⁵

The list includes many of the most prominent and powerful financiers and industrialists of the time. J. P. Morgan in particular was such a devout Episcopalian that he regularly attended church conventions as a delegate and was appointed to a committee charged with revising the Book of Common Prayer.¹⁶

It’s thus worth looking at the functions that the Episcopal Church served for this previous techno-nationalist elite, to determine whether and what kinds of institutions (religious or secular) might serve similar functions for a future elite.

The first was to bless its adherents as an elect, not only religious (as the more Calvinist doctrines of Episcopalianism would imply) but also social and cultural, an elect whose members would serve as models for others to admire and emulate. The essential idea was that “there was an institutionalized set of touchstones of belief, behavior, and taste that were embodied in the proper sort of individuals and could serve as a beacon for a nation in profound social transition.”¹⁷ In the cultural sphere this led to the establishment of many of the great American art and other museums, as well as support of high culture in general.

At the same time, this elect was encouraged by church leaders to look within and become conscious of their own good fortune and their consequent obligation to assist those less fortunate. In the social sphere this led to the establishment of outreach programs to the poor, “institutional churches” that provided secular services on church grounds, settlement houses, and related projects in the spirit of the “Social Gospel.”¹⁸

Other aspects of the Episcopal Church worth noting:

• Membership in its establishment was restricted but also open to some degree. Being Anglo-Saxon was almost a prerequisite, as was having a certain degree of wealth—many churches even had a system of pew-rents that restricted the relatively impecunious to the upper galleries. However, within those constraints it was possible for newcomers to join the church (many arriving from Congregationalism, the Quakers, and Unitarianism), serve the church is various ways as a layperson, become accepted into church society, and gain contacts that would prove valuable in society at large.

• Churches and their services provided loci in space and time where the elite could meet on a regular basis (at least every week for diligent parishioners), work together in church activities on a relatively equal basis (e.g., as vestrymen), and build ties between families that might later be reinforced by marriages.

• Episcopalians were key to promoting the growth of the “St. Grottlesex“ network of exclusive private schools that Greer discusses as being established to perpetuate the 19th century techno-nationalist elite. Of the specific schools that Greer names, the majority were founded, funded, or led by Episcopalians; it was very common for the headmasters of these schools to be Episcopal priests.¹⁹

Are there present-day institutions that could be to our would-be techno-nationalist elite what the Episcopal Church was to that past elite? Or possible new institutions that could evolve to fill that role?

Here I must plead ignorance. While I’ve worked for Silicon Valley companies almost my entire career, my life has been lived at a remove from the Valley itself, not to mention San Francisco proper. I have even less visibility into what might be going on in Austin, Texas, El Segundo, California, or other places that might rival the Bay area as a technology hub.

So I don‘t know what public or private organizations or events are currently patronized by our would-be elite, or what might attract their attention in future. However, I’m mildly skeptical that the next Episcopal Church will in fact be a church. It’s possible that there may be a revival in religious affiliation and practice (for example, see the recent growth in interest in Catholicism), but I find it difficult to see any particular faith or denomination unifying and binding a future techno-nationalist elite.

Prospects for (re)creating a techno-nationalist elite

Tanner Greer explored the history of the last American techno-nationalist elite, and I’ve speculated about what might be needed to create a new elite for the 21st century. But how likely is that to occur?

Rather than engage in detailed speculation, I’ll consider a counterfactual. Greer highlights the experience of Union victory in the US Civil War as the crucible for the creation of the 19th century techno-nationalist elite. But suppose the Confederacy had instead defeated the Union militarily, especially early on, seized Washington and captured and executed Lincoln and most of his cabinet, and been able to force terms of surrender on the remaining Union leaders? Or what if after the fall of Fort Sumter the North had simply acquiesced to the secession of the South?

What of the techno-nationalist elite then? In a North marked by defeat or retreat, no doubt with continuing internal conflicts over slavery and recriminations over the war’s outcome, would a self-consciously patriotic and nationalist elite have formed? Or would the financiers and industrialists of the post-war North have remained divided, some making accomodations with slave power and others resisting as best they could?

If the formation of a new techno-nationalist elite depends on America facing an existential threat and emerging victorious, then I have to confess I’m skeptical as to the possibility, and incline more to something like the counterfactual scenario above: a technology industry whose leaders are divided amongst themselves, some genuinely patriotic and committed to liberal democracy (but relatively ineffectual in their promotion of it) and others willing to make accomodations with illiberalism (but in practice being dispensable junior partners of the actual ruling elite).

Here ends my thoughts and speculations. When I originally read Tanner Greer’s article and posted an X thread about it, I expressed a hope that “Tanner Greer expands on this analysis in future articles, including offering advice tailored to the present day.“²⁰ The above is my own contribution to providing “advice tailored to the present day,” until such time as we’re privileged to read a better treatment from the man himself.

I should have already covered most of the material in Calculus I in prior courses, most notably Mathematical Foundations II and Mathematical Foundations III. However, I felt I had some significant holes in my knowledge, especially around hyperbolic functions (see below). So I wanted to make sure that I had complete coverage of single-variable calculus, especially before going on to more study of multi-variable calculus and other topics.

As I usually state: Not everyone will share my opinions on Math Academy, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful or interesting to at least some people.

Back on pace

After not quite meeting my 40 XP/day goal during the Linear Algebra course, I got back on track during Calculus I. According to my activity log, I averaged just under 42 XP per day. There were only 4 days when I did less than 30 XP, and just 1 day when I did no Math Academy work at all. However, I didn’t do so great on quizzes: I took 7 quizzes and did retakes on 6 of them.

I spent just under a month (28 days) taking Calculus I, as with Linear Algebra, a relatively short time that’s due to already having covered a lot of the material in the Mathematical Foundations courses.

Anki on the side

While working through Calculus I, I found myself struggling to remember all of the formulas that might come up in problems. This was especially true when I started the topics on hyperbolic functions, which introduce an entirely new set of identities and derivatives, similar to those associated with trigonometric functions but just different enough to cause confusion. I concluded that unless I could achieve better automaticity with these identities and formulas I was going to have a tough time going forward into multivariable calculus and other courses.

Unfortunately, Math Academy’s spaced repetition process wasn’t giving me enough review of standad formulas. Math Academy staff have teased a potential future “math facts” class; however it appears to be some ways off, and in any case sounds like it will focus more on elementary school material like multiplication tables.

It was therefore back to the old school spaced repetition solution for me, namely creating flash cards in the Anki app. (I wrote “app” singular, but the process is more complicated than that: I create cards using the Anki desktop app for macOS, synchronize them up to the Anki website, and then synchronize them down to the Anki iOS app on my iPhone.) Thus far I’ve added over 80 cards, from formulas for the volumes of spheres and other solids to the derivatives of inverse reciprocal hyperbolic functions.

Doing additional spaced repetition using Anki has helped a lot with simpler things like formulas for volumes and surface areas. However, I’m still having trouble with trigonometric and hyperbolic identities and formulas, where it’s easy to get lost in a maze of twisty little equations, all somewhat alike. I’ll need to continue working on this.

On to Calculus II

After finishing Calculus I, I’m immediately starting Calculus II. Per the Math Academy status information, I’ve already completed about 50% of its topics, so I should be able to finish up Calculus II well before the end of the year and conclude my study of single-variable calculus. Then it’s on to Multivariable Calculus and then Probability and Statistics. After that, who knows? I’d like to level up in my Python knowledge, so maybe I’ll look into the computer science course discussed on the recent Math Academy podcast by Jason Roberts and Justin Skycak.

That’s it for now, I hope to be back here with another update in a few weeks.

I’ve completed my fourth Math Academy course, Linear Algebra. As has become a habit by now, I’m celebrating by posting another update on my Math Academy experience. (For my experiences with my first course, Mathematical Foundations II, see my original series of posts summarizing the book The Math Academy Way and reviewing MFII. For my experiences with the Mathematical Foundations III and Mathematics for Machine Learning course, see my first and second updates.)

My usual disclaimer applies: Not everyone will share my opinions on Math Academy, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful or interesting to at least some people.

(Not quite) keeping up the pace

During the Linear Algebra course I didn’t quite maintain the daily goal of 40 XP that I set while taking the Mathematics for Machine Learning course. I averaged about 38 XP per day for 33 days, according to my activity log; there were 9 days when I did less than 30 XP, and 3 days when I did less than 10 XP, including 1 day when I did no Math Academy work at all. I took 8 quizzes and did re-takes for 3 of them; for 1 quiz I got 0 XP the first time.

All in all, I spent just over a month taking Linear Algebra, a relatively short time that’s due to already learning a fair amount of linear algebra in the Mathematics for Machine Learning course. (When I started the Linear Algebra course, Math Academy indicated that I had already completed 75% of the course topics.)

I know eigenvectors

As I’ve mentioned multiple times, my original interest in Math Academy was sparked by my desire to finish learning linear algebra, a process that I abandoned short of learning what an eigenvector was. I am happy to relate that I now know what an eigenvector is, as well as an eigenvalue.

This is not knowledge in the “knowing what” sense; that I could have gotten from Wikipedia or (if I wanted to be au courant) by asking an LLM. It’s “knowing how” knowledge, the result of filling lots of sheets of paper calculating eigenvalues and their associated eigenvectors, and then using them in various contexts (e.g., singular value decomposition and principal component analysis). Do I know all of this cold, able to employ any of those techniques with full confidence and automaticity? Not quite yet, I’ll no doubt need further review sessions. But I can’t look at a matrix anymore without thinking about computing its eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

More Math Academy musings

It’s also a tradition for me to include in these updates more of my thoughts on the Math Academy system itself. Here are two for this post:

Math Academy and Alpha School. In my post on Joe Liemandt’s intterview about Alpha School, I discussed TimeBack, the software stack (“education OS”) used by Alpha School and being licensed to other private schools. As it happens, TimeBack includes a number of third-party learning systems, including Math Academy. In fact, according to a TimeBack developer, Math Academy is among the most-used applications in the Alpha School TimeBack platform. A subsequent tweet details the criteria used for selecting applications for inclusion; it’s clear that Math Academy does well on all of them.

It’s interesting to speculate whether Alpha School is paying for individual Math Academy subscriptions for each student, or whether Alpha School is using Math Academy under some sort of enterprise site license. Based on various things I’ve read, it appears that the TimeBack system wants and needs clear feedback on student interaction with the learning application, and that’s difficult to do with a third-party application. Joe Liemandt also has a goal of deploying a version of TimeBack to a billion children, and that will be difficult with Math Academy’s current pricing. Thus I wouldn’t be surprised to see Math Academy and other third-party applications eventually replaced in the TimeBack stack with similar applications developed in house.

Does Math Academy need a “slow mode”? In a recent post titled “Frustrated and Confused,” Reddit user cmredd sounds off about Math Academy: “I think I’m quite close to cancelling my subscription unless a few (basic but key) things are fixed or added.” Their core complaint is that Math Academy doesn’t provide enough reviews, especially for students who only have enough time to do a few XP per day (e.g., 15 or less), and doesn’t provide a simple way for students to request more reviews. Hence the idea of a “slow mode” for such students that prioritizes reviews of prior material over the introduction of new material.

I made a number of comments in response to that post, and won’t repeat them here. But I did want to add that The Math Academy Way has an extensive set of FAQ chapters that respond to various questions and concerns about how Math Academy works, including some touching on the points that cmredd raises. These FAQs are well worth reading at length. Whether you agree with Math Academy’s general approach or not, there’s no question that its developers can provide coherent and onsistent answers for why it works the way it does.

However, I think there is a question about how useful Math Academy can be for a student without a good mathematical background who can spend only a few minutes per day on the system on average. I’m not a believer in XP-maxing (like people who brag about doing 100+ XP per day), but it seems like it wouldn’t be cost effective to pay $49 a month for a service where you can do (say) only 10 XP or less a day on average (e.g., just a single lesson, review, or quiz), need to do lots of reviews due to experiencing difficulty with the material, and therefore may take a year or even two to finish a given course. As I’ve written before, Math Academy is not for everyone, and I think such students would be better served by looking at alternatives.

(The folks at Math Academy agree, and it factors into their economic model. From the response to the FAQ “Why isn’t Math Academy free?” in The Math Academy Way: “Math Academy . . . must be priced in a way that the company’s solvency is not dependent on a massive user base.”)

Where to next?

As discussed above, I’ve now completed my original goal of learning linear algebra (at least to a first level), and in only 9 months compared to my original estimate of 1 year. The question now is, what to do next?

In my last update, I floated the idea of taking Multivariable Calculus and then Probability and Statistics, rounding out my knowledge of topics that the Mathematics for Machine Learning course provided an introduction to.

However, now that I’ve finished Linear Algebra ahead of schedule I’m thinking of instead taking Calculus I and then Calculus II, Math Academy’s university-level introductory calculus courses. There were areas of calculus that I didn’t get lessons on in Mathematical Foundations I and II, like hyperbolic functions, and I’m still a bit shaky on topics like differentiation and integration of the less common trigonometric functions. I’d like to have more automaticity on those topics before tackling the full Multivariable Calculus course.

But no matter what I decide, I plan to be back here in a few months writing about the successful completion of another step in my Math Academy journey.

Joe Liemandt, the funder, principal, and (along with Mackenzie Price) driving force behind Alpha School, recently gave a lengthy interview to Patrick O’Shaughnessy that went into a fair amount of detail about the thinking and the technology behind Alpha School and related ventures. It joins a growing list of material about Alpha School (see my “Further reading and listening” section below). I want to focus on this interview in particular, since as the chief funder Liemandt is ultimately responsible for the direction that Alpha School takes, and thus will bear a large part of the responsibility for its overall success or failure. I’ve supplemented it a bit with Alpha School-related material from other sources that provides additional context for Liemandt’s remarks.

A disclaimer: I am not an expert on K-12 education. I am an adult learner who has used and reviewed online learning systems from Math Academy and Physicsgraph and liked them. My goal in this post, as in my others, is to be neither an uncritical cheerleader nor a dismissive critic, but rather to provide a measured look at the topic and to try to add some value to the public discussion of it.

You can watch the video for yourself or read the transcript, so I don’t intend to recap the interview or even discuss every part of it. The following are the areas I found most interesting.

Initial impressions

The video is prefaced with a clip from later in the interview:

All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because GenAI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you.

These are Joe Liemandt’s words, but it was Patrick O’Shaughnessy who chose to highlight them. In doing this I think he gave the audience a misleading impression regarding Liemandt’s ideas and what Alpha School actually is. Taken at face value and in isolation, this is a standard pitch we’ve heard a hundred times before: “Everything you know about education is wrong, ChatGPT can teach everything your child needs to know.” The real story here is more interesting; in particular, Alpha School is using LLMs, but not in a conventional way, i.e., as chatbots.

After listening to the Liemandt interview, I listened to a podcast interview with Mackenzie Price. Consistent with someone who hasn’t done public interviews for many years, Liemandt’s comments are rather unpolished compared to Price’s, which come off to me like a very practiced sales pitch. I have nothing against sales pitches (I’ve worked in enterprise software sales groups for many years), but here I give the edge to Liemandt in terms of being perceived as an authentic and credible spokesperson for Alpha School.

“Time back” vs. ”2 hour learning”

Early in the interview Liemandt makes the point that one major way to make children like school more is just to have less of it:

My first week as principal 3 years ago, you know, I’m now accountable to the kids . . . and so I’m talking to some fifth graders I’m like . . . “What would make you love school?” and they’re like, “less school,” and I’m like, ”Okay, well how much less?” and they’re like, “no school,” and I’m like “Okay, well, that seems a little light as a principal to like have no school,” and so basically we negotiated . . .

He then expands on the central pitch of Alpha School: that students need to spend only 2 hours a day doing hard-core academic learning, and then can spend the rest of the day in more enjoyable pursuits. Later in the interview he puts it this way: “Give kids their time back, . . . that is by far the number one motivator for kids.”

Alpha School emphasizes the “2 hour learning” pitch (even to the point of having an associated website 2hourlearning.com and company 2HR Learning, Inc.), but my personal opinion is that “giving kids time back” is a more effective and defensible marketing message. Like Benjamin Bloom’s “2 sigma solution,” “2 hour learning” is a slogan that’s superficially attractive but typically ends up being qualified in one way or another, often by people disinclined to believe the hype: “It wasn’t really 2 sigma, because there are factors A, B, and C that made Bloom’s study unrealistic.” “It’s not really 2 hours a day, it’s really more like 3.5 hours a day, because it doesn’t account for X, Y, and Z.”

Why provide an opportunity for people to nitpick your claims and muddy your message? From a kid’s point of view, shortening the traditional school day even a bit is a win—recall how happy you were as a child when school ended an hour early.

TimeBack, Incept, and “AI Powered”

Perhaps the most interesting section of the interview is Liemandt’s discussion of TimeBack and Incept, two of the software products being developed for Alpha School and related ventures. Together with comments by the pseudonymous Austin Scholar and @turing_hamster (see below), these give a more detailed picture of how the academic component of Alpha School works.

The first, and most important, point is that Alpha School does not use LLM chatbots like ChatGPT and its ilk. In fact, Liemandt in this interview and Mackenzie Price in hers go out of their way to emphasize that LLM chatbots as they currently exist are not a suitable base on which to build a learning system, because students will primarily use them to cheat. To quote Liemandt:

[Deploying ChatGPT is] literally the worst thing you could do. Just to be very clear, you are not a principal at a school if you think ChatGPT is good. 90% of the use of ChatGPT is to cheat. . . . Now, there are 10% use cases of people who are like, “I need a Socratic tutor where I’m super excited about it and I need to dive in deeper,” right? And that 5 to 10%, those kids are going to crush it with it, and you should give it to those 5 or 10%. 90% of the kids are like, “How do I use this to cheat?”

To revisit one of my pet peeves: This is all well and good, but when you advertise Alpha School as an “AI Powered Private School” (the tab heading on its website), talk about your “AI tutor” (on the 2hourlearning.com website), and have press articles with titles like “A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You,” people can be forgiven for thinking that you’re just another undifferentiated entry in the increasingly long line of startups trying to take ChatGPT (the one ”AI” product the typical person knows about) and teach kids with it.

I thought over-emphasizing the “AI” aspect in marketing was a mistake when Math Academy did it, and I think it’s a suboptimal approach here as well, especially as we’re seeing more stories about the downsides of chatbots: “No, no, no, our AI is not like their AI; ours is the good kind of AI.”¹ Now back to Liemandt . . .

We literally don’t have chat functionality activated in our AI. Like it is not a chatbot. It’s terrible . . . that’s not what people need. . . . Where we use the AI is generating personalized lesson plans and personalized lessons themselves. . . . That is a great use of AI. A second great use of AI is actually to watch the screen and coach the kids, right? To give them the game film.

As I understand it, Incept is the component within the overall software stack that generates the lessons themselves. An LLM is used in that context, not to interact directly with students but to generate “variations on a theme,” that is, sets of questions and answers formulated from underlying templates but customized in various ways. (For more detail, see this tweet; as noted in the ensuing thread, the PhysicsGraph team is doing something similar.)

TimeBack is the overall software stack (or “EducationOS” as the thus-far-minimal TimeBack website terms it) that integrates the various learning apps, both those produced in-house (e.g., AlphaRead) and those sourced from others (e.g., Math Academy). By analogy to Math Academy and PhysicsGraph (the systems I’m most familar with), this presumably includes taking students through initial diagnostic exams, maintaining an overall knowledge graph and students’ progress against it, determining course and lesson sequencing for each student, and providing status dashboards for students, parents, and “guides” (Alpha School’s version of teachers).

Monitoring students

As noted by Liemandt, TimeBack also incorporates an LLM-based system that tracks students’ actions on video and attempts to identify times when students are not being attentive to lessons or otherwise not completing their work. Liemandt explains:

So 3 years ago, we would just sit there and have teams of people all night, you know, the kids would finish and then all night you would just sit and watch the videos and annotate them of, okay, that’s what’s going wrong here, this is what the kids [are] doing. . . . It’s just building out a video model, a reinforcement learning video model, . . . with human feedback, and the human feedback is not from the kids, it’s from people watching it to say, “I need to train this up on what how kids learn and what is effective learning, what are the anti-patterns, and what do we want to coach for.”

Between this and other uses, per Liemandt, Alpha School is apparently spending on the order of $10,000 US per student per month on LLM usage.

This sort of fine-grained student monitoring is exactly what edtech critics like Audrey Watters and others decry as “techno-fascism,” “surveillance capitalism,” and the like—the idea that “tech bros” want to turn every school into a panopticon in which a student’s every move is monitored and measured. (And, presumably, students who chafe under the yoke are removed from the classroom, in the first stage of the “school-to-prison pipeline”.)

Yet, as Liemandt’s mention of “game film” suggests, such close monitoring of students, including automated measurement of what they do, is not uncommon at all in other school activities, most notably school sports. What makes this different? Perhaps at least three factors:

First, the monitoring is compulsory. Students decide for themselves whether they try out for a school team, but they have no choice as to whether or not they go to school, and little or no choice regarding the regime they’re under once they get there. Any choice being exercised is by their parents, who decided to enroll them in Alpha School in the first place.²

Second, there are concerns about misuse or commercial use of data generated from student monitoring—that somewhere buried in a 50-page terms of service agreement is a clause granting Alpha School or its affiliates blanket permissions to sell any and all student data to all comers.

Finally, some might worry about collected student data being used to justify expulsions or other lesser punishments—for example, by an Alpha School-affiliated charter school trying to get rid of unwanted students to improve its overall test scores. Being kicked out of school has a lot greater consequences than being kicked off the football team or the marching band.

How Alpha School responds to these concerns is up to it. There are some people who will never be convinced of its beneficence in this respect, but I think it’s worth reassuring its most important audience, parents of prospective students.

Money as motivator

Liemandt lays great emphasis on student motivation as the most important factor for Alpha School to focus on:

Motivation is 90% of the solution. Okay. The edtech is 10%. . . . We keep putting edtech into schools and test scores keep going down. . . . The issue is edtech is necessary but not sufficient. . . . Educators will say you need two things to teach a kid. First, and most important, a motivated student and then, second, you need to put them in lessons of the correct difficulty. . . . Edtech does the second one really well. . . . But are you going to engage? Do you have any interest in engaging? Right? Or if I don’t engage with the app, right? Then I’m not going to learn anything. Motivation is 90%. And Alpha is 100% built around solving the motivation problem.

Having to spend less time on academic subjects is a powerful motivator, as discussed by Liemandt elsewhere in the interview. Alpha School also employs another motivational technique, rewarding students who perform desired tasks with “Alpha bucks,” a private currency that students can exchange for various treats.

In the interview Liemandt goes further, discussing how he rewarded students with relatively large cash prizes for acing Texas student assessment tests:

Back to money motivation: I’m like, “I’ll give you a $100 bill for a hundred on the Texas STAAR, 100 for 100.” They’re like, “That’s still impossible, I can’t get one.” I’m like, “No, no, no, there’s a catch: any grade level.” . . . And they’re like, “Okay, I’ll take a third grade test.” Yeah. And I’m like, “Great.” And so they go take a third grade test with STAAR, they get $100.

Liemandt continues the anecdote, explaining how the students then repeated the feat by taking the fourth-grade STAAR test, still below their grade level, scoring 100 again and winning another $100 US.

This is interesting because, as referenced in the AstralCodexTen review of Alpha School, research by Bradley Allan and Roland Fryer indicates that rewarding students for “outputs” (in this case, perfect test results) is less effective than rewarding them for “inputs” (e.g., reading a book). From that point of view, Liemandt’s approach is less than optimal.

But let’s continue with Liemandt’s anecdote:

They take [the fifth-grade test] and they get an 85, right? 75 or 85. And I’m like, . . . “Do you want the AI tutor to generate the lessons so you can get 100?” And they’re like, ”Let me see how many.” And then they see it and they’re like, “I can do that in a week.” And they’re like, “I’m in.” And then they get a hundred, right?

Back to Allan and Fryer:

In our experiments, input incentives were more effective than output incentives, suggesting that students do not know how to increase their test scores. If students only have a vague idea of how to increase their test scores, then when provided with incentives for performance, they may not be motivated to increase effort.

The implication of Liemandt’s remark is that incentives for outputs can indeed motivate students, if they are given specific instructions on exactly what they need to do to achieve those outputs, for example, by going back and mastering prerequisite topics that the system has identified that they lack.

Trilogy, ESW, and funding Alpha School

In the latter part of the interview, O’Shaughnessy prompts Liemandt to go down memory lane and talk about his experiences at his companies Trilogy and ESW Capital.³ I was working for enterprise IT companies in the 1990s on and had previously never heard of Trilogy, much less ESW Capital, so this section held particular interest for me. ESW Capital, apparently a spin-off from Trilogy, is a private equity firm investing in software companies,

The popular image of private equity firms is as “vulture capitalists” that buy companies, load them up with debt in order to pay themselves dividends, lay off most of the staff and strip the companies of assets to further enrich themselves, and then stand back as the companies slide into bankruptcy and lay off the rest of their employees.

From my perspective, ESW Capital seems more like a modern incarnation of Computer Associates, once the second largest software company in the world. The basic model is to acquire companies that are no longer growing strongly but have substantial installed bases, and then to switch the companies’ approaches from “hunting” to “farming.” That is, the new focus is on supporting existing customers in order to realize revenue from subscription renewals and expansion deals, and cutting back on those areas of the business that don’t directly support that strategy.⁴

When done well this can be a very lucrative strategy, one that throws off a large ongoing stream of cash. As Liemandt remarks:

What you’re just doing is managing, and . . . you’re pulling the cash out to do it and there is investment you make because that extends it. Software still is one [area] where if you focus on the customer—I mean, just basics, right—that you can extend . . . the area under the curve [i.e., total revenue per customer]. . . . And then you get some nice things like, oh, an AI uplift and, you know, things like that that that allow you to do it.

What does this have to do with Alpha School? First, it provides money (lots of money) to create not just Alpha School but the whole panoply of software and related technology for which Alpha School is the first customer, as well as to expand and extend the Alpha School model in various ways:

I was like, “You’ve been telling me for 25 years that you could run this company better than me. Let’s see. Right. Good luck. I’m going to go be a principal.” . . . And I said, “And by the way, I’m taking a billion dollars so . . . figure out and get that going.” And so now I turned from, you know, boss to shareholder. And literally I’m like the worst shareholder now in the world. . . . I’m like, “Guys, I need all this capital. Like I need more cash. . . . You know this expansion that Mackenzie [Price] wants to do, right? It’s going to take $300 million.”

Alpha School also benefits from a training model originally pioneered by Trilogy, in the form of Trilogy University, and now embodied in Gauntlet AI.⁵ The Gauntlet AI program is essentially an internship (unpaid except for room and board) in which participants work 80-to-100-hour weeks for 10 weeks, with the promise of guaranteed employment for those who graduate (about half of those who start). Presumably a good number of those graduates end up in the Joe Liemandt keiretsu, of which 2HR Learning, Inc., Alpha Schools, LLC, TimeBack, LLC, and various other Alpha School-related ventures are members.⁶ (Alpha School also recruits through Crossover, apparently another member of the keiretsu.)

Growth-maxing and business models

I get the idea that underlying Joe Liemandt’s interest in Alpha School and related ventures is not just a desire to transform education for the better (a desire that strikes me as entirely sincere), but also a desire to go back to his Trilogy roots and build a business from scratch. Certainly his ambitions in this area are outsized: not just to run a few private schools but to stake out a major position in what he refers to in the interview as a trillion dollar market.

(Is this a bad thing in principle? Some people are very allergic to the idea of for-profit companies being involved in education, for example, pointing out that for-profit colleges encouraged students to take on excessively-large and non-dischargeable student loans for degrees of dubious worth. However, that was arguably in large part a consequence of misaligned government incentives and regulations, which many nonprofit institutions also took advantage of to grow enrollments. More generally, I don’t think nonprofit status confers any special virtue on educational institutions; each institution, nonprofit or for-profit, should be judged on its own merits.)

The overall strategy pursued by Liemandt, Price, et al., seems to be to offer a set of differentiated education products, which we may think of as the Gold, Silver, and Bronze versions of Alpha School:⁷

First is Alpha School itself, both the original in Austin, Texas, and its sister schools being established across the US. This offering, at a price point ranging from $40,000-75,000 US per student per year, is intended for affluent families with parents who are relatively tech-savvy (so as to appreciate the “AI Powered” messaging) and willing to consider nontraditional schooling.

Based on the Alpha School location list, there are 15 of these schools existing or planned across the US (along with the lower-cost Brownsville, Texas, campus, which is something of a one-off). Some of these are for lower grades only, perhaps due to a combination of limited staff and the desire to have students grow within the system. There are also variants of Alpha School targeted at different student profiles and offered under different brands: GT School for more academically minded students, Texas Sports Academy for student athletes, Next Gen Academy for gamers, and so on. To the best of my knowledge these have comparable pricing to the original Alpha School.

The Alpha Schools and their private school variants will likely be a “halo product” for the entire 2 Hour Learning project: The selective effects of the relatively high tuition will likely mean that these schools will produce the best academic results, they will feature the most impressive (and expensive) afternoon projects and extracurricular perks (e.g., overseas trips), and are likely to be the schools most featured in student testimonials, pundit newsletters and tweets, and national press articles.

Next come a potpourri of “Alpha School lite” offerings, apparently priced in the $5,000-15,000 US range. These include virtual charter schools (like Arizona’s Unbound Academy), systems for homeschoolers (Alpha Anywhere), and programs to supplement traditional schooling (Prequel). Except for Prequel, these aim to leverage government funding to bring the cost down to a level more affordable for less affluent families, either via direct funding of charter schools or indirect funding through education voucher programs. For example, the Texas Education Savings Account Program will provide almost $11,000 US per student per year to offset the cost of private schools, and up to $2,000 US per student per year for homeschooled students.

Liemandt also talks about plans to expand this model to more schools, whether directly affiliated with Alpha School or just licensing the TimeBack platform (e.g., through the 2 Hour Learning for Private Schools program):

I’ll give you an example of one of one of the ones [that’s] not funded yet, but the business plan is super awesome, which is, Texas just passed school choice, [a] billion dollars [in funding]. . . . This group is . . . building Texas Sports Academy. Their goal is to go to every school district in Texas . . . and build a . . . micro middle school for D1 athletes. . . . They’re going to be based on the . . . Timeback platform. And then in the afternoon, it’s going to be one of the local coaches, right, that everybody in town reveres, who is going to have a . . . middle school . . . for people who want to be D1 athletes, and they’re going to spend the afternoon doing whatever awesome athletics. . . . As we prove this out in scale there’s actually a lot of . . . famous professional athletes who are like, “I would love to start a school like that.”

The final offering is the most ambitious: to reduce the cost of TimeBack, Incept, and the other components of the Alpha School software stack to the point where it can be offered to most children around the world:

I was talking to some ministers of education of other countries and, you know, I was like, “Look, you know, sometime in the next 5 years—I don’t know exactly when—but there’s going to be a tablet that’s less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day. . . . Our AI burn is like 10,000 bucks a kid now, but it’s going to be down. It’s going to be for everybody.

Now, it’s not as if we haven’t been down this road before, although inflation has raised the price from $100 US to $1,000 US; we’ve seen the TED Talk and read the post mortems. But even if the technical and cost obstacles can be overcome (and I’m not going to bet against it⁸), we go back to one of Liemandt’s first comments: “The edtech is 10%. . . . Motivation is 90%.” So the “$1,000 tablet” by itself will not be sufficient.

From guides to games

In the original Alpha School model, motivation is provided by highly-paid guides. What’s Liemandt’s answer for motivating a billion children? The answer appears to be video games:

The people who know how to engage kids more than anything is video game developers. . . . When I talk about this tablet, I absolutely believe that there will be video games on that tablet that are totally engaging to kids that they will go through and it will teach them everything they need to know. . . . We’ve invested over $100 million in getting some of the best video game designers in the world. They’re down in Austin, and they are building a video game on top of the 2-hour learning engine that they believe will rival any video game on the planet. And the difference [is], parents will be happy to let their kids play it and get their kids to [the] top 10%.

Again, it’s not as if Alpha School and 2HR Learning are the first organizations to think of gamifying education. We’ll have to wait for wider release of the full TimeBack stack to see how their approach compares to that of others.

Is there another way?

As related by Liemandt elsewhere in the interview, Trilogy was originally a scrappy upstart, just Liemandt and his co-workers in the proverbial Silicon Valley garage. The contrast with Liemandt’s present day project could not be greater: The overall Alpha School/2HR Learning/TimeBack project has hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and hundreds of developers. It’s taking on the most difficult challenge in education, transforming K-12 schools, and finding the task far from simple. (For example, the affiliated venture Unbound Academy has had almost all of its applications to run charter schools rejected.)

The two systems I’m most familiar with, Math Academy and PhysicsGraph, are taking a very different approach. They’re built by small teams (3 people for PhysicsGraph, perhaps a dozen or 2 for Math Academy), appear to be primarily self-funded, focus on defined topic areas, are one or two orders of magnitude less expensive ($200-500 US per year per student), and are targeting much more tractable markets (supplemental instruction for K-12 and postsecondary students, and career- and hobby-related training for adult learners).

The result is systems that embody the same general principles of academic learning as Alpha School (as laid out in Justin Skycak’s book The Math Academy Way) and are (in my experience) very effective. Math Academy in particular is so well thought of that Alpha School itself adopted it for use within the overall TimeBack system. (Although it’s always possible that it will be replaced later with a system developed in-house.)

Which approach will be more successful, Alpha School’s full frontal assault or the more guerilla approach of Math Academy, PhysicsGraph, and their imitators? I’m afraid that I’ll have to end on an ambiguous note and say that I just don’t know, although I’m looking forward to seeing both approaches play out. In the meantime I’ll keep checking up on Alpha School and its various offshoots, even though I don’t have a school-age child to consider enrolling.

Further reading and listening

I’ve divided the following links into three sections, as follows:

Alpha School tells its own story:

• Joe Liemandt interview with Patrick O’Shaughnessy for the “Invest Like the Best” podcast. The subject of this post.
• The Future of Education. Mackenzie Price’s newsletter.
• “Class Dismissed” by Jeremy Stern for Colossus magazine. A profile of Joe Liemandt and Mackenzie Price, written with their cooperation. (Colossus is part of the media franchise that includes “Invest Like the Best.”)
• “A.I. School Is in Session: Two Takes on the Future of Education” with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton for the New York Times. An dual interview with MacKenzie Price and Princeton professor (and historian of science) D. Graham Burnett.
• “Khanversation #53: Alpha School and and education in 2025” with Razib Khan and Josiah Neely. An interview with Pamela Hobart, who began as an Alpha School parent and now works for Alpha School.
• @turing_hamster on X. The social media feed of a developer working on the software used by Alpha School. Although it’s scattered across multiple tweets, this is probably the best place I’ve found so far to get more insight into the technology behind the TimeBack system.
• “Welcome to the Future of Education” from 2HR Learning. A white paper describing the “2 hour learning” system. It has lots of material covering claimed results, and a bit about the actual apps.
• “2024 Cyber Charter School Application for Unbound Academic Institute.” Unbound Academy’s application to open up a virtual charter school in Pennsylvania. (The actual application begins on the page headed “Cyber Charter School Application Fact Sheet.”)

Alpha School parents and students tell their own stories:

• Austin Scholar. A newsletter by an Alpha School graduate who is very positive about the program. Of particular interest are the articles “Debunking the biggest myths about Alpha,” and “The Alpha App Stack.”
• “Your Review—Alpha School. An anonymous review (mostly positive) of Alpha School by a parent of students at the Alpha School Austin campus.
• JeskaLuv Substack. A newsletter by a parent of students at the Alpha School Brownsville campus, with four posts thus far reviewing their experience (overall negative).
• “Alpha School and 2x Learning.” An article by an Alpha School parent questioning its method for assessing learning improvements.
• “Why I Pulled My 13-Year-Old Daughter Out of Traditional School“ by Rachelle Starr. A (mostly positive) article by a parent whose daughter is a student using the Alpha Anywhere offering for homeschoolers.

Other peoples’ takes on Alpha School and related initiatives:

• “A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You” by Pooja Salhotra for the New York Times. An overview of Alpha School, including comments from educators and Alpha School parents.
• “AI school offers challenge to public education: ‘They need to be accountable to their customer’” by Zachary Suri for Texas Standard. A story about Alpha School by a Texas-based news organization that interviewed Alpha students (apparently with the cooperation of Alpha PR staff) but was subsequently denied permission to use the interviews, supposedly because the reporter asked too many “DEI questions.”
• “The Truth About 2 Hour Learning & Unbound Academy a/k/a The School ‘Replacing Teachers with AI’” by Dan Meyer. A critical look at the proposed Arizona charter school Unbound Academy, based on Alpha School principles and technology.
• “AI Schools, the Future of Education?” by Quinton Ashley. A critical look at Alpha School and the various people and companies associated with it.
• “Alpha School’s Other Story Wasn’t in the Times” and “Innovation Without Critique Isn’t Reform. It’s Marketing“ by James O‘Hagan. Two critical articles, the first based on the posts in JeskaLuv Substack.
• “A World-Class Education in Two Hours a Day?” by Greg Campion. A positive take on what adoption of the Alpha School model might mean.
• “A New Vision for School” by Joey Kang. Thoughts on Alpha School from a teacher in Singapore.
• “Are Teacherless Schools Good for Education?” by Jordan Davis. Another take from a teacher.
• “What Traditional Education Can Learn from Alpha School’s AI Teaching Model” by David Hobbs.
• “AI’s Impact on Education: High Quality Learning in Just Two Hours a Day“ by Dadang Irsyam. One of the earlier articles on Alpha School, by a tech journalist.
• “On Alpha School” by Zvi Mowshowitz. An positive article discussing some of the principles behind Alpha School, including motivation and gamification.
• X post by Rui Ma. A recap of the AstralCodexTen review, interesting for the subsequent thread.
• “Texas Businesswoman Wants to Open AI-Driven, Teacherless Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania” by Peter Greene for the Bucks County Beacon. An article criticizing Unbound Academy’s proposal for a charter school in Pennsylvania.
• “RE: Unbound Academic Institute (PA) Charter School.” The Pennsylvania Department of Education’s formal decision rejecting Unbound Academy’s charter school application.

My usual disclaimer applies: Not everyone will share my opinions on Math Academy, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful or interesting to at least some people.

Steady as she goes

Im my last update I opined that keeping to a reasonable XP goal each and every day was the best approach to maintaining steady progress in Math Academy courses. For Mathematics for Machine Learning I set a daily goal of 40 XP. According to my activity log for the 105 days I spent in the course, I averaged 48 XP per day. There were only 11 days when I did less than 40 XP, and only one day when I skipped Math Academy entirely and didn’t do any XP at all.¹

At the other end of the scale, there were only five days where I did 70 XP or more, and only two days when I did 100 XP or more. (One of these was the last day of the course, when I was close enough to completing it that I decided to just go the extra mile and get it done; that was also my maximum XP total at 102.) In general my strategy has been to do enough work each day to get at least 40 XP. The major exceptions to this were when I failed quizzes. Then I would do reviews and retake the quiz the same day, which padded my XP total a bit.

Coach is always right (or you should find a new coach)

One of the things people bring up from time to time is wanting a lot more flexibility in deciding which order to do lessons. This is also related to the complaint made by Oz Nova in his article “A balanced review of Math Academy” about the rigidity of the knowledge graph:

Why do some learning resources designed for autodidacts—such as Math Academy . . .—rely so heavily on dependency graphs? The generous answer may be that it’s unrealistic for the learner to know an appropriate ordering, and perhaps motivating for them to be shown the “ideal.” The cynical answer is that these programs take the idea of mastery learning too far, and have become dogmatic. . . . After all, it’d be easy enough to present users with a suggested sequencing without strictly requiring that it be followed.

A minor nitpick: Math Academy does not completely impose a strict ordering on students. Yes, the system decides what topics to present next, but when a student is presented with a list of lessons and reviews, they do not have to do them in the presented order.

But, as it happens, I am fairly religious about following the sequence of topics suggested by Math Academy: I do any suggested reviews first, going in sequence from first to last presented, and then do all the suggested lessons in sequence from first to last presented. I also generally do any presented quizzes as soon as they are presented, and only rarely choose to postpone them.

If we take at face value Justin Skycak’s analogizing learning math to developing athletic talent, then in essence I’m just following the instructions of my “coach.” Presumably the people who developed Math Academy know a lot more about math education than I do, and they have the benefit of lots of data about what works well and less well with Math Academy students. I‘m therefore not inclined to question their judgment about course and topic sequencing, any more than a freshman player would presume to tell their coach that they should change the content and sequence of their drills.²

Of course, sometimes players chafe at a coach’s instructions, and find that the coach’s approach doesn’t match well with their own talents and style. It‘s also true that some coaches are more competent than others. If a player finds they’re in a less than optimal situation, they can always find another coach, transfer to another school, or ask to be traded. As I’ve mentioned before, Math Academy is not for everyone.

“Among the chief glories of Western civilization”

Oz Nova also has some things to say on the topic of self-motivation and why (in his opinion) schemes like XP goals, leaderboards and leagues, and related Math Academy features fall short:

Every person has their own mix of motivation and the last thing I want to do is to judge another’s. But speaking personally, if a book promises to help me grapple mathematically with the chief glories of Western civilization, now THAT might sustain my interest.

This is from the introduction to Differential Equations with Applications and Historical Notes by George F. Simmons, a book as close as possible to perfect, for me, for this topic. It is not just motivating but stirring, driving, elevating. By math textbook standards, it overflows with fascination, excitement, even love.

The Simmons treatment is so vibrant that something like Math Academy sits lifeless in comparison.

Since I’ve had trouble learning about differential equations and would like to know more about them, I got a copy of Simmons’s book. I found it to be well-written and sprinkled through with information about the historical development of the topics covered, including mini-biographies of the mathematicians who developed them.

Is this motivating? It’s hard to say. As I’ve previously mentioned, I have a practical approach to learning mathematics, primarily focused on what I can do with it, so I’m probably not the best person to judge. I also often find myself distracted by sidebar material like this, so much so that I neglect the main discussion.³ From that point of view there’s a lot to be said for Math Academy’s “lifeless” approach.

Having said that, it’s possible that Math Academy might benefit by including more material on the historical background of the topics in its courses. Perhaps this could be included as a reward (not a sidebar), for example, after successfully completing a quiz or course.

Onward to (more) eigenvectors

As you may recall, my original motivation for signing up with Math Academy was to learn what an eigenvector was, and by extension to complete my study of linear algebra. The Mathematics for Machine Learning course covers various topics in linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and probability and statistics, and includes a fair amount of material about eigenvalues and eigenvectors, including their application to principal component analysis.

So in a sense I’ve already achieved my goal, as I now know what an eigenvector is. But I don’t want to stop here. My next task is to finish the real Linear Algebra course; I’ve already covered three quarters of its topics, per my dashboard page, so even allowing for having to relearn some topics I should be able to complete it well before the end of the year (my original timeframe). Then I’ll go on to Multivariable Calculus and Probability and Statistics, rounding out my knowledge of topics that the Mathematics for Machine Learning course provided an introduction to. That will be more than enough to occupy me in the coming months, then I’ll see where my Math Academy journey takes me after that.

The first (and at the time of writing, only) course offered on PhysicsGraph is Introduction to Quantum Computing. I decided to take advantage of a promotional offer (see below) and recently finished the entire course. And as I did with Math Academy, I decided to write a review.

PhysicsGraph compared to Math Academy

As noted above (and freely confirmed by Chris Sutherland, one of its two founders), PhysicsGraph is very much modeled on Math Academy. In particular, it shares the following features:

A finely-scaffolded knowledge graph. Physics, like mathematics, is a hierarchical field: you must know elementary topics by heart in order to understand more advanced ones. Both PhysicsGraph and Math Academy embody these dependencies in a “knowledge graph” for each course, a directed acyclic graph of individual topics (e.g., “quantum operations and quantum circuits”) showing which topics are prerequisites for other topics (e.g., “multi-qubit operations and quantum circuits”). As a student progresses through the knowledge graph, fulfillment of prerequisites (i.e., completing the corresponding lessons) unlocks lessons for more advanced topics.

To reduce cognitive load on students, ideally the topics in the knowledge graph should be “bite-sized,” each containing the minimum of material needed to advance to the next topics in the graph. This help ensure that students can fully master a given topic before going on to the next. (Justin Skycak of Math Academy refers to the ideal knowledge graph as being “finely scaffolded.”) For the most part this seems to be the case with PhysicsGraph, although there were some longer lessons (like quantum teleportation and superdense coding) where some might have preferred their being split in two.

As does Math Academy, PhysicsGraph publishes the knowledge graphs for topics in its course(s), so you can see the scaffolding for yourself. For example, see the knowledge graph for the Introduction to Quantum Computing course.

Experience Points (XP). Like Math Academy, PhysicsGraph assigns each lesson an XP value that presumably reflects the amount and difficulty of the material in that lesson. Students then earn XP for themselves by successfully answering questions, with XP bonuses handed out for successfully answering all questions in a lesson or review.

I found accumulating XP on PhysicsGraph to be easier than on Math Academy: I was able to do over a thousand XP in a week and well over a hundred XP per day. (I did 354 XP on one particularly productive day.) In contrast, I keep myself busy trying to maintain a pace of 40 XP per day on Math Academy. Part of the difference may be that I was already familiar with many topics in the Introduction to Quantum Computing course (e.g., matrix multiplication and vector spaces) from learning and practicing them on Math Academy.

Adaptive diagnostics. Like Math Academy, PhysicsGraph has students take a diagnostic exam before starting a course. The exam is used to judge the level of the student’s knowledge and which prerequisite topics they can safely skip. That frees the student from getting bored covering material that they already know.

I found there were only a couple of times where I felt PhysicsGraph assumed knowledge I wasn’t fully solid on, one being expressing complex numbers in polar form. (I had some problems with this in Math Academy too.)

Spaced repetition review. Like Math Academy, PhysicsGraph prompts students to periodically review previously-covered (and hopefully mastered) material, scheduled in such a way that a student reviews the material for a given topic at the point at which they’re in danger of forgetting it.

Math Academy has an elaborate algorithm for doing this (see my discussion of it), one that incorporates “implicit review” of material, i.e., reducing the overall number of reviews based on the fact that successfully reviewing a topic also implicitly reviews prerequisites for that topic. The PhysicsGraph website doesn’t contain detailed information about its SRS technology, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it has a similar scheme.

Im Math Academy the reviews tend to predominate as you reach the end of a course, so that you spend as much or more time reviewing previous material as you do learning the last few topics in the course. That wasn’t my experience with PhysicsGraph, which may be a good thing or bad thing: It’s possible that PhysicsGraph is not scheduling enough reviews to promote long-term retention.

Gamification. Like Math Academy, PhysicsGraph allows students to compare their progress to others by looking at a leaderboard displaying XP totals for the highest-ranking students. However, unlike Math Academy, participating in the leaderboard is not optional, and there is only a single leaderboard instead of the multiple “leagues” of Math Academy. I think participation in gamification schemes should be optional, since some students don’t want to compare themselves to others and don’t need the motivation provided by such comparisons. As for having multiple leagues, I don’t think that makes sense until the number of active PhysicsGraph students is one or two orders of magnitude larger than it is now.

Community forum. Like Math Academy, PhysicsGraph has a Discord server in which students can (at least in theory) share experiences, help each other with problems, provide feedback to the service’s founders, and so on. At present the PhysicsGraph server is relatively inactive, presumably because the number of students is still relatively small. (Even with Math Academy, which presumably has hundreds if not thousands of active students, only a relatively few people post to the Discord server; this is typical of social media in general, and I wouldn’t expect PhysicsGraph to be any different.)

Target market. PhysicsGraph will likely appeal to the same types of students that Math Academy does, namely homeschoolers, advanced K-12 students, university students, and adults of any age learning new fields for personal enjoyment (like me) or professional enrichment. In particular, based on discussions on the Math Academy discord server and elsewhere, taking a Math Academy course appears to be a popular way to prepare for a formal instructor-led course (e.g., at a college or university) or to supplement such a course while taking it. I expect PhysicsGraph to have a similar appeal, and in fact their proposed next courses (“Physics I” and “Physics II”) appear to directly address that use case.

No “freemium” option. Like Math Academy, PhysicsGraph is a paid service with no free offering (although it does offer a free trial with a money-back guarantee). In my opinion this is exactly the way it should be: These services offer real value to students, and students should be willing to pay for that value.

PhysicsGraph’s subscription pricing is currently $29 US per month, compared to $49 US per month for Math Academy. I think this is a fair price given the paucity of courses at present compared to what Math Academy offers; however I think there’s room for raising the price in future if PhysicsGraph can built out a complete set of undergraduate physics courses and even extend into adjacent areas like chemistry. (I should also add that PhysicsGraph’s current annual price of $199 US is an absolute bargain, representing a 43% discount off paying per month; with Math Academy, paying by the year gets you only a 15% discount.)

The lack of a free offering also means that PhysicsGraph, like Math Academy, has an easier path to becoming a sustainable business by bringing in revenue from day one. The long-term financial health of a service like PhysicsGraph is presumably important for its founders and employees. But it’s also important for those of its customers who are lifelong learners, who want to take more courses over time and continue to get reviews for those previously taken. And unlike a typical VC-funded “freemium” educational offering, a service that can sustain itself solely on revenue from students will also be resistant to adding intrusive ads, employing deceptive marketing techniques, and generally implementing other forms of “enshittification.”

There are also areas where PhysicsGraph differs from Math Academy, for better or worse:

No timed quizzes. Math Academy periodically tests students’ mastery of previously-covered material using timed quizzes, requiring the student to answer a series of questions within a 15-minute period. The results of the quizzes are then used to schedule additional reviews and to modify the difficulty of subsequent quizzes. Despite finding these quizzes to be stressful, I think they’re useful in exposing gaps in learning and determining how best to correct them. I hope PhysicsGraph sees fit to offer a similar feature in future.

No “free response” questions. Math Academy lessons, reviews, and quizzes typically use multiple-choice questions with five possible answers. However some questions require responses where the student types in the answer. (Math Academy provides some UI widgets to make this easier when entering formulas.) As with quizzes, I find these types of questions more stressful to do, because I can’t just test my tentative answer by comparing it with the presented list of choices; instead I have to double- or even triple-check my work. But, also as with quizzes, I think free-response questions help in learning the material. This is another feature that PhysicsGraph might consider for future implementation in cases where it makes sense.

No question answering when revisiting lessons. This is a subtle point, but one that I think is important: In both Math Academy and PhysicsGraph you can go back to previous lessons and go through the material again. In Math Academy you can also answer the questions again in the same manner as when taking the lesson originally, except that you do not receive any further XP. However, this is not possible in PhysicsGraph; when revisiting a lesson you see all the questions presented along with your previous answers (correct or incorrect) and the accompanying explanations. I think this is a mistake: a major reason to revisit a lesson is to solidify your understanding of that lesson’s topics, and working through the exercises again helps contribute to that. I think PhysicsGraph should consider implementing Math Academy’s approach.

No “AI-powered” marketing. Math Academy advertises itself as “AI-Powered,” and its website has a “How our AI works” web page. As I discussed in my review, I am not a fan of this strategy, which presumably seeks to exploit the current hype around ChatGPT and other LLM-based services to help market Math Academy. PhysicsGraph is blessedly free of this conflation of LLMs with the machine learning-based analytics underlying Math Academy and (presumably) PhysicsGraph. It’s not trying to advertise itself as A Young Lady’s Illustrated Feynman Lectures, and thank goodness for that.

(To be clear, I think LLMs may have a place in a service like PhysicsGraph or Math Academy. However I think they’re an unneeded distraction from the core functioning of the service, and figuring out when and where their use does make sense will require some thought and experimentation.)

Per-class pricing. For both Math Academy and PhysicsGraph the main offering is via a monthly or yearly subscription; I think this is the right choice for both services, since it provides ongoing revenue with which to improve the service and add more courses. However, as I previously noted with Math Academy, I think it’s useful to also offer students the option to pay a one-time fee for an individual course, including the ability to review material for that course after completing it.

PhysicsGraph has done this with the Introduction to Quantum Computing course, offering lifetime access for $99 US, discounted from $199 US as an early-bird promotion. The promotional price thus equates to over three months of the subscription pricing, with the regular pricing (when it goes into effect) amounting to over six months of a subscription.

I could have opted for a $29 per month subscription, knocked out the Introduction to Quantum Computing course in less than a month, and then cancelled the service. However, I went for the per-class price because I wanted to be able to review topics in the course on an ongoing basis without having to maintain a subscription.

PhysicsGraph compared to Quantum Country

PhysicsGraph is not the first attempt to teach the basics of quantum computing and leverage spaced repetition to help the reader remember them. A couple of years ago Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen created the Quantum Country website, billed as “a free introduction to quantum computing and quantum mechanics . . . presented in a new mnemonic medium which makes it almost effortless to remember what you read.” It covers much of the same material as the PhysicsGraph Introduction to Quantum Computing course, including a discussion of quantum teleportation.

How does Quantum Country compare to the PhysicsGraph quantum computing course? My snap judgment is that Quantum Country is superior as a scientific essay for a knowledgeable audience, and makes an honest attempt to sweat the details (as opposed to hand-waving over them). However, I think it’s inferior as a way to actually learn quantum computing basics.

First, and most trivially, Quantum Country assumes a basic level of knowledge that some readers won’t have, to be “comfortable with complex numbers and with linear algebra—vectors, matrices, and so on . . . [and] with the logic gates used in conventional computers—gates such as AND, OR, NOT, and so on.” That’s not a problem with a scientific essay, and as the authors note there are other resources to learn those details. But it is a problem for readers coming into the topic relatively cold.

Quantum Country also spends some time on the history of the ideas behind quantum computing and the context for its development, and includes a fair amount of material on the principles and benefits of spaced repetition. If you subscribe to Justin Skycak’s theory of skill development then a lot of that is arguably superfluous—like teaching someone how to play basketball by starting out with a discussion of the high-level principles that make it a great game.² PhysicsGraph’s (and Math Academy’s) approach is more like “let’s have you first learn how to dribble.”

Next, Quantum Country material is not divided up and scaffolded as it would be in PhysicsGraph or Math Academy; it’s more like an essay where the reader is continually led along. This may be a small point, but I think it’s important for a student to have a small sense of accomplishment after finishing one lesson and before beginning the rest.

I think it’s also important for the system to gate access to further lessons on successfully completing the current one; with Quantum Country you can completely skip (or wrongly answer) all the spaced repetition questions and just go on to read further without necessarily understanding what you’ve read already.

Finally, in various places Quantum Country mimics the “this exercise is left to the reader” practice typical of traditional textbooks. This is contrary to the instructional philosophy behind both Math Academy and PhysicsGraph, in which all topics should be fully explained (even over-explained), with the role of the student then being to practice on their own applying the explained techniques to problems that are very similar (sometimes only trivially different) to those covered in the instructional material.

However, Quantum Country does have one feature that I think might be profitably considered for PhysicsGraph (and Math Academy): it sends email messages to remind readers when reviews are due. Math Academy assumes a model in which students are accessing the system every day, will see offered reviews in the normal course of events, and do not need additional reminders.

PhysicsGraph also assumes that students are motivated to check the system on a regular basis, in part because they’re paying for a continuing subscription. But what about students (like me) who pay for lifetime access to a single PhysicsGraph course? There may come a time when reviews for that course are due only every few days, or even every few weeks or months. In that case it would be useful to get email reminders when reviews are due.

Learning to teleport quantum states

I think there are multiple areas where PhysicsGraph could be improved. In particular, after I completed the course and started to get reviews for various topics, I had real difficulty completing the reviews for the last topics in the course, superdense coding and quantum teleportation. Above and beyond any intellectual deficiencies on my part, I think this may be due to at least two factors:

First, and most important, I think not having periodic timed quizzes is a real lack. There have been multiple occasions in Math Academy where I didn’t do well on quizzes and had to go back and do additional reviews and even revisit lessons. I think this really helped me better understand and retain the material. This is missing in PhysicsGraph, and as a result I wasn’t doing as much review as I should have been.

I also think some of the topics in the Introduction to Quantum Computing course could be even more finely scaffolded than they are. As one example, I think the lesson on separable and entangled states and Bell states might be better split into two. I’ve had major problems remembering the symbols for the Bell states and their associated quantum states; that might have been at least partially remedied by having a separate lesson (along with associated questions and reviews) dedicated to learning about those states.

But even in its current somewhat embryonic state, PhysicsGraph is a fun and effective way to learn physics. The choice of quantum computing for the first course is an excellent one: The material is understandable with only a minimum of mathematics knowledge, and the course itself teaches any additional mathematics needed.

The topic is also intrinsically interesting. Quantum mechanics, on which quantum computing depends, is a shining example of our ability to understand the world and manipulate it, the theory enabling everything from your cat’s laser pointer to the laptop on which I’m writing this article. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon that Einstein found baffling (he called it “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” “spooky action at a distance”) and the ability to teleport quantum states is one of its most surprising consequences.

Yet at the end of the Introduction to Quantum Computing course, after all the preliminary lessons about Kronecker products and Bell states, PhysicsGraph will take you to a point where you can not only understand how quantum teleportation works, but why it must work exactly that way. Doing it in practice is far from trivial—real magic is hard—but you will have unlocked the spell that underlies the trick.

I myself am not planning to subscribe to PhysicsGraph on an ongoing basis. My personal interest is in learning more about data science, and to that end I’m working through the relevant Math Academy courses to learn the needed background material. My interest in physics these days is a relatively casual one that can easily be satisfied through other means.

However, if you are interested in really learning physics, and not just reading popular articles or watching videos about it, I strongly recommend that you check out PhysicsGraph. It’s a worthy attempt to apply to learning physics the proven educational techniques—direct instruction, spaced repetition, and so on— implemented in the Math Academy service. PhysicsGraph is still under construction, but I have confidence that the people behind it will end up building something great.

Earlier this year I published a series of posts about Math Academy, summarizing the book The Math Academy Way and reviewing the service itself based on my experience thus far in completing the Mathematical Foundations II course. I’ve now completed the Mathematical Foundations III course as well and am starting the Linear Algebra course, the key to my quest to know what an eigenvector is Mathematics for Machine Learning course.

This is a good time to stop and present my updated thoughts on the Math Academy experience. Not everyone will share these opinions, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful to at least some people.

Class completions are the only milestones worth celebrating

Lots of people post daily or weekly about how many XP they’ve done that day or week, or celebrate their passing a certain milestone like 4,000 or 5,000 XP. I have nothing against such people, but I just don’t see the point of that. An XP total is an arbitrary figure and doesn’t necessarily bear a direct relation to what you’ve learned.

If your goal is to drive from New York City to Los Angeles, or from Paris to Berlin, it doesn’t matter how many miles or kilometers your car’s odometer shows, or even how many miles or kilometers you drive in a given day. All that matters is whether you reach your destination. You can celebrate when you get there. (As a corollary, that means I won’t be posting again about my Math Academy progress until/unless I complete the Linear Algebra Mathematics for Machine Learning course.)

But if you do have a burning desire to see my progress and verify it, you can look at my activity log for the time I spent doing Mathematical Foundations III and my certificate of completion for the course.

League participation is optional and potentially distracting

As I wrote in my earlier posts, I started out participating in the league updates. It was fun to a certain extent to compete against other people, but eventually I got a little too stressed out not just trying to qualify for promotion, but trying to be in the top 1 or 2 slots for the week.

I can see where competing against others and vying for promotion might serve as an external source of motivation for many people, and there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s good that Math Academy includes that feature. However, in my case I was motivated enough already, and doing leagues as well was a bit too much of a muchness. So, I eventually decided to stop worrying about the leagues and just concentrate on making progress in my course. As of now I see no reason to regret that decision.

You should try to do something every day (but not overdo it)

Even though I quit the leagues, I still made it a point to do lessons every day, ideally enough to exceed the 50 XP per day quota I had set for myself. I think I succeeded in that goal—I can’t recall any days on which I didn’t do anything at all, although there have been a few days when I just did one or two reviews.

Many areas of Math Academy appear to assume a student will be doing lessons five days a week, but I strongly recommend scheduling yourself to study every day if you can do it. There will always be emergencies that take precedence over doing a lesson, but I think it’s too easy to slack off and fall out of the habit if you deliberately miss a day or two.

At the same time, I encourage you not to overdo things. This is one reason I don’t pay much attention to people posting insanely high daily or weekly XP totals. Maybe they have the spare time to spend several hours a day working Math Academy exercises, but you probably don’t. Consistency, not speed, is the key; slow and steady wins the race.

During the Mathematical Foundations III course I typically found myself exceeding my 50 XP per day quota—it was too tempting to do one more lesson, or to do a review as soon as possible after missing a quiz question. For the Linear Algebra Mathematics for Machine Learning course I’ve decided to lower my quota goal to 40 XP; I have another projects I want to work on, and want to preserve time for them. Even at 40 XP a day I should be able to achieve my goal of finishing Linear Algebra Mathematics for Machine Leaning by the end of the year.

Math Academy should let you select your desired course sequence

When I finished Mathematical Foundations III, the system immediately began offering me lessons for the Mathematics for Machine Learning course. This is apparently because this is the default track that the system lays out for you. But, as I’ve noted multiple times, I don’t want to take Mathematics for Machine Learning, at least not now. I want to take Linear Algebra. (Yes, I know that Mathematics for Machine Learning includes a large chunk of linear algebra, but I want the full course of it.) (UPDATE: As noted above, I decided to take Mathematics for Machine Learning after all, and come back to the full Linear Algebra course later. But I still stand by my comment in the next paragraph.)

Unfortunately, I can’t find any way in the Math Academy interface to change the track that I’m on. The system knows (or should know) what courses are prerequisites for other courses, so it would be nice if I could see the tree of possible courses, select a goal to work toward (which for me right now would be completing the Probability and Statistics course), and then offer the courses in sequence needed to meet that goal.

Math Academy is (still) a great service

Despite the nitpicks I have about certain aspects of Math Academy and the online interface, I still think Math Academy is a wonderful service and have no regrets whatsoever about signing up for an entire year. I can’t speak to how it would be as a service for K-12 students, but if you’re a self-motivated adult learner interested in picking up math for the first time or as a refresher, Math Academy is well worth the money.

As for me, I have Linear Algebra Mathematics for Machine Learning to look forward to, and more courses currently being offered that I’d like to take beyond that. And with Math Academy adding more new courses this year, I’ll probably find a few more that I’d be interested in. Math Academy offers enough to keep me busy through the end of my current subscription, and I suspect I’ll be renewing it for next year as well.

My current status

As of the time of writing, I’ve completed the Mathematical Foundations II course and am about 28% of the way through the Mathematical Foundations III course, having accumulated a total of over 3,600 XP thus far. I’ve settled down into a routine of doing at least 50 XP a day, sometimes a bit more than that. I have never gone a day without doing at least something.

If I maintain my current rate of progress, I hope to complete the Mathematical Foundations III course sometime in late May or June (but see my complaints in the prior post about progress estimates!), and will then start the Linear Algebra course. As I mentioned previously, my goal is to finish the Linear Algebra course before the end of 2025, and then to complete the Multivariable Calculus and Probability and Statistics courses by the end of 2026.

Is Math Academy worth the money?

Let’s start with the obvious topic, money. If I meet the goals discussed above by the ends of 2025 and 2026, I will end up spending over a thousand dollars on Math Academy. That’s a lot of money, even for someone like me with a well-paying job. Then I’ll be faced with the choice of paying for the service a while longer, to make sure I get any needed reviews and won’t forget what I learned. (See my suggestion in the last post for a reduced-price offering that just covers reviews.)

However, on balance I think it was and will be worth it. Learning mathematics is both a hobby for me and supports other hobbies I have, and I’ve spent similar amounts on hobbies in the past. And it’s certainly true that spending several years on a less costly approach (reading a textbook and doing its exercises) didn’t work out for me. So, I’m happy to pay for a service that looks like it will.

Do you actually learn anything?

I think I’m learning some mathematics with Math Academy, but am I really? Well, I now have a much better handle on some topics that I previously had never encountered or had trouble remembering. The most notable of these are the synthetic division method for polynomials, the various trigonometric identities, and differentiation of products and quotients of functions.

I still struggle remembering some things, like the derivatives of the secant and cosecant functions, but I hope that will get better in time. In the meantime I sometimes resort to deriving those from the derivatives for sine and cosine. (This works fine in lessons and reviews but kills performance on time-limited quizzes.)

One thing I will say is that the “scaffolding” aspect of the Math Academy system means that often what I’ve learned is the simplest possible case, and I would be at a loss dealing with more general cases. For example, the Mathematical Foundations II course teaches using synthetic division to divide a simple linear polynomial factor (e.g., x-3) into a polynomial of higher degree, but not how to divide an arbitrary polynomial into another.

I don’t see this as a drawback, though. It’s necessary to master simple cases before taking on more complex problems, and the confidence gained from knowing how to solve simple cases gives one a step up when it comes to learning about harder ones.

Does speed kill learning?

One criticism levied at Math Academy is that it overly emphasizes speed of learning. For example, this criticism shows up in Michael Pershan’s critique of the Math Academy system and in student quotes from an article about the original Math Academy program that he links to (“We do too much in not enough time”).

It’s certainly true that the developers of Math Academy put great weight on the speed of learning (“accelerates the learning process at 4X the speed of a traditional math class” is a key selling point). And at $49 a month there’s a built-in incentive to go as fast as possible, to get the most bang for the buck and avoid spending too much by stretching out your course time.

This emphasis on speed also shows up in the leagues and leaderboard system, which encourages students to compete on how fast they can pile up XP. Finally, it’s a common occurrence on X and similar forums to see people posting their XP totals in a way that’s reminiscent of people posting their high scores in a video game. It prompts the question: “OK, you did 7835 XP, but what mathematics did you actually learn?”

I’m sure that the Math Academy developers will respond that learning rapidly is perfectly compatible with learning well. Certainly The Math Academy Way doesn’t mention any drawbacks to trying to speed run through courses; at one point it raises the possibility of getting through a typical course in 5-6 weeks (at 100 XP a day), and treats that as an unambiguously positive thing to do. (An included table goes even further and shows that by doing 160 XP a day you could complete a typical Math Academy course in three weeks.)

However, after having breezed through most of the Mathematical Foundations II course in less than a month, I’ve decided to deliberately slow down my pace. With the Mathematical Foundations III course getting into more topics I have less previous experience with, I’m trying to stick to my original goal of 50 XP per day, as opposed to trying to push up to and past the 100 XP a day mark. I also have other things I want to do in my spare time, and I don’t want to get to a point where I’m doing so many math exercises that I get sick of the whole process.

What about this “understanding” thing?

Another point of contention is whether Math Academy is really helping students to understand mathematics, or whether it’s just teaching superficial procedural skills. (Michael Pershan harps on this, for example, as does Dan Meyer.) Other comments have criticized the Math Academy system because it’s so different from the heavily proof-based way of learning mathematics embodied in various advanced textbooks, in which students build up their knowledge of particular areas of mathematics almost from first principles.

I’m not an expert in mathematics education, so I can’t really speak to the debates about whether Math Academy promotes understanding or not. I do read the explanations embedded in Math Academy lessons, though, and I do try to build up a basic understanding of what I’m reading.

As for proofs, the Math Academy developers are certainly aware of student demands for a more proof-oriented approach (see for example a post by Justin Skycak) and are apparently working to add more courses in that vein. That may or may not satisfy those who want Math Academy to be more like the textbooks they’re used to.

However, as a former applied math and physics major, my approach to mathematics is primarily instrumental: I want to know how to do math in support of other things that I want to do. I am less interested in learning mathematics for its own sake, and am very much not interested in an approach to math that is overly abstract and proof-focused. From my point of view the Math Academy approach is therefore very congenial.

Who else might benefit from Math Academy?

It’s been a while since I had to worry about school instruction in mathematics, whether for me or anyone else, so I can’t speak to the issues around using Math Academy for home-schooled students or mathematically talented students. But as an adult student of mathematics I do have some thoughts about Math Academy’s approach to that segment of the market.

If you base your impressions on what Math Academy students post on X, Reddit, and other online venues, you could get the impression that the typical adult Math Academy user is what the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom snidely called a “roaming autodidact”: “a self-motivated, able learner . . . simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets . . . almost always conceived as western, white, educated and male.”

Assuming that’s the case, one can understand some of the current product focus of Math Academy the company, including introducing more proof-oriented courses, as mentioned above, and especially adding courses like Mathematics for Machine Learning that cater to the latest hotness. They are doing what Clayton Christensen claimed incumbent vendors do, namely going up-market and catering to their most demanding customers.

But in so doing, is Math Academy closing off other potential market opportunities and leaving them to possibly be exploited by others instead? Let’s go back to Benjamin Bloom’s original research and recall that what got people’s attention was not that he was able to take a 95+ percentile mathematically-talented student and turn him [sic] into the next John von Neumann. Rather it was the claim that Bloom’s methods could enable an average student to reach much higher levels of achievement.

There are a lot of otherwise-intelligent adults out there who left off their mathematics education fairly early due to encountering difficulties and suffering ensuing math anxiety. What Math Academy could offer them is a firm grounding in actual mathematics, as opposed to a simplified exposition high on verbosity and very light on equations (the mathematical equivalent of the “physics for poets” courses some institutions have).

Let’s consider an alternative customer persona:

She [sic] is a former humanities major now working in a relatively non-technical job in a company or industry with a tech focus. She feels the lack of the mathematics training she never got, or dropped out of early due to encountering difficulties. She’s motivated to remedy that lack, and has even tried taking a couple of community college mathematics courses, but it just didn’t work out for some reason—maybe it was the teacher or curriculum, maybe she couldn’t make the schedule work due to work or family responsibilites.

She makes a reasonably good salary for a humanities major, but not nearly as much as the technical professionals she works with. She’s moderately progressive in her politics, and checks social media posts on Bluesky when she has a few minutes, because that’s where her IRL and online friends are.

How might Math Academy cater to her and people like her (assuming that it wants to)?

First, meet her where she is. Extend the word of mouth marketing efforts beyond X and Reddit to alternative platforms like Bluesky, which currently has over 30 million registered users. (PS: If anyone from Math Academy wants to set up a Bluesky account I’d be happy to reskeet their skeets.)

Second, further tone down the “AI-powered” messaging, or just ditch it entirely. As I mentioned previously, it’s a potential turn-off for many people, and she may be one of them. (And even if she’s OK with it, her friends may give her grief for using anything having to do with “AI.”)

Finally, consider some alternative product packaging. She doesn’t want to march her way through every course Math Academy has to offer. She’d likely be interested only in the Mathematical Foundations courses, and possibly only the first one or two courses in that series. Given the other demands on her time, she’s leary about committing to spend $49 month after month. She might instead like to pay a flat rate (amount TBD) for a single course like Mathematical Foundations I, and have a generous time limit for completing it, say six to nine months. (A 3,000 XP course could be completed within six months at a pace of 30 XP a day, or within nine months at a pace of 20 XP a day.)

Whether such an offering would find much take-up with this hypothesized “ex-humanities major” market is an open question. However, I think it would be a more attractive offering to that market segment than what the current service provides. And even if relatively few people take Math Academy up on the offer, I think there could still be important intangible benefits to reaching out to adult learners beyond the current core user base of tech-savvy folks. It’s not something Math Academy necessarily needs to do now—after all, the service is still technically in beta—but it’s something that might be worth considering in the mid-term.

We have LLMs now, why bother learning math?

Speaking of “AI” and the latest hotness, one possible response to Math Academy is, “Why bother?” I can ask an LLM to explain pretty much any mathematical topic to me (even in poetic form if I’m so inclined), and as LLMs improve their various capabilities I can just point one to a mathematical problem and ask it to solve it for me. What’s the point of paying $49 a month to Math Academy and doing all that work, when I could pay less (or even nothing) to get on-demand mathematical expertise with little or no work required?

There are responses one could make regarding why internalizing mathematics knowledge is important, especially if your job involves tasks that are mathematical or quasi-mathematical in nature. But that’s not my situation, so I’ll leave it to others to make that particular case.

My response is simpler: I enjoy doing math-related activities (like hobby data science projects), just like I enjoy writing, and I have no interest in outsourcing those activities to anyone or anything else. If I wanted to play the guitar, I wouldn’t be satisfied with paying someone to play the guitar for me. I also wouldn’t care that other people can play the guitar much better than I ever could. I would just want the satisfaction of mastering the guitar myself and being able to play a song. That’s how it is with me and mathematics, and no conceivable LLM could change that particular equation.

(As it happens, I did ask an LLM to explain to me what an eigenvector is. The answer was like a condensed and simplified Wikipedia article, and reading it was unsatisfying. I want to play the guitar myself.)

Whither Math Academy?

Finally, what of Math Academy itself? When I got a copy of my transcript after completing Mathematical Foundations II, it listed my student ID as being above 12,000. Assuming that IDs are assigned sequentially and not randomly, that means that over 12,000 people have used the Math Academy system and enrolled in a Math Academy course.

If all those people were still subscribed to the service then Math Academy would have monthly revenue of about $600K or about a $7M a year run rate. In reality the number of current subscribers is presumably somewhat less than that (given that many subscribers may have stopped after a few months), but on the other hand the subscriber base seems to be growing reasonably rapidly. So, my Fermi estimate is that for 2025 Math Academy could be up to a $10M-a-year business with up to 20 employees.

As I mentioned before, I can’t speak to the market fit for home schoolers or mathematically talented youth. However, I think Math Academy has achieved good product/market fit for that group of people of which I’m a member: adult learners with at least some mathematical background, a desire or need to learn or re-learn math, and a reasonable amount of spending power, typically due to working in IT or other high-tech fields.

Math Academy is clearly catering to that market by its choice of courses to add, including the Mathematics for Machine Learning course and proposed computer science courses, expanding from its core mathematics curriculum into adjacent areas. It can further broaden the market by some of the sales and marketing initiatives already discussed, including PPP pricing for non-US students, group and family discounts, and the like. These measures will lower revenue per user, but will expand the total addressable market.

I suspect that Math Academy could grow its subscriber base to 10x its current size, and its revenue almost as much, and could do so on a relatively accelerated schedule. Given that it’s (presumably) cash-flow positive today and should stay that way barring misdirected overspending, it looks to be a business that will be around for the long haul.

What about the larger claims made on Math Academy’s behalf? There I remain unconvinced. I don’t believe that Math Academy and the ideas about mathematics education it embodies will have any significant impact on traditional educational institutions in the near or medium terms. (The reactions of people like Michael Pershan and Dan Meyer are early indicators of that.) There are people and organizations working to change that mindset (and new ones popping up all the time, like the just-established Center for Educational Progress), but I suspect their’s will be the work of a generation and perhaps longer.

Despite Math Academy’s claims to be research-grounded and evidence-based, I’m also skeptical that we’ll see much if any research focused on Math Academy itself, trying to determine whether its pedagogy really has any advantages over the alternatives. The Math Academy folks are clearly too busy to do this, and I’m not sure anyone else will be willing to take on the task. So, all we’ll have is anecdata, anecdata that will be untrustworthy given the selection effects inherent in who uses the service. (I should add that my own anecdata shouldn’t be trusted any more than anyone else’s.)

But, in the meantime, I’m happy to have a service that seems to work for me, happy enough that I just upgraded my Math Academy subscription from monthly to annual. So, with that I’ll end this series and go back to working through Mathematical Foundations III. If you’ve checked out even one or two of my posts on Math Academy, thank you for reading!

Inital course selection

As I’ve mentioned many times previously, my goal is to learn what an eigenvector is, and for that I’ll need to take the Linear Algebra course. However I was not so deluded as to think I could just jump into the course, since it had been a while since I’d seriously studied math.

I therefore elected to start with one of the Mathematical Foundations courses recommended for adult learners. Unfortunately my delusion, while not severe enough for me to start the Linear Algebra course right away, was severe enough to make me think I just needed to take the Mathematical Foundations III course, the immediate prerequisite for the Linear Algebra course.

That was a major mistake, as discussed in the next section. I did a cursory check of the “Overview,” “Outcomes,” and “Contents” sections in the Mathematical Foundations III course description. However, in retrospect it would have been nice to have some additional information that I could have used to make an initial assessment of course appropriateness even before taking the diagnostic exam.

For example, suppose that the Mathematical Foundations III course description had had a minimal discussion of prerequisites, like “Among other things, this course assumes that you know how to factor polynomials using synthetic division, how to use trigometric identities like the law of sines, and how to differentiate the product or quotient of two functions.”

Then I would have immediately known that the Mathematical Foundations III course was too advanced for me, and I should take the diagnostic exam for the Mathematical Foundations II course instead. (Yes, I could have also just looked at the content for Mathematical Foundations II to see what that course taught, but I was being lazy and didn’t think to do that.)

The diagnostic exam

Instead I started taking the diagnostic exam for the Mathematical Foundations III course. It was a brutal and dispiriting experience, as I found myself being able to answer only a small fraction of the questions correctly. For most questions I didn’t even know how to go about finding an answer.

At this point I was internally shouting, “Stop! Let me cancel this exam and go back to square one!” However, I didn’t see any obvious way to stop the exam and switch to the diagnostic assessment for Mathematical Foundations II. So I soldiered on, finished the exam, and then was thrown into the beginning of Mathematical Foundations III.

As with the diagnostic exam, I just wanted to stop, go back, and try the Mathematical Foundations II course instead. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out a way to do that from the main course screen. It wasn’t until I got an email announcing the results of the diagnostic exam that I was enlightened: you can change courses by clicking on the profile icon in the upper right, selecting “settings,” and then selecting “Course” from the “Settings” page.

I then took the diagnostic exam for Mathematical Foundations II, did much better, and was soon embarked on my math learning journey.

Lessons and questions

Once I started the Mathematical Foundations II course, I found I really liked the way Math Academy organizes lessons and the accompanying questions. The lessons are relatively short, so I can do them whenever I feel like; I’ve typically been doing a couple in the morning before breakfast, a couple during lunch, and then more in the evening after dinner.

I originally planned to accumulate 50 XP a day, seven days a week. (I thought it important to do some work every day to not get out of the habit.) As it happened, I did over 90 XP every day for the first few weeks before cutting back (as discussed below).

I did more than anticipated for two reasons. First, I got a little competitive when looking at the league standings; more on this below. I also found doing the lessons and exercises to be a fun alternative to scrolling through social media. You can get a good sense of my progress by looking at the activity log generated by the Math Academy system; it covers the time from when I started until just after I completed the Mathematical Foundations II course, almost a month in total. (However, as noted below, I came to rethink my practice of overdoing things like this.)

My working method when doing lessons has been to read through the first example in each lesson, and then to try to work through the second example myself before reading the explanation for it. I found this to be a useful low-stress way to prepare for the first question following the examples. The questions themselves are relatively straightforward to answer if I understand the examples. I always try to work through the question first before looking at the multiple choice answers.

This generally works well: Either I get the answer right or I screw up something, choose the wrong answer, and get corrected. However, there have been occasions when I got an initial answer, didn’t see it listed among the five choices, and went back to try to understand what I did wrong. Some may consider this a bit of a cheat, but it’s inherent to a system organized around multiple choice answers.

(The questions for which you need to type in something avoid this problem, but as noted in my previous post they have their own problems when trying to access the system on a tablet. Also, in cases where there are multiple values in the answer—e.g., you need to find two values a and b, instead of a single value a—the Math Academy system tries to mitigate the problem of students just looking at the multiple choices and then trying to verify each one. It does this by requiring the student to enter or choose a sum or product of the answer values—e.g., a + b—rather than presenting the values themselves in the multiple choices.)

The questions are generally variations on a theme—sometimes very minor variations. Given that, I can see why some people would hate hate hate this way of instruction. There seems to be a macho attitude on the part of some students that learning mathematics is not supposed to be easy, that one has to conquer the exercises in textbooks like “Baby Rudin” and “Papa Rudin” before one can consider oneself mathematically knowledgeable. It’s like a hazing ritual, in which each generation has to suffer in order for the prior generation to consider their own suffering justified and worthwhile. The people who created the Math Academy clearly do not share this attitude, and I for one am very glad of it.

When I answered a question incorrectly, most of the time it was because I messed up something in working the problem: I misread the question, made a sign error, or screwed up when copying a term from step to step. The diagnostic exam has a “I made a silly mistake” option that allows you to retry a question, but the regular course questions do not. I think this is the correct approach: if you make silly mistakes on a regular basis then your goal should be to train yourself to be more careful in working a problem, including checking the result.

I don’t guess at answers, but there have been times when I accidentally got the correct answer: I didn’t quite know how to work the problem, but I stumbled on the right answer anyway. There’s no option to tell the system “I got this right, but I really didn’t know how to do it.” I originally thought it might be a good option to add, if for no other reason than to get a needed extra review, but this happens so infrequently that I doubt it’s worth it.

Reviews

I’ve previously tried out spaced repetition systems, most notably Anki, for learning various topics. I soon found myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of items I needed to review each day, a number so large that I eventually gave up in despair—it was sheer tedium to work through them all, especially when first learning the information.

Fortunately, Math Academy does not have that problem. On average I had to do less than three reviews of topics each day; a few days there were no reviews at all, and on a couple days there were many as six to eight. Each review topic had just a few questions—plus I’ve noted that the review ends early if you answer the first three questions correctly.

I consider that amount of review quite reasonable. The Math Academy Way claims that the Math Academy system leverages the hierarchical nature of mathematics to reduce the amount of needed review. In my experience, that claim is justified.

However, there are cases where I might in fact like to have more reviews, namely when it comes to learning sets of related facts. A good example is the set of standard angles on the unit circle and the values of trigonometric functions for those angles: the sine, cosine and tangent of 30 degrees (π/6), the sine, cosine, and tangent of 45 degrees (π/4), and so on around the circle. I found myself unable to recall all of those values instantly, and had to resort to calculating them in some cases. (For example, the sine, cosine, and tangent of 150 degrees can be easily derived from the values for 30 degrees.)

I’d rather not slow myself down by having to derive some of these on the fly. I’d rather be able to recall them instantly, just as I can instantly recall that 4 * 5 = 20. I could certainly put those facts into Anki or a similar spaced repetition system, but it might be nice to have the Math Academy system allow for special reviews of facts like that. (It appears that Math Academy may be planning something along this line, based on tweets from some of its employees.)

Quizzes

I had to do less than one quiz a day, of which some were retakes due to my not doing so well the first time. As with reviews, I consider this an acceptable number.

I found the quizzes themselves to be a bit stressful due to the time limit. On several occasions I had to leave one or two questions unanswered. On other occasions I rushed through problems and didn’t check them properly. As as result I scored lower than I would have liked several times, with the system reacting by having me take the same quiz again. Of the 15 unique quizzes I was presented during the Mathematical Foundations II course, I had to retake five.

Despite raising my stress level a bit, I thought the quizzes were useful and reasonable. I think the key to doing well on them is to develop “automaticity” in the sense used in The Math Academy Way, so that you can solve the presented problems without having to think too much about exactly how they should be solved.

Leagues and leaderboards

The leagues and associated leaderboards are an optional feature of the Math Academy system. I left them turned on initially because I wanted to see how they worked and how I compared with others. I was able to quickly advance through the lower leagues, often being the high scorer within my group. When this series started I was in the Platinum League (the middle league in the list of league ranked by exclusivity) and was about to be promoted into the Sapphire League. I found this aspect of the system to be fun and motivating, at least for a time—often I would do a lesson or two more just to improve my standings within my league.

Speaking of motivation: There isn’t much reward within the system itself for ranking high within your league, or for being promoted from one league to another. The period of competition simply ends and then you’re in a new league. It might be nice to have even a simple “Congratulations on being promoted!” message, or a “Hooray! You ranked first in your group!” Maybe the Math Academy folks think such things are unneeded or even undesirable, or maybe they just haven’t gotten around to implementing frills like this.

The flip side of the league and leaderboard gamification is that it encourages people to pile up XP simply for the sake of advancing in the leagues. You see this phenomenon on X as well, with people posting their cumulative XP. I don’t really need to be chasing the 100 XP a day mark in order to meet my own learning goals: 50 XP a day would have me completing the Mathematical Foundations III course by July, and then I’d have the rest of the year to finish the Linear Algebra course.

So, after I got promoted into the Sapphire League, I turned off the league feature. I’ve settled into a routine I can maintain, no longer have the distraction of invidious comparison with others competing for promotion, and have recovered some of my spare time for other things I enjoy.

Measuring course progress

Now that I’ve moved on to the Mathematical Foundations III course, one source of frustration to me is figuring out how I’m progressing within the course relative to my goal date for finishing it. (Note: The numbers I quote in this section are from when I first wrote it, a few days before publishing this post. I’ve progressed further since then.)

In the “XP Goals” section of the “Settings” section of the website, I’ve told the system that my goal is to do at least 50 XP each and every day of the week. The system then tells me on that same pqge that “At a pace of 350 XP per week, it’s estimated that Mathematical Foundations III will be completed by late May.”

However, if I go to the main learning screen, where the lessons are, it tells me that I am 24% through Mathematical Foundations III and that “Estimated completion is mid-July.” If I hover the cursor over that statement, it expands into a subwindow claiming that at a (boldfaced) pace of 49 XP I will indeed finish in mid-July. And if I hover over the ”24%” in a circle (next to where the page displays the course title), that subwindow also claims my pace is 49 XP a day. It further claims that I started the course on February 6 (correct), have a goal of ending the course on June 30 (also correct), and have done 691 XP in the course thus far (also correct as far as I know, from looking at my activity log).

Then it goes on to tell me that my “expected” progress should be 1260 XP, and that I’m therefore 569 XP behind schedule. It also tells me that the “total days” is 26 (with a parenthetical comment, “non-holiday weekdays”.)

This is all very confusing. Where does this figure of 49 XP come from? If I look at the activity log for the 8 days that I’ve been working on Mathematical Foundations III, I’ve been averaging 67 XP a day. And where does the “26 days” come from? There are a lot more than 26 days between now and June 30, about 50 all told if my calculations are correct, not even counting weekends and holidays.

(As an aside, The Math Academy Way assumes a 5-day week in its examples of learning speed and related topics. I’m wondering if that’s carried over into the Math Academy system, even in the case where a student—namely me—has indicated their intention to study every day.)

I’m just asking for a reasonable estimate of when I’ll be able to complete Mathematical Foundations III, and what pace I’ll need to maintain in order to make my goal date. Right now I’m not getting that, and I have limited trust in the numbers that the Math Academy web interface is showing me.

Course completion and results

I finished the Mathematical Foundations II course as my first month with Math Academy was nearing its end. As with being promoted to a higher league, this was a non-event as far as the user interface was concerned: I simply looked at the page one day and noticed that it was now showing my being in the Mathematical Foundations III course. (This was presumably because I had enrolled in Mathematical Foundations III originally, and so the course was in effect waiting for me to finish Mathematical Foundations II.)

The transition between courses was about as exciting as watching your car’s odometer roll over at the next 10,000 or 100,000 mark—especially when you get distracted and miss the exact time when it rolls over. I put many hours into working through all the course lessons, and it would be nice if the system would take note of that.

However, I should note that I did get a transcript and a certificate of completion for the Mathematical Foundations II course, as well as documents providing a course overview, a detailed list of course contents, and the accreditation letter for Math Academy itself. (Note to Math Academy folks: the course overview document has a typo: “Upon completeing . . .”)

These aren’t much use to me in my current situation (except to show skeptics that I really did use Math Academy before reviewing it), but they’re nice to have. I guess someone could use the certificates and transcripts to show a potential employer the level of mathematics they have learned (assuming the job requires using math as a core component). But, if I were an employer, could I really trust such evidence? After all, it’s possible that the student just breezed through the courses using an LLM to come up with answers.

Speaking of LLMs, that’s one of the topics I’ll be discussing in part 11 of this series, in which I offer my final thoughts on Math Academy.

Marketing

I have two comments here, one positive and one not so much. First, the positive:

Thus far Math Academy has (by its founders’ admission) spent no money whatsoever on advertising (Internet-based or otherwise), preferring to have its message spread by word of mouth. I think this is an excellent approach, especially for a service that is still in beta. I myself found out about Math Academy from a post on X, and since then I’ve seen multiple mentions of Math Academy on other services, including Reddit in particular (e.g., the /r/learnmath subreddit and—of course—the r/MathAcademy subreddit). Most of these mentions have been positive, from people who’ve used the service and like it. Your customers are your best salespeople, as the saying goes.

Math Academy staff have been active on these various platforms, providing in-depth responses to questions from people interested in signing up for the service. Again, this is an excellent approach, especially if the target audience is technically knowledgeable.

You can’t find Math Academy-related posts on all social media. In particular, I couldn’t find any Math Academy presence in the Fediverse (at least the section of it I have search access to) and the only post about Math Academy I’ve found on Bluesky was someone else’s repost from X. I wish Math Academy would establish a Bluesky or Mastodon account, even if it’s for nothing more than product announcements. There are lots of people like me who have moved their social media activity mostly or totally off of X.

Now for the not so positive: I am not a fan of Math Academy using the term “AI-powered” to describe its service. I think it’s a flawed strategy in at least three ways:

First, it’s a “me too” marketing strategy for a service that claims to not be a “me too” service. It seems to be trying to leverage the hype around large language models and generative AI to advertise a service in which the only “AI” appears to be traditional machine learning. I understand the motivation, but:

There are going to be lots of startups trying to ride the AI bandwagon with promises of personalized tutors that will talk to your child and patiently hold their hand while they learn. By leaning on the “AI-powered” slogan, Math Academy risks having itself be lumped in with a crowded field of companies trying to turn an LLM into A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. And if those companies fail (as many of them no doubt will), there’s a risk of having their failure taint Math Academy as well.

Second, hyping Math Academy as an “AI” application will also likely risk harming its image with that relatively large contingent of people for whom “AI” is synonymous with copyright violations, planet warming, and the immiseration of artists, writers, musicians, and many others in the name of VC-driven hypergrowth. “AI-powered” is a phrase that’s an instant turn-off for a lot of people who might otherwise be prepared to evaluate Math Academy on its merits.

Finally, “AI-powered” is “feature/benefit” marketing: “here is a product feature and here is the benefit it brings.” I strongly feel that Math Academy would be much better off with a “problem/solution” approach to marketing itself—or, if you want to get even more stark, a “pain/pain relief” approach.

(For example, for an adult learner like me the marketing message of Math Academy might be stated as follows: “You’ve forgotten more math than you remember, and you need or want to re-learn it. Math Academy helps you learn mathematics so that you never forget it again, and helps you do it in the least amount of time possible.”)

The main Math Academy website (the one you see if you’re not an active student) mostly gets this right: The headline is “Math Academy is the most efficient and effective way to learn math . . . guaranteed,” and there’s only four places on the page that reference “AI”: “AI-driven algorithms“ in relatively small print, a question “Is it really AI?” also in relatively small print, a larger headline “AI-Powered + Research-Driven Pedagogy” halfway down the page, and finally a small link “How our AI works” at the very bottom of the page.

The question “Is it really AI?” and the link “How our AI works” would cause the casual reader to expect that the answer would be “yes” and that clicking on the link would lead to a discussion of how Math Academy is leveraging LLMs—what most people would likely think of today if they heard the term “AI.” But instead the “How Our AI Works” page talks about Math Academy using an expert system, the knowledge graph, the student model, the diagnostic algorithm, the task-selection algorithm, the spaced repetition algorithm, and so on. “AI“ is mentioned only in the headline and the first sentence.

This reinforces my contention that the references to “AI“ and “AI-powered” are mainly marketing fluff and could be dispensed with mostly or even totally. Call it an “expert system” or an “algorithm-driven system,” refer to “advanced machine learning” or “adaptive analytics” embedded in the system, and so on. Just try to limit the use of the term “AI.”

Pricing

Assuming someone is intrigued by the idea of Math Academy, the most salient point for them is likely to be the price: $49 a month is a pretty substantial sum for most people. Math Academy is clearly pricing the service based on its value to a user, not based on the marginal cost to support an incremental new user (which I presume is fairly low). But, at least to me, the price is worth it: I place a substantial personal value on knowing an area of mathematics that has previously eluded me, and I’m happy to pay for a service that (at least thus far) seems a good choice for helping me do that.

The price also serves as a filter to discourage people whose motivation is not that high and for whom Math Academy would not be an effective learning experience. The remaining people who do pay the $49 a month are not only motivated to actually use Math Academy, they’re also motivated to talk up the service to others—if for no other reason than to justify to themselves why they’re paying so much. (This blog series can be seen as an extreme example of that.)

Finally, the high price and the absence of a free option helps fund development and operation of the Math Academy service, helps Math Academy be profitable as soon as possible, and helps ensure that the company and service will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

However, there are a few ways I can see the pricing scheme being tweaked. The first—already floated by Math Academy itself—is to make the service more affordable to people in countries where typical incomes are a fraction of what they are in the US and similar countries. Due to the deficiencies of their public school systems, students in many of those countries already pay for private tutoring at a much higher rate than US students, and thus would be good prospects for a service that could credibly promise to accelerate their mathematical education.

There will certainly be people in the US and elsewhere who will try to game any geo-based pricing scheme, for example, by using a VPN to make it look like they’re based in India rather than Indiana. However, it’s not clear that this would be a major problem, and there are potential ways to reduce it. (For example, the cheapest prices might only be for access to versions of the service in other languages, say, Hindi or Chinese.)

There are also likely students within the US and similar countries who would be very good candidates for Math Academy but whose families cannot afford it, namely mathematically promising students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Math Academy could offer discounted subscriptions directly to such students, but another possible approach would be to reach out to local groups working to identify and assist mathematically gifted students, and offer them discounted group subscriptions that could be paid for by donors to such groups. Math Academy is apparently also considering offering family discounts, something that would presumably be of great interest to the home-schooling community.

I’ll elaborate more on this in my next post, but I can also see a potential market among adult learners who are very motivated to learn mathematics up to a particular level (equivalent to Mathematical Foundations II or even just Mathematical Foundations I) and are not interested in (or capable of) progressing further. A per-course flat price might be a better approach for that segment of the market, especially when combined with my next idea:

There’s a particular pricing issue that is likely to affect me and perhaps other adult learners: Let’s say that I succeed in my quest to learn what an eigenvector is (i.e., by completing the Math Academy Linear Algebra course). I’ll likely want to go on and take one or two other courses (Multivariable Calculus and Probability and Statistics being the most likely ones), but I doubt that I’d want to continue cranking through every advanced course that Math Academy has to offer.

So, what would I do then? The obvious answer is to cancel my Math Academy subscription. But what if I’m afraid of forgetting what I’ve learned, and don’t have total confidence in previous spaced repetition reviews having foreclosed that possibility? In that case, I’d be interested in switching to a hypothetical reduced-price Math Academy subscription that just provided ongoing reviews of material from previously completed courses, say for $5-10 per month. Math Academy would then keep me as an ongoing customer, and I could always upgrade my subscription back to full price if I happened to find a new course I was interested in taking.

(The Math Academy “test prep” mode—which I haven’t tried—is somewhat reminiscent of this, in that it prevents moving to another course and instead just does reviews for the current one. But this is intended only as a temporary, not permanent, measure, and you’re still paying full price in the meantime.)

User experience

As of today, the only way to use the Math Academy service is as a website. I started out using the Math Academy on my laptop, a 13-inch MacBook Air, and it was perfectly usable in that context. However, after a couple of weeks I switched to using the website primarily on my iPad Mini. By doing this I could easily take the iPad Mini and a similarly sized 5-inch by 8-inch notepad (to work on problems) and work on Math Academy lessons anywhere in the house that was convenient: home office, living room, or bedroom. I could also easily take them and work on problems elsewhere, like in a library or if I were eating in a restaurant by myself.

The present Math Academy website is usable on an iPad Mini or similarly-sized tablets, but the experience is not perfect in all respects. The main problems I encountered were as follows:

First, the small text entry boxes used for some answers are difficult to use unless you really expand the page. This is especially true for the special features used to enter fractions or square roots; after entering part of an answer using them I often found myself struggling to get the cursor to go back to the remainder of the text field, because my finger is so large relative to the input fields. On a desktop PC or laptop the tab key can be used to move back to the enclosing input subfield, but that’s not possible on a tablet (at least, not without the use of an external keyboard). Perhaps an additional UI element could be added that simulates the effect of typing the tab key?

Second, when taking quizzes, the position of the “Prev” and “Next” buttons was very inconvenient when using my iPad Mini in portrait mode, because they were off the screen when viewing the problem itself at a normal readable size. Once I entered an answer I found myself scrolling the page around to try to find the “Next” button to go to the next problem—an annoying thing to have to do when you’re taking a timed quiz and every second counts. Quizzes do work better with a tablet in landscape mode, but that’s a less natural way to hold a tablet if you’re not watching a video.

My final thoughts on the user interface: I think keeping the Math Academy service as a traditional website is perfectly fine. I don’t feel the need to have an iPad app (or a similar app for other tablets), and I certainly don’t feel the need for a Math Academy smartphone app. (For one thing, any non-trivial use of the service requires you to be writing on a scratch pad to work problems, something you can’t do in the typical situations in which you’d use a smartphone, like standing in line at the grocery store.) Maybe having a phone app would be useful for markets in other countries where a smartphone is the only device used by most users, but I don’t see it as mandatory for the US market.

However, I definitely would like to see the website tweaked to be more usable on tablet devices down to the size of an iPad Mini or comparable Android models. This includes relatively larger default fonts, relatively larger text input fields and a way to handle the tab key issue, and a page organization that can fit all needed UI elements within a portrait-mode tablet screen without having to scroll the page horizontally. Due to the issues I’ve encountered, I’ve decided to switch back to my laptop for now.

I’ll have more feedback to offer in part 10 of this series, in which I’ll discuss the learning-related aspects of Math Academy as I experienced them.

As in previous posts, the following sections are my paraphrases of the content of The Math Academy Way; my own comments are [enclosed in square brackets]. You should interpret statements not in brackets as being prefaced by “The book says . . .” or “The author claims that . . .” Terms in boldface are key concepts relevant to the Math Academy system.

Frequently Asked Questions

Many of these are relevant primarily to people already taking Math Academy courses, but there are several exceptions.

First, the FAQ includes an explanation of how course lessons are divided up into instruction and active problem solving, interleaved with each other. More specifically, the lesson begins with an introduction (presented using slides), followed by a worked example covering the material just introduced and 2-3 practice problems similar to the worked example. The worked example plus practice problems is known as a knowledge point (KP), and there are typically 3-4 per lesson.

Failure to complete a KP results in “failing” the lesson, and the student is moved on to different lessons before coming back to the failed one. Math Academy claims an average pass rate of 95% on the first try, and 98% within two tries.

A subsequent question addresses the concern about the large amount of problem solving required of Math Academy students. The response is that only doing active problem solving as soon as possible after learning something will ensure that the information will in fact be committed to long-term memory. [This concern about Math Academy’s relentless focus on problem solving is also reminiscent of Dan Meyer’s complaint that Math Academy, like other proposed instructional metholodogies, is simply “[redefining] math to mean ‘becoming an absolute demon at math exercises.’” More on that later.]

Further questions reiterate core tenets of the Math Academy approach:

It’s not necessary to struggle in order to learn something—and in fact struggling is counterproductive. “The way to increase a student’s ability to make mental leaps is not by having them jump further, but by having them build bridges from which to jump.”

Automaticity is important, and something the Math Academy needs to check for. It is not necessary to achieve full automaticity to advance to higher-level topics, but a lack of automaticity will eventually catch up with students and impede further progress.

Consulting and leveraging worked examples is essential to make continued progress. “If you don’t have worked examples and instructional scaffolding to help carry you through once math becomes hard for you, then every problem basically blows up into a ‘research project’ for you.”

[This point is also relevant to Dan Meyer’s criticisms of the Math Academy approach. He dismisses the fact that Math Academy provides examples to teach concepts: “You don’t get Math Academy ‘experience points’ for reading conceptually rich explanations. You get them for completing exercises.” The counterpoint is that if you don’t read the explanations and examples, and as a consequence lack basic understanding of the concepts, then at some point you’ll no longer be able to successfully complete the exercises, and you’ll stop getting those sweet, sweet XP.]

[For example, Dan Meyer describes teaching his young children to mechanically calculate derivatives: “Easy! All I did was tell them to take the number above the x and write it next to the x, then to subtract one from the number above the x.” His kids could no doubt rack up some XP doing exercises of that type, but their XP acquisition would grind to a halt as soon as they came to a problem that asked them to calculate the slope of a tangent line to a curve.]

Math Academy courses are not structured like typical higher math textbooks because that style of instruction is demonstrably ineffective except for the most talented students. “Higher math textbooks and classes are typically not aligned with (and are often in direct opposition to) decades of research into the cognitive science of learning. Higher math is heavily g-loaded, which creates a cognitive barrier for many students. The goal of guided and scaffolded instruction is to help boost students over that barrier.”

Both interleaving of topics and the difficulty of reviews are designed to promote learning by making the task of retrieving information more effortful: It’s easier to remember something on a quiz or review if you’ve just covered the material, and it’s more satisfying to be able to ace every quiz or review, but that means that any learning may be shallow and the supposedly-learned information easily forgotten.

Learning with the Math Academy system requires that students put in a reasonable level of effort on a continuing basis. “Math Academy teaches math as though we were training a professional athlete or musician, or anyone looking to acquire a skill to the highest degree possible. . . . While it’s true that willingness to work hard is a bottleneck for many students, such students are not part of our target market.”

[This statement will no doubt be seized upon by critics who claim that any success Math Academy might have is due purely to selection effects: they are in effect “skimming off the cream” and leaving all the other students in the lurch. It’s certainly a fair criticism that Math Academy demands a high degree of self-motivation. One might hope that other people might be able to step in to help motivate students who are not as willing to put in the effort, but The Math Academy Way doesn’t spend much time on that issue—the “Coaching” chapter is one of the shortest ones in the book.]

[It’s easy to dismiss criticisms like this—for example, by questioning how much typical public school math teachers are able to motivate their own students who lack motivation. But I think it’s worth thinking about how Math Academy might be extended or supplemented to address this. One can blue-sky high-tech solutions, like an LLM designed to be an encouraging companion to an individual student, or low-tech solutions, like local Math Academy meet-ups where students could meet each other, share experiences, and possibly get special assistance from a volunteer or paid instructor. I’m not sure what might work or what might be feasible, but I think addressing this issue to at least some degree will be key to extending the addressable market for this method of online instruction.]

There are many other questions in the FAQ, but I’ll stop at this point.

Notes for Future Additions

This section contains material that is under consideration for incorporation in the main text of The Math Academy Way, and is interesting as a further look into the thinking of those creating the Math Academy system.

Apropos of my comments in the previous section, there’s a lot of suggestions for extending the “Coaching” chapter. For the most part the suggested additions continue the theme of Math Academy as an equivalent to intensive athletic or musical training, and the focus is almost exclusively on parents motivating their children. [Again, this reinforces the idea that Math Academy is not interested in—or has rationally chosen not to pursue—promoting its service to the traditional public education market.]

There is an interesting discussion of knowledge spaces, which are at least superficially comparable to the knowledge graphs of Math Academy, but proved to be too complex to implement in the context of a Math Academy-like system. [There is a commercial product, ALEKS, based on the knowledge spaces framework. It would be interesting to know more about how successful it has been, particularly since it’s sold by McGraw Hill and pitched to the K-12 education market, among others.]

One other interesting but brief mention is regarding “elaborative interrogration,” that is, asking students to elaborate on their understanding of particular concepts and procedures. [If Math Academy is going to incorporate LLMs in some contexts—and right now there’s no firm indication of this either way—this might be an area where they could be useful, if for no other reason than being able to better interpret free-form answers.]

The section includes with many more links to further reading. These may be of interest to anyone who’s gotten this far in the book and want to explore more material along the same lines.

This concludes my discussion of The Math Academy Way. In part 9 of this series I’ll discuss my own experience as a Math Academy student, starting with those aspects of the service unrelated to the actual learning of mathematics.

As in previous posts, the following sections are my paraphrases of the content of The Math Academy Way; my own comments are [enclosed in square brackets]. You should interpret statements not in brackets as being prefaced by “The book says . . .” or “The author claims that . . .” Terms in boldface are key concepts relevant to the Math Academy system.

Chapter 26. Technical Deep Dive on Space Repetition

This chapter elaborates on the custom spaced repetition algorithm employed in the Math Academy system, Fractional Implicit Repetition (FIRe). The basic idea is that in a hierarchical body of knowledge like mathematics, if a student does a spaced repetition review for one mathematical topic, that implies they are also doing a review of other topics that are the original topic’s prerequisites. For example, doing a review of multiplying a two-digit number by a one-digit number (say, 4 x 12) implies also reviewing multiplying a one-digit number by a one-digit number (4 x 2 = 8) and adding a one-digit number to a two-digit number (40 + 8 = 48).

This allows the Math Academy system to reduce the overall number of spaced repetition reviews presented to the student: a single review is implicitly covering multiple other topics (two in the example), and successfully completing the review should “reward” the student by being reflected in the spaced repetition schedule for those topics.

However, there is a catch: while the review for the original topic was presumably presented to the student according to a schedule optimized for retention (per standard SRS practice), the implicit reviews for the prerequisite topics were not. In particular, those reviews may have occurred earlier than they should have been if the reviews were being scheduled in the normal way, and this may negatively affect retention of that material.

The chosen solution is to give the student only partial credit for successfully completing the (implicit) reviews of the prerequisite topic. [The book does not present the exact algorithm by which this done, but presumably the fractional credit is low (close to zero) if the time of review for a prerequisite topic is well before when that topic would normally be reviewed, and is high (close to one) if the time of review is almost at the point where that topic would normally be reviewed.]

Now consider when the student is scheduled for a review of a prerequisite topic, say adding a one-digit number to a two-digit number, according to the standard spaced repetition schedule. If the student fails that review, then clearly that will negatively impact the spaced repetition schedule for the prerequisite topic, i.e., the system will schedule the next review sooner than otherwise. However, failing the review for the prerequisite is also implicitly a failure of review for the original topic, in this case multiplying a two-digit number by a one-digit number. “If you can’t add a one-digit number to a two-digit number, then there’s no way you’re able to multiply a two-digit number by a one-digit number.” So the schedule for that topic should be penalized as well, but again with appropriate discounting.

As a general statement, successfully completing a scheduled review of a particular topic will positively impact the spaced repetition schedules (i.e., by reducing the number of required reviews) for that topic and for all lower-level topics that are prerequisites for that topic (with appropriate discounting). Likewise, failing to complete a scheduled review of a particular topic will negatively impact the spaced repetition schedules (i.e., by increasing the number of required reviews) for that topic and for all higher-level topics for which that topic is a prerequisite (again, with appropriate discounting). “Visually, credit travels downwards through the knowledge graph like lightning bolts. Penalties travel upwards through the knowledge graph like growing trees.”

There is a further refinement: in some cases reviewing a particular topic doesn’t fully constitute an implicit review of a prerequisite topic, since that review may only partially depend on the prerequisite (partial encompassing). For example, of the problem set used for review of integration by parts, only a few problems (say 20% of them) may involve integrating trigonometric functions. This limits the amount of credit that may be given for an implicit review: a successful review of integration by parts may at most provide 20% of the full credit for a successful review of integrating trig functions; this 0.2 credit would then be further discounted as discussed above according to the review schedule for integration of trig functions.

This can be represented in the knowledge graph as a set of weights: of three prerequisite topics for the example topic of integration by parts, integration of polynomial functions may receive full credit (weight of 1.0), integration of exponential functions may receive half credit (weight of 0.5), and integration of trigonometric functions may receive only 20% of full credit (weight of 0.2).

Now, as noted above, successful review of a topic provides implicit credit not just for that topic’s prerequisites, but also for the topics that are prerequisites to those prerequisites in turn, and so on down the knowledge graph. So in theory a given topic has weights as described above with every topic in the knowledge graph that is an “ancestor” of the original topic. Similarly, a topic has weights with all topics for which it itself is a prerequisite.

For a course with n topics, the number of possible weights is n x (n - 1) / 2. For example, a course with 1,000 individual topics would have (1,000 x 999) / 2 = 499,500 possible weights.

However, in practice implementing the FIRe algorithm does not require that all of these weights be explicitly specified. First, some of them can be inferred. [For example, if topic A has a weight of 0.5 with its direct prerequisite topic B, and topic B has a weight of 0.4 with its own direct prerequisite topic C, then presumably the weight of A with C can be inferred as 0.5 x 0.4 = 0.2.]

Second, if the distance in the knowledge graph between two topics A and Z is large enough then the weight can be assumed to be zero, even if topic A is fully encompassed in topic Z. [I believe this full encompassing corresponds to all the weights on the edges of the nodes between the topics, e.g., A to B, B to C, . . ., Y to Z, being one.] This is because by the time the student starts explicit reviews on the more advanced topic Z they would have already completed most of their explicit reviews of the topic A encountered much earlier in the course. Thus there is no real value in giving topic A any implicit credit resulting from a successful review of topic Z. [Note that the book does not explicitly define what distances are considered to be “large” for the purpose above.]

So as a result the number of weights that must be manually assigned is found to be relatively low. [I may write more about this after I watch the YouTube video about assigning weights.]

The chapter then discusses the case when a topic in one course “encompasses” a lower-level topic in another course, i.e., the first topic presumes knowledge of the material in the second topic, even though the second topic is not formally a prerequisite for the first topic (being in a different course).

This is known as non-ancestor encompassing, and weights are set so that successful review of the higher-level topic in one course provides (full) review credit for the topic in the lower-level course. [Note that this increases the total number of weights that must be assigned.]

The next section discusses “student-topic learning speed,” defined as the ratio of “speedup due to [greater] student ability” to “slowdown due to [greater] topic difficulty.” Thus learning speed would be greatest for a strong student studying easy material, and least for a weak student studying difficult material.

Student ability (relative to a given topic) is measured by looking at the accuracy of their answers for reviews and quizzes for that topic. Student ability is predicted at their beginning of the topic based on prior performance on prerequisites and other relevant material, and then is modified as they answer questions.

Topic difficulty is measured by looking at answers for that topic across all “serious” students [where “serious” is not otherwise defined]. It can be used to help formulate a prediction of student learning speed on a given topic.

The Math Academy spaced repetition formulas

Frank here! The final section of this chapter discusses the Math Academy formulas relating to spaced repetition. This subsection is my commentary on those formulas; due to the length of it I’ve dispensed with enclosing the text in sequare brackets.

The first formula is as follows:

repNum → max(0, repNum + speed · decay ^failed · netWork)

Here repNum is a value representing the amount of successful space repetition review that the student has done for a given topic. The book refers to this as “how many successful repetition rounds a student has accumulated,” but this should not be interpreted as a literal count. Instead it is a value that can be adjusted upward or downward at each review, depending on the factors in the formula. (See also the discussion in chapter 18 in the section “Calibrating to Individual Students and Topics” regarding a review being worth more or less than one spaced repetition.)

The repNum value is tracked for each topic, and is updated at each review, whether that review is an explicit review of that topic or an implicit review of it (i.e., an explicit review of a more advanced topic for which the topic in question is a prerequisite).

The first and most important factor in that calculation is netWork, described as “how much net work the student accomplished during the rewiew.” For an explicit review of a particular topic, netWork is presumably equal to, or at least directly proportional to, the amount of XP the student is granted or penalized as a result of the review; for example, if the student passed the review and was granted 4 XP, netWork would be 4 or some fraction of it. If, on the other hand, the student failed the review and was penalized 2 XP, netWork would be negative, and its magnitude would be half that of the successful review in this example.

For implicit reviews of a topic, netWork would be discounted from the full value, as discussed previously.

The second factor is speed, a value representing the student’s learning speed relative to the assumed typical learning speed. If a student is learning faster than most, speed will be greater than one, and netWork will be multiplied accordingly when calculating the new value of repNum; if they are learning slower than most, speed will be less than one (but still positive).

(See also chapter 18, section “Calibrating to Individual Students and Topics”: “If a student does a review on a topic for which their learning speed is 2x, then that review counts as being worth 2 spaced repetitions. Likewise, if a student does a review on a topic for which their learning speed is 0.5x, then that review counts as being worth 0.5 spaced repetitions.”)

Finally, delay is used to penalize students who have gone a long time since the last review and then failed the current one. The value failed is 0 if the review is successful, in which case we have decay ^failed = decay ⁰ = 1; in other words, there is no delay-related penalty imposed. On the other hand, failed is 1 if the student failed the review, in which case we have decay ^failed = decay ¹ = delay, and the penalty is imposed.

The delay value is a positive value that starts out at 1 but is further increased if the student has gone past the scheduled interval for a review. In that case, if the student fails the review then the (positive) delay value multiplies the (negative) netWork value to reduce the new repNum value beyond what it would have been reduced to if the student had not delayed the review.

The second formula is as follows:

memory → max(0, memory + netWork)(0.5)^{(days/interval)}

Memory to the left of the arrow is a numeric value representing the student’s memory of a topic just prior to doing a spaced repetition review. Immediately after the review memory is assumed to change by an amount netWork. If the review is successful then netWork is positive, representing an increase in the student’s memory of a topic. On the other hand, the netWork value will be negative if the student fails the review, representing a decrease in the student’s memory of a topic. However, memory can never decrease below 0 (representing total forgetting of a topic), so the “max” function is used to ensure that.

Once the review is complete and the student’s memory value is recalculated, it then starts to decay exponentially as time goes on. The speed of the decay is related to the spaced repetition interval as follows: the spaced repetition interval is calculated to be the number of days after the review at which the student’s memory has decayed to half the original value it had immediately after the last review.

Immediately after the review, the days value in days / interval is 0, so we have (0.5)^{days/interval} = (0.5)⁰ = 1; in other words, no memory decay has yet taken place. When the number of days after the review is equal to the calculated spaced repetition interval then we have (0.5)^{days/interval} = (0.5)¹ = 0.5, and memory has decayed to half its original value.

Memory continues decaying if the student goes past the calculated space repetition review interval without doing a review. For example, if the student goes twice the interval period without a review then we have (0.5)^{days/interval} = (0.5)² = 0.25; in other words, memory has decayed to a quarter of its original value.

Chapter 24. Technical Deep Dive on Diagnostic Exams

New students on Math Academy need to take a diagnostic exam before beginning a course, to judge whether the student has mastered topics that are prerequisites for the course. This exam would be unacceptably long if the student needed to be tested on every possible prerequisite, potentially requiring up to a thousand questions.

However, the hierarchical structure of mathematics (as reflected in the Math Academy knowledge graph), along with some other techniques, allows the exam to get acceptable results (in terms of proper placement) with relatively few questions (20-60 depending on the course level). Successful answers for a more advanced question indicate that the student should also be successful answering questions on less advanced prerequisites; thus the system can skip answering those questions.

Success on a question for a given topic can also be correlated with success on a different question on a different topic that is relatively unrelated to the first (neither topic is a prerequisite for the other). That can also allow for the second question to be skipped, instead inferring its result from the result on the first question.

The diagnostic exam also attempts to measure knowledge confidence, that is, whether the Math Academy system can reasonably conclude that the student has the applicable knowledge. If the student successfully answers a more advanced question but fails to answer a simpler question, or if the student takes an unacceptably long time to answer a question, then the system’s confidence in the student’s knowledge will decrease. The system can then compensate by being prepared to go back to earlier material if the student starts having issues on the current material.

In general, the diagnostic exam is conservative in its assessment of a student’s knowledge, to avoid placing the student in a course for which they’re not prepared. In doing actual course work the student will typically be assessed as performing at a somewhat higher level (the “edge of mastery”).

If needed (e.g., due to a change in the knowledge graph), the system can do supplemental diagnostics from time to time to produce a more accurate assessment of the student’s knowledge.

Given the importance of the diagnostic exam and the need to ensure an accurate assessment, diagnostic questions are created manually by Math Academy staff. [As with the knowledge graph, the set of diagnostic questions forms an important component of the overall Math Academy intellectual property portfolio. However, lie the knowledge graph, the questions themselves are publicly visible, and hence can be scraped by competitors.]

Chapter 28. Technical Deep Dive on Learning Efficiency

Learning efficiency is the extent to which a student can complete all spaced repetition reviews without having to explicitly review previously learned material. Efficiency is at its theoretical lowest when all topics are independent of each other and need to be reviewed individually. [A good example is flashcard-based learning of unrelated facts, like the capital cities of the fifty US states.] Efficiency is at its theoretical maximum when each topic is the sole prerequisite for the next, so that reviewing a topic implicitly reviews all its predecessors.

Because of the hierarchical nature of mathematics as reflected in the knowledge graph, in which one topic encompasses many others, learning efficiency in the Math Academy system can be much closer to the theoretical maximum. The empirical result is that on average most courses require only about one explicit review for each topic covered.

The Math Academy gets closer to the theoretical maximum learning efficiency by taking all the repetition reviews due for various topics and “compressing” them: retaining only those that cover all of the topics associated with the due reviews and contribute the most in terms of space repetition reviews across the entire student knowledge profile (repetition compression).

Students can vary in their learning efficiency percentage; for example, an efficiency of 0.5 corresponds to taking twice the expected time to complete all the work for a course. This work is measured in eXperience Points (XP), which represent one minute’s work by an average student who is serious about their studies but does make some mistakes. So a given course will be considered as requiring, say, 3,000 XP. [Translated to time, this 3,000 XP would be about 50 hours, i.e., 3,000 minutes divided by 60 minutes per hour.]

In addition to the quality of a student’s work affecting their learning efficiency (by answering questions correctly and avoiding excessive reviews), devoting more time to studying can also increase learning efficiency, with it being empirically measured to be proportional to the pace of studying raised to the exponent 0.1. Thus doubling the pace (doing twice the amount of studiny per day) increases efficiency by about 2^0.1 = 1.07, a 7% increase.

So, increasing the pace increases learning efficiency, which in turn means it will take less time to complete a course than it would otherwise. However the overall determinant of course completion time is still just how many minutes (XP) one can spend each day. So, for example, doing 40 XP a day (assumed to correspond to a learning efficiency of 1) would allow a student to complete a 3,000 XP course in 75 days or 15 weeks. [This assumes the student studies 5 days a week, as in a typical school or home-schooling environment.]

If the student instead did 160 XP per day (almost 3 hours of work) this would correspond to a pace of 4x normal, their learning efficiency would improve to about 1.15, and the time for course completion would be 3000 / (160 * 1.15) = 16.3 days or just over 3 weeks [again assuming 5 days of work a week].

On the other hand, a pace of 10 XP per day (about 10 minutes) would correspond to a pace 0.25x normal, their learning efficiency would decrease to about 0.87, and the time for course completion would be 3000 / (10 * 0.87) = 345 days or 69 weeks [again assuming 5 days of work a week]. It would thus take the student more than a year to complete the course.

A typical mathematics course takes 36 [5-day] weeks, with 50 minutes of class time and 50 minutes of homework per day. If the student did 100 XP per day on a 3,000-XP Math Academy course, they would complete the course in 5-6 weeks, about a 6x speedup. [This corresponds to a learning efficiency of (100 / 40)^^0.1 = 1.1, and a completion time of 3000 / (100 * 1.1) = 27 days, or about 5 1/2 weeks.]

Math Academy recommends doing at least 15 XP per day to complete a course in a reasonable time (less than a year), but recommends a faster pace for best results. [The calculated learning efficiency for 15 XP per day would be (15 / 40)^^0.1 = 0.91, and the course course completion time for a 3,000 XP course would be 3000 / (15 * 0.91) = 220 days or 44 weeks, a little bit longer than a traditional school course.]

Chapter 29. Technical Deep Dive on Prioritizing Core Topics

A Math Academy course includes both core topics and supplemental topics, with core topics prioritized. Core topics are identified by a proprietary algorithm running against the course’s knowledge graph. Any topic identified as core will have all its prerequisites as core as well.

Supplemental topics are often present mainly because they are part of educational standards (e.g., Common Core). Core topics are the focus of the Mathematical Foundations (MF) series of courses, which are intended for adult learners who need a refresher on K-12 math but are not subject to Common Core or other requirements. The Mathematical Foundations courses are prerequisites for university-level courses.

This concludes my discussion of Part V of The Math Academy Way. In part 8 of this series I’ll discuss the final sections of the book, with a focus on “Frequently Asked Questions,” which includes answers for questions that might be asked by either students taking Math Academy courses or those interested in doing so.

As in previous posts, the following sections are my paraphrases of the content of The Math Academy Way; my own comments are [enclosed in square brackets]. You should interpret statements not in brackets as being prefaced by “The book says . . .” or “The author claims that . . .” Terms in boldface are key concepts relevant to the Math Academy system.

Chapter 24. Parental Support (In Progress)

Because deliberative practice requires effort, students need support and encouragement to do it, and need to be held accountable by responsible others (parents or teachers) when they don’t do it. Otherwise students lose motivation and give up on Math Academy.

[This is the only place thus far where teachers are mentioned as potentially assisting students using the Math Academy system.]

The above is the bare minimum needed. The ideal level of support is similar to that characteristic of the families of competitive musicians (and other high-achieving performers), which include daily supervised practice, ongoing evaluation and discussion of progress, motivation through rewards and encouragement, and so on.

[This chapter does not mention it, but even the bare minimum is going to be hard to maintain in families where work, illness, poverty, single parent, etc., make ongoing support and supervision difficult.]

Chapter 25. In-Task Coaching

The main point emphasized in this incomplete chapter is the negative effect of a student using reference material while completing a task in the Math Academy system. This is because they’re using the reference material as a crutch instead of trying to retrieve the material from memory (effortful retrieval).

[I have occasionally done this while using the Math Academy system, looking back at a prerequisite topic before beginning a lesson on a topic I felt a little uncomfortable taking on, or copying down a formula discussed in the example section of a lesson before embarking on answering the questions. As the book says, though, this is generally not a good idea, and I try to do it only occasionally.]

[I’ve also done something related but a little different: Before beginning a series of questions, I sometimes write out from memory the formulas that I’ll need. Other times, if I can’t remember a formula I’ll try to derive it from other formulas I know. For example, one time I couldn’t remember the formula for the derivative of the tangent function, so I worked it out using the definition of the tangent function (sine divided by cosine), the formula for differentiating the quotient of two functions, and the formulas for the derivatives of the sine and cosine functions. It’s not clear to me whether either of these practices are a violation of the advice in this chapter.]

This concludes my discussion of Part IV of The Math Academy Way. In part 7 of this series I’ll discuss Part V of the book, “Technical deep dives,” which decribes in more detail the “technologies” that support the learning strategies discussed in Part III.

As in my previous posts, the following sections are my paraphrases of the content of The Math Academy Way; my own comments are [enclosed in square brackets]. You should interpret statements not in brackets as being prefaced by “The book says . . .” or “The author claims that . . .” Terms in boldface are key concepts relevant to the Math Academy system.

Chapter 10. Active Learning

This chapter reemphasizes that active learning (doing exercises, etc.) is much more effective than passive learning (watching videos and lectures, reading and re-reading textbooks,etc.). In classroom settings this requires all students to be actively learning individually, not just doing exercises as a group.

Multiple examples show the need for active learning. In the first (hypothetical) example, a personal tennis coach talks about tennis and demonstrates moves, but does not have the student practice them. The obvious result would be no learning. In a second (real-life) example, a system was tested that provided instructors improved feedback for lectures, but it was discovered most students were not paying attention anyway.

A third example is MIT physics courses incorporating active learning and reducing the number of students failing by almost 2/3. Finally, it was discovered that elite skaters spend 6x more practice time vs. rest time on jumps, etc., that they’re trying to master. (The Math Academy system has students spending 7x time doing exercises vs. reading worked examples.)

The neuroscience behind active learning: active learning leads to more brain activity, both during active learning and during subsequent passive learning.

Why are there misconceptions around active learning? Passive learning is more convenient for teachers and less stressful for students—and thus less stressful for teachers in turn. Students think they are learning something when they actually aren’t.

Chapter 11. Direct Instruction (in-progress)

[This is a fragmentary chapter with minimal material thus far.]

We should not reject direct instruction on the basis that active learning with passive guidance is more effective than passive learning plus direct instruction. This tells us nothing about the effectiveness of direct instruction on its own, but rather just demonstrates the superiority of active learning over passive learning: Active + Direct > Active + Unguided > Passive + Direct.

Chapter 12. Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is “mindful repetition at the edge of one’s ability,” contrasted with mindless repetition of things one already knows. The chapter includes much discussion about the effectiveness of deliberate practice vs. non-deliberative, as well as the fact that deliberate practice is hard for students, since one must continually repeat things “at the edge of one’s ability.” One can supplement deliberate practice with other more fun things to help motivate students, but these are not an effective substitute for it.

Chapter 13. Mastery Learning

The basic idea here is to require the student to demonstrate proficiency in whatever areas are prerequisites for their next learning challenge. In the limit this requires one-on-one instruction, either by a tutor or by a system like Math Academy.

The idea of mastery learning is resisted by traditional educators because it plays havoc with the traditional grade by grade progression of students.

Math Academy has implemented mastery learning at a very granular level through its “knowledge graph,” discussed above. The knowledge graph dictates what a student can next learn. This is compared to the zone of proximal development, i.e., that set of problems which a student can solve with support but not without it. This corresponds with the knowledge frontier or edge of mastery. The goal is for the student to continually expand that frontier outward.

The knowledge profile is the set of topics in the knowledge graph that the student has already mastered. Placement diagnostics determine what that profile is for a new student, so that they can be presented with material at their knowledge frontier.

Chapter 14, Minimizing Cognitive Load

Math Academy instruction is very fine-grained, with a given area having about 10x the number of steps (e.g., worked example followed by exercise) than typical mathematics curricula. The goal is to minimize cognitive load, i.e., the amount of working memory required to complete a task. This helps prevent students from getting stuck on a particular point in the progression of the curriculum.

Each topic is divided into several knowledge points, each consisting of a worked example plus practice exercises. The example given is adding two digit whole numbers. The first knowledge point might be adding two digit numbers where carrying is not required, e.g., 63 + 12. The second knowledge point might be adding two digit numbers with carrying, e.g., 63 + 18. The third knowledge point might be adding two digit numbers with carrying into the hundreds place, e.g., 63 + 38. And so on. Each knowledge point has a subgoal label, e.g., “adding two digit numbers with carrying.”

Knowledge points also can contain diagrams for visualization in addition to verbal explanations, to leverage dual coding and distribute mental processing between visual processing (visuo-spatial sketchpad) and verbal/audio processing (phonological loop). For higher-level topics this can include flow charts.

As students learn the material, scaffolding is removed: a review question may call upon knowledge from one or two of many different worked examples, and timed quizzes further test knowledge in a context where it is not possible to “look at the book.”

Chapter 15. Developing Automaticity

“Automaticity is the ability to perform low-level skills without conscious effort. [emphasis added]” An analogy is to athletes who can perform low-level skills (dribbling a basketball) while thinking consciously about higher-level game strategies. [A similar analogy would be musicians who can perform low-level tasks of playing an instrument while thinking about higher-level tasks like playing expressively or in a certain style.]

One can achieve automaticity (e.g., in mathematics) by leveraging long-term memory to relieve pressure on the limited capacity of short-term memory. Long-term memory thus becomes an extension of short-term memory that a person can draw upon at will.

Automaticity goes beyond familiarity, and requires accessing learned knowledge quickly and accurately. This is required as a necessary foundation before learning more advanced topics that depend on that knowledge already being learned.

Examples of automaticity and the lack thereof: Students are being taught how to compute cubes as the number multiplied by itself and then multiplied by itself again, for example, 4³ = 4 x 4 x 4. The first student knows 4 x 4 = 16 (from having the multiplication table in long-term memory) and then can apply the learned procedure for multiplying a two digit number by a one digit number. The second student doesn’t know the multiplication table, so needs to compute 4 * 4 as 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 = 16. The third student doesn’t even know the addition fact 4 + 4 = 8, but must count up from 4 by 1 four times: 4 + 1 = 5, 5 + 1 = 6, 6 + 1 = 7, 7 + 1 = 8. This results in the second two students making mistakes in their calculations, requiring additional teacher time to correct their understanding and causing student frustration that they’re not “good at math.”

“Automaticity is a necessary component of creativity.” An example is writing: if a person has difficulty with basic issues of spelling and grammar, they will have difficulty in expressing themselves in a creative way. [This is especially true with skills like writing and doing mathematics that—unlike oral language learning—do not come naturally to students based on their having inborn capabilities.]

Automaticity is also necessary for higher-level thinking, and automaticity in knowing and recalling standard mathematical facts is critical to achieving mathematical literacy and academic success in mathematics.

Finally, the chapter discusses the neuroscience underlying automaticity, the idea that it prevents disruptions to background thinking (the “default mode network”), disruptions that reduce the amount of attention and thought a person can devote to a higher-level task.

Chapter 16. Layering

“Layering is the act of building on top of existing knowledge. [emphasis added]” Layering promotes retroactive facilitation (solving a problem using existing knowledge reinforces memory of that knowledge) and proactive facilitation (knowledge acquired in solving previous problems improving knowledge acquisition needed in solving new problems).

Layering also improves the structural integrity of a person’s acquired knowledge, i.e., having that knowledge not have holes where understanding is lacking.

Math Academy promotes layering by having mastery of one topic lead directly into a new topic, and by leveraging a complete and comprehensive knowledge graph in which all new topics depend and build on previous topics. It also uses additional techniques to promote connections between topics, like presenting multi-part problems requiring knowledge of many previous topics to solve.

A key principle: “Any lesson should cover all types of problems that a student could reasonably be expected to solve if they truly know the topic.” Some other approaches violate this by, for example, presenting calculus in a way that does not require algebra.

Chapter 17. Non-Interference

Learning two related topics at the same time (or close together) can inhibit learning of both (associative interference). The Math Academy system avoids this by spacing related topics out in time, and presenting students with a choice of unrelated next topics, thus achieving non-interference. In addition to promoting learning, this also keeps students interested by increasing variety and reducing unnecessary repetition.

Chapter 18. Spaced Repetition (Distributed Practice)

This chapter reviews conventional information about spaced repetition: that by spacing review out in time, students can mitigate the effect of memory decay (the forgetting curve) and (ideally) retain information indefinitely.

The book criticizes traditional educational practices for neglecting the effectiveness of spaced repetition, and thereby leading students to forget information once they have been tested on it, reducing the amount of information retained by them.

Math Academy has found a way to improve on traditional spaced repetition methods based on flashcards, using fractional implicit repetition (FIRe). In a hierarchical body of knowledge like mathematics, by reviewing a given topic the student is implicitly also reviewing those topics on which the original topic depends; this must be taken into account when constructing a review schedule for a student. The techniques by which this is done have been refined over many years by Math Academy [and therefore form part of its proprietary advantage].

Spaced repetition also promotes generalization: that by reviewing material on a suitable schedule, the student can discover new connections between the topic being reviewed and other topics, and therefore can better transfer their knowledge to related but different topics.

What about the objection that spaced repetition requires reviewing a very large number of items during each review session? Because mathematics is a hierarchical body of knowledge (see above), more advanced skills encompass many more basic skills. Thus the number of reviews can be reduced (repetition compression) by reviewing the advanced skill, which also serves as a review of the basic skills. The example given is that of multiplying a 2-digit number by a single-digit number: reviewing this also reviews multiplying a single-digit number by another single-digit number, as well as adding a single-digit number to a 2-digit number.

However, this cannot always be done. If a student’s learning speed is below average, the Math Academy system will not do implicit reviews but will drop back to doing explicit reviews of more basic material. In this case a review counts as a fraction of a spaced repetition. Conversely, if a student’s learning speed is above average, each review will count as more than one spaced repetition. The Math Academy system computes student-topic learning speeds for each individua student in order to do this effectively.

Spaced repetition can be contrasted with the spiral approach, where an instructor periodically revisits material previously covered. Spiraling amounts to spaced repetition with a fixed schedule, and is less effective than actual spaced repetition. However, it is easier for instructors to implement; true spaced repetition with individualized schedules requires supporting technology like that found in the Math Academy system.

Chapter 19. Interleaving (Mixed Practice)

Interleaving or mixed practice—mixing up exercises on different topics in a single practice session—is contrasted with blocking or blocked practice—doing a bunch of similar exercises on the same topic. [“Blocking” and “blocked” are here used in the sense of doing a homogeneous “block” of exercises. This was what I was doing by systematically doing linear algebra exercises one by one in the order presented in the textbook I was using.]

Interleaving is more effective for a variety of reasons. First, it is more efficient: blocking leads to diminishing returns as the number of similar exercises increases. Second, it helps students better match problem solving techniques to problems, especially when the technique needed is not obvious from the statement of the problem. With blocking, students end up reusing the same technique from problem to problem and can get lost when a different type of problem is posed.

However, blocking can appear to be more effective, and to some degree can be more effective when first learning a skill. This makes it attractive to both students and teachers (who are motivated by the appearance of rapid learning). However, interleaving is more effective for long-term retention of material, as has been experimentally demonstrated. It involves desirable difficulties, i.e., difficulties that promote learning.

Interleaving can occur at two levels, and the Math Academy system features both:

Macro-interleaving is done at the level of topics: the student will be presented with a variety of different topics, as opposed to working on the same topic for an extended period of time. Micro-interleaving is done at the level of review, mixing up problems from different topics.

However, there is a trade-off here, in that it would take an excessively long time to fully interleave all review exercises for a topic (i.e., with exercises for several other topics) before featuring them on quizzes on that topic. So the Math Academy system compromises by blocking exercises during lessons and counting them toward spaced repetition credit.

Chapter 20. The Testing Effect (Retrieval Practice)

The best way to review material is not to re-read it (or re-watch it, or re-listen to it), it’s to be quizzed on it. (This is referred to as the testing effect or retrieval practice effect.) The act of retrieving material helps fix it in long-term memory. This is especially effective when quizzes are combined with spaced repetition.

Frequent quizzes are not used in traditional educational settings as much as they might be; a more typical pattern is to have one mid-term exam and one final exam. However, the Math Academy system does quick quizzes very frequently (continuous assessment), and also does evaluation as part of spaced repetition review.

The Math Academy systems tries to mitigate test-induced anxiety by doing quick quizzes on material the student is already ready to be tested on. Timed tests should not be introduced too early and tests in general should be matched to the student’s current level of proficiency, thus preventing desirable difficulties from turning into undesirable difficulties. Lower proficiency can lead to math anxiety as students find themselves unprepared for tests and do poorly on them.

Doing frequent quizzes helps build self-confidence and prepares the student for more extensive timed testing. Topics show up on low-stakes non-timed quizzes first, with opportunities to retake quizzes and go back to review material. Timed tests on the same topics are done only after the student has demonstrated proficiency on those topics.

Chapter 21. Targeted Remediation

The Math Academy system helps students struggling with certain topics (or certain components within a given topic) not by trying to lower the difficulty of the student’s tasks, e.g., by providing extra feedback and hints (“adaptive feedback”), but rather by giving them additional time and practice on exactly those topics (or components within topics) that are causing them the most difficulty (targeted remediation).

“Targeted remediation at Math Academy’s level of granularity (individual students on individual topics) and integrity (maintaining the bar for success) has not been studied in academic literature. [emphasis in the original]”

Corrective remedial support is tailored to the specific circumstances: providing more questions if a student is struggling with a task, switching them to unrelated topics if they fail a topic before coming back to the original topic, and providing remedial reviews if they appear to be stuck at a particular place. Note that remedial reviews may be for a topic that’s some distance back in the knowledge graph hierarchy, but which is a prerequisite for the current topic. For example, in the topic of cubing a number, a student may have problems with calculating (-4)³ = (-4) x (-4) x (-4) because they have unremediated problems with multiplying negative numbers.

Preventative remediation occurs when the student’s learning speed for a topic is predicted to be low based on their learning speed for other related topics. In this case the Math Academy system can prevent problems by scheduling additional reviews.

Foundational remediation occurs when students start a Math Academy course with holes in their knowledge of the foundational topics for the course. For example, they may not have mastered some topics in arithmetic needed for algebra. In this case the Math Academy system can let them proceed with topics that don’t depend on the unmastered foundational topics, and go back and remediate those unmastered topics when needed.

Finally, the Math Academy developers track student learning to see if there are any topics that students are having particular struggles with. They can then do content remediation, for example by providing additional worked examples or review points within the topic, or by splitting it up into multiple separate topics.

Chapter 22. Gamification

Gamification can improve both student learning and enjoyment if it is properly aligned with education objectives and student motivations and is designed to prevent students gaming the system.

The Math Academy system uses eXperience Points (XP) tied to completion of tasks, each XP representing a minute of sustained effort by an average student. (Optional) competitive weekly leaderboards keep track of students’ activity versus other students of comparable ability. Students accumulating lots of XP get promoted into higher leagues, students not doing so much get relegated to lower divisions [as in the English Premier League].

Students can earn extra XP with perfect performances on tasks, earn little or no XP for nearly passable or poor performance, and get penalized with negative XP if they are perceived to be blowing off tasks.

Student progress is measured separately from XP, based on the percentage of a course that they’ve completed. Progress slows down near the end of a course due to the need to review material from earlier in the course—but the system will never let lesson time (vs. review time) fall below 25% of the total time. There is no leaderboard or other gamification for course progress.

Chapter 23. Leveraging Cognitive Learning Strategies Requires Technology

Teachers are reluctant to implement educational strategies like those embodied in the Math Academy system, but not through any fault of their own. They are working under structural constraints that make it difficult to adopt such strategies, for example, the system of grade-to-grade progression. Even if they could adopt some or all of the strategies then it would be physically impossible to implement them beyond a 1-on-1 tutoring scenario, because students have differing knowledge profiles and learn at different speeds. Thus implementing these strategies via technology is the only possible solution.

[This raises a question: How did this problem play out in the original Math Academy program in Pasadena, the one from which the Math Academy learning system arose? I think this chapter would benefit from a more in-depth treatment of that story, including an account of how it motivated creation of the Math Academy system.]

This concludes my discussion of Part III of The Math Academy Way. In part 6 of this series I’ll discuss Part IV of the book, “Coaching,” a relatively short and incomplete section that discusses how parents can best help children using the Math Academy system, as well as how students can help themselves.

As in my summary of Part I, the following sections are my paraphrases of the content of The Math Academy Way; my own comments are [enclosed in square brackets]. You should interpret statements not in brackets as being prefaced by “The book says . . .” or “The author claims that . . .” Terms in boldface are key concepts relevant to the Math Academy system.

Chapter 6. The persistence of neuromyths

This is a brief chapter that makes the point that laypeople and even experts believe things about the brain and learning that are demonstrably not true. The so-called “Mozart Effect” is given as an example. Belief in such neuromyths is common among those seeking to excuse education failures or looking for a “quick fix” that doesn’t require a lot of effort.

Chapter 7. Myths and Realities about Individual Differences

This chapter begins by pointing out the the idea of different ”learning styles” is a neuromyth: students may prefer receiving information in different ways (e.g., verbal vs. visual), but that does not affect the rate at which they actually learn.

A major factor in how people learn is working memory capacity (WMC): Larger WMC makes tasks easier (all other things being equal), improves the ability to do abstract thinking (which in turn affects the ability to apply learning to new contexts), and improves the speed at which people can learn.

It is not possible to improve WMC. [Although the author does not mention it by name, so-called ”dual n-back” training would seem to be an example of a technique that purports to do this. But see Gwern Branwen’s discussion of whether this actually affects IQ.] However WMC can be augmented by long-term memory that encodes domain-specific knowledge. [A trivial example: avoiding the need to multiple 4 times 16 because one has memorized the answer.] Since people are able to add more information to long-term memory (within limits), this is consistent with the ideas behind growth mindset.

In the context of mathematics, the field can be divided into roughly six levels, from basic arithmetic to Fields medal-level mathematical work. [I was probably at or close to level 4 upon graduating from college—capable of doing graduate-level work at least to some minimal level—and am now below level 3.]

People generally hit an abstraction ceiling, a point at which the time and effort required to learn math to a given level exponentially increases to a point where continuing is not a productive use of one’s time even given sufficient motivation. For people with lower WMC the exponential curve is steeper and they will hit the ceiling sooner, because it takes them more energy to reach a given level of proficiency.

However, if learning can be made more efficient, so that it requires less energy, the exponential curve flattens somewhat and students can reach levels of proficiency they might not otherwise be able to.

WMC and similar capacities have a genetic component, and we cannot assume everybody to be at the same level. Genetic-influenced ability interacts with environmental factors—access to instructors, amount of practice, etc.—to determine the overall level a person can reach in math. Instructors downplay this fact, partly to encourage students and partly for self-interested reasons, because they don’t want to lose students. [Does this same incentive affect Math Academy itself, and, if so, how?]

But people can generally learn more math than they do, and struggling in math is not really an indication of how much one can learn. For example, the struggle may be because a student didn’t master previous material and is not given the opportunity to remedy that. One of Math Academy’s claims is that they can detect and remediate such knowledge gaps with the aid of an ”adaptive, automated learning system.”

Math Academy also avoids such gaps in the first place via a combination of mastery learning, spaced repetition, and comprehensive coverage of all required topics. [See the chapter on the ”knowledge graph.”]

Struggle can also be caused by ineffective practice and insufficient practice. Math Academy can help here by providing suitable practice exercises to encourage active learning, but success is ultimately up to the student’s motivation to put in the work. Such motivation may be intrinsic (the student loves math) or extrinsic (the student needs math for a job, or is rewarded by competitive success or by parents).

Final discussion: If suitable instructional scaffolding, guidance, etc., can compensate for lower WMC and related issues, why couldn’t we employ this to educate all students at the same rate and to the same level?

But in practice some students can ”eat” bigger ”bites” of new material than others can, and this will in practice cause them to progress faster. This is consistent with the observation that math will become difficult for different students at different times in their study.

[This discussion reminds me of Nathan Robinson’s argument that we can’t conclude that hereditary differences in intelligence between individuals exist until/unless we spend many many years trying to teach someone something: “When we have given students a boundlessly kind, supportive engineering program, that lasts as long as they need and is structured around them with as many of society’s resources as possible put toward its perfection . . . then maybe we will know their ‘natural capacity’ for engineering.” The counter-argument in The Math Academy Way is that any given student’s “innate capacity” for mathematics is significantly higher than we suppose, but that students do vary in that capacity, such that some will “hit a wall” earlier than others even in an optimally-structured program.]

Chapter 8. Myths and Realities about Effective Practice

The first part of this chapter promotes direct instruction and criticizes constructivist instruction, discovery learning, and related approaches. One key point is that discovery learning is much more effective for experts who have pre-existing knowledge that they can use as a basis for further exploration, and also more effective in a work setting where no one person is expected to know everything and work output is often a group effort.

But these are not typically the case in traditional education: we want individuals to learn, not groups, and we don’t want student to have the illusion of learning when in reality they’re being carried by other people in the group.

The discussion then switches to the point that no learning is effortless, and learning requires a sustained effort at deliberative practice, i.e., ”individualized training activities specifically chosen to improve specific aspects of a student’s performance.” This can include practice testing and distributed practice (spaced repetition). “Learning is all about creating desirable difficulties.”

Finally, the discussion defends testing, repetition, competition, and (in the context of math) computation from those who feel they detract from learning. The main point here is that testing, repetition, and competition are key to talent development in other fields, and equally if not more so in math. As for computation, it is needed as a basic skill to help build further conceptual understanding.

Chapter 9. Myths and Realities About Mathematical Acceleration

This chapter discusses extensive research that shows that having qualified students take above-grade math courses has many positive benefits and no drawbacks. Students who have mastered prerequisites suffer no negative psychological effects, learn more material to the same depth (as they would without acceleration), don’t run out of math courses (many such courses beyond calculus), get better experience than with math competitions, can place out of college courses (possibly with special appeals to instructors), and better prepare themselves for advanced instruction in math or related fields (e.g., engineering).

Speculations on why schools don’t support acceleration include: It doesn’t fit the traditional one-grade-at-a-time model, especially at breakpoints between elementary and junior high school, and between junior high school and senior high school. Acceleration can also negatively impact school funding because students spend less time in school. [Another possible reason is apparent disparate impact, based on which students get admitted to accelerated classes and which don’t.]

This concludes my discussion of Part II of The Math Academy Way. In part 5 of this series I’ll discuss Part III of the book, which goes into more depth regarding the “features” of the Math Academy system, i.e., the learning strategies it implements.

In this post I turn the floor over to Math Academy itself, summarizing the main arguments of Part I of the book The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning, by Justin Skycak (advised by Jason Roberts). (The book is still in draft form; I read, took notes on, and am referencing the draft as of December 27, 2024. However, at the time of writing there is a newer draft, dated January 28, 2025.)

The preface of the book lays out the questions the book aims to answer:

1. What techniques exist to maximize student learning and talent development, particularly in the context of math?

2. Why are these techniques so impactful, and if they are indeed so impactful, then why are they so often absent from traditional classrooms?

3. How does Math Academy leverage these techniques?

The book is aimed at pretty much anyone who might be interested in the Math Academy system, not excepting math hobbyists (like me).

The first set of chapters (Part I: Preliminaries) can be thought of as an extended “sales pitch” for Math Academy: identifying the problem and explaining how Math Academy is uniquely positioned to solve it. These and later chapters include copious quotations from and citations of the research literature relevant to Math Academy; as noted in the preface, “when faced with the decision to (a) build credibility by quoting the literature extensively, versus (b) streamline our communication, we have chosen to lean towards credibility.”

The following sections are my paraphrases of the content of The Math Academy Way; my own comments are [enclosed in square brackets]. You should interpret statements not in brackets as being prefaced by “The book says that . . .” or “The author claims that . . .” Terms in boldface are key concepts relevant to the Math Academy system.

Chapter 1. The Two-Sigma Solution

The first chapter riffs off the key claim of education researcher Benjamin Bloom: that one-on-one instruction can elevate a typical student to the 98th percentile, an up to two standard deviation improvement (hence the “two sigma solution”). [However, the book notes that this level of improvement is not seen by other researchers, and José Luis Ricón’s analysis echoes this skepticism.] Leaving aside the issue of exactly how effective it is, Bloom’s method would be extremely costly to do with human instructors even if we wanted to do it: more than $10,000 a year.

But in any case traditional schooling is at odds with the idea of talent development as it is practiced in other areas (e.g., sports and music). The key contrasts are grouping by ability vs. grouping by age, and short-term teacher involvement with a given group of students vs. long-term involvement (cross-sectional vs. longitudinal). Mixing these modes does not seem to be effective.

Talent development itself proceeds in three phases: an early phase focused on having fun learning, a middle phase focused on intensive skill development, and a final phase focused on application to new and original problems at the highest level. Acquiring knowledge and solving problems (the second phase) precedes creative endeavors (the third phase). Math Academy is focused on the second phase and assumes a willingness to learn on the part of the student.

The chapter concludes with a list of citations of relevant research papers, a practice repeated in subsequent chapters.

[To the extent that this book is a sales pitch—and I think in large part it is, whether the author acknowledges it or not—this chapter is in my opinion a missed opportunity. It’s a classic example of “feature-benefit” selling: “here is a feature, and here is the benefit it provides you, the prospective customer.” But this doesn’t address a critical point: why should I or anyone else care? Selling is much more effective when the customer has “pain” that the product can potentially relieve.]

[That’s why I led my previous post with the anecdote about me not knowing what an eigenvector is, goofy though it may be. It is a source of embarrassment and frustration to me that I still haven’t learned a key concept in an area of mathematics I’m interested in, and that embarrassment and frustration are intense enough that I was motivated to read this book and to consider spending $49 a month. So, Math Academy folks, please consider surfacing more pain in your prospects! And not general free-floating pain, but pain as it is specifically felt by students, parents, teachers, adults in the workforce, etc.]

Chapter 2. The Science of Learning

The key message of this chapter is that researchers have empirically demonstrated the key elements related to effective learning: active learning, deliberative practice, mastery learning, minimizing cognitive load, developing automaticity, layering, non-interference, spaced repetition (distributed practice), interleaving (mixed practice), the testing effect (retrieval practice), and gamification.

However, with minor exceptions [like the Math Academy], educators have not incorporated these finding into their teaching practice. The main reason seems to be that using them makes both teachers and students feel that students are not learning fast enough, and both teachers and students value the perception of learning over the actuality: illusion of comprehension prioritized over desirable difficulty.

[Although the book doesn’t mention it, this is true of parents as well: many value good grades more than actual learning.]

Technology can help here, by making it possible for teachers to implement techniques that are too time-consuming to do manually, e.g., creating personalized spaced repetition schedules for students. [But, technology is no panacea here, since effective use of spaced repetition requires a fair amount of discipline on the part of the student.]

The chapter concludes with the claim that by using these techniques the Math Academy system can accelerate learning by 4x.

Chapter 3. Core Science: How the Brain Works

This chapter begins by reviewing the distinction between sensory memory, short-term memory (working memory), and long-term memory. Proper learning techniques can compensate for lower short-term memory.

Solving a math problem (like calculating the value of 4³ ) is a coordinated effort between sensory, short-term, and long-term memory: Sensory memory is used for initial understanding of the problem (calculate 4³ ) and for concrete storage of intermediate results (e.g., writing down “4 * 16” after having done the initial multiplication of 4 * 4). Long-term memory is used for retrieval of memorized facts (e.g., 4 * 4 = 16) and memorized procedures (e.g., how to multiple a two-digit number). Working memory retrieves information from sensory memory and long-term memory, does calculations as needed, and stores the results in sensory memory (as intermediate results) or long-term memory (as final results).

The author notes that items stored in long-term memory can reduce the work done by short-term memory, e.g., memorizing the values of 2³ , 3³ , 4³ , 5³ , etc.

[An alternate—though less general—possibility along the same lines is being familar with “computer arithmetic” and recalling that 16 * 4 = 64. Or, a variant: recasting 4³ as (2² )³ = 2⁶ based on rules involving addition of exponents, and then using the memorized values of powers of two to produce 2⁶ = 64.]

Chapter 4. Core Technology: The Knowledge Graph

This chapter introduces the idea of a knowledge graph, a [directed acyclic] graph showing which (detailed) topics are prerequisites for other (detailed) topics. Some topics may be prerequisites for more than one topic, and some topics may have multiple prerequisites.

[The knowledge graph is analogous to a “tech tree” in Sid Meier’s Civilization and similar games, in which certain technologies must be discovered first in order to enable discovery of others. It’s a directed graph because the edges go in a single direction from a more basic prerequisite topic to a more advanced topic that depends on that prerequisite. It’s an acyclic graph because there are no circular dependencies, in which one topic is a prequisite for another topic, which in turn is a prerequisite for the first.]

The full knowledge graph for Math Academy consists of thousands of topics [nodes], covering mathematics from elementary school to college. Courses are simply subsets of the overall knowledge graph, typically containing a few hundred topics; these topics can then be combined into a course graph.

[The construction of the overall knowledge graph must have taken a lot of work. The graph is thus a possible source of competitive advantage for Math Academy. However, since it’s exposed in the course pages an unscrupulous competitor could presumably copy the entire graph, either directly or—more sneakily—by enrolling an LLM as a student and training it on the course material.]

Mastery learning: Students must demonstrate proficiency in all prerequisites for a topic before being allowed to move on to that topic. Mastery of a topic thus unlocks new portions of the knowledge graph into which students can advance.

A topic can encompass other topics that are prerequisites to it. This simplifies review of material: a student reviewing a given topic does not have to do detailed review of that topic’s prerequisites.

[The book discusses this point in much more detail later. For now, note that this encompassing is made possible by the hierarchical nature of mathematics, in which more advanced areas subsume basic topics. It would not necessarily be possible with other subjects. Also, many people like me who’ve tried learning topics using spaced repetition have felt burdened by the sheer number of items to be reviewed each day, especially when learning a new set of facts. Greatly reducing the number of review items can thus be a major advantage for Math Academy.]

Finally, a new Math Academy student takes a diagnostic exam to determine which topics in the knowledge graph they have mastered and which they have not. This enables them to skip topics they already know in favor of addressing foundational topics that they have not yet mastered.

Chapter 5. Accountability and Incentives

Maximizing learning is difficult and at odds with other possible goals: enjoyment, ease of practice, etc. Doing it successfully requires making decisions on pedagogy, etc., based on how those affect measurable learning. However students and teachers (as well as parents and sometimes employers) resist this approach (which is admittedly not easy to implement).

Accountability is lacking in traditional education because it is diffuse, spread out over multiple teachers: a teacher may be ineffective, and will leave it to the teacher of the next grade to remedy any student deficiencies. [This is of course a consequence of the way education is traditionally structured.]

Grade inflation is rampant. This means that grades as a measure of learning cannot be trusted and can set students up for failure in future courses. Experience during COVID-19 demonstrates this, as math grades inflated and remained inflated after the main part of the epidemic was over. But COVID-19 just accelerated an existing trend.

One response to criticism of grade inflation is to deny the existence of objective learning (radical constructivism), making the student the judge of their own learning. [Although the author does not mention it, this can seen as an example of the general postmodernist approach.] This denial also can be seen as a response to concerns over disparate impact, both during COVID-19 and otherwise. [It’s interesting to speculate whether radical constructivism would have gained a following if such concerns were absent.]

In contrast, Math Academy is held accountable for learning by those who pay for it and [it is implied] exert the discipline to complete the course, and must therefore ensure it employs effective learning strategies. This is in contrast to free or “freemium” offerings that cannot afford to turn away students unwilling to put in serious work.

[Note that charging in and of itself is necessary but not sufficient: There are lots of education offerings that charge a lot of money and purport to deliver actual learning. The key element has to be independent validation of learning by a third party mechanism, e.g., standardized tests or class grades.]

This concludes my discussion of Part I of The Math Academy Way. In part 4 of this series I’ll discuss Part II of the book, which can be thought of as addressing prospects’ objections to the sales pitch of Part I.

But before I do that, let me take a few moments to throw some cold water on Math Academy. Why I am doing this? I’ve spent almost my entire career working in sales groups selling software and hardware to large enterprises. Based on my experience, it’s best for both customer and vendor if a prospect starts the “sales journey” with a healthy amount of skepticism.

It’s too easy to let yourself be overly-dazzled by the promises of new “gee-whiz” technologies, or to be so suffering from painful problems that you leap to adopt the first product that comes along and promises to relieve that pain. That in turn can produce unhappy customers and a vendor distracted by trying to mollify them.

I tried to apply that way of thinking to my own case, doing research and looking for reviews of Math Academy (especially negative ones) rather than instantly reaching for my credit card and signing up for the service as soon as I read about it. So, please allow me to role-play as a skeptical and pessimistic prospective customer of Math Academy, at least for this post. Let’s start:

If you were a betting person and you were coming into this cold, you would bet that Math Academy is not going to “revolutionize education,” is not a “game changer,” and certainly will not have “civilizational impact”—to quote just a few of the things people have written about it.

Why is that? First, your prior position should be to hold as true the “null hypothesis in education,” as the economist Arnold Kling refers to it: that no education intervention—including online education technologies like the Math Academy system—will meet all of the following four tests:

• It is experimentally validated as making a real difference (not just due to selection effects).
• It is persistent (learning does not fade with time).
• It is replicable by groups other than the original educators.
• It is scalable to be able to support large numbers of students.

(The issue of selection effects is particularly relevant to Math Academy, since it appears to be attracting a customer base that is relatively more affluent, knowledgeable about mathematics, and motivated to learn than the student population as a whole.)

Audrey Watters, a critic of education technology, has her own version of Kling’s “null hypothesis”:

A friendly reminder that a meta-analysis of one hundred years of research on ed-tech looks something like this: some students showed some improvement on a standardized test in a specific subject area, after using ed-tech in a class taught by a supportive educator well-trained in that subject area and in the technology in question.

In other words, that’s about all that we can expect of the Math Academy system as well, a system whose roots lie in a context very much like this (a special mathematics program in the Pasadena, California, public school system).

Second, Math Academy touts itself as being based on the “two sigma problem” (or, more optimistically, “two sigma solution”) work promoted by education researcher Benjamin Bloom: that certain types of education practice can elevate a student from the 50th percentile in rank to the 98th percentile, a jump of about two standard deviations (hence the “two sigma”). But apparently other researchers have not been able to fully replicate Bloom’s results, and reading José Luis Ricón’s discussion of “two sigma” research, including some of the techniques touted by Math Academy, left me fairly lukewarm about the possibility of true two sigma solutions, or even one or one-half sigma solutions.

Next, Math Academy the company is yet another in a long line of for-profit and non-profit organizations commercializing online education technologies enthusiastically hyped as revolutionizing education. Your a priori assumption should be that it will fail to live up to that hype, just like its predecessors. Those failures have been exhaustively documented by Audrey Watters; see for example her comments on “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade” (that decade being the 2010s).

Finally, there are various reasons why Math Academy is unlikely to have much impact on education as a whole, at least in the US, where the public school and higher education systems are characterized by a set of entrenched practices and often misaligned incentives. Many of these reasons are discussed in The Math Academy Way, and I’ll cover them in due time. However, they clearly limit the market that Math Academy can address, at least in the near term.

Where then might Math Academy find some traction? There are three obvious markets:

• Homeschooled students, whose parents and guardians have rejected the public school system and are thus not restricted by public school ways of teaching.
• Mathematically talented students (high 90s percentiles), who again are not often finding what they need in the traditional education system.
• Adult learners (like me) who are looking to refresh and recover their mathematical knowledge or learn new areas of mathematics, whether in support of career goals or simply as a hobby.

These are not trivial markets. For example, the National Home Education Research Institute claims there were over 3 million US home-schooled students in 2021-2022. There are over 100,000 US students taking AP Calculus BC (equivalent to a university calculus course). There are also millions of people who subscribe to math-centric video channels like 3Blue1Brown.

However, the cost of Math Academy and the level of student motivation required to complete its courses will likely combine to limit its appeal among those three groups. There may be enough takers to support a sustainable business—50,000 customers at $500-600 a year would be a $25-30 million revenue opportunity—but it’s not clear that there’s enough of a market to achieve the broader ambitions of Math Academy’s founders and staff, much less to have “civilizational impact.”

So, how might Math Academy fail? Let me count the ways:

• The system could fail to meet its education goals, such that students going through the program don’t show much actual improvement in test scores and grades.
• The company could fail to meet its financial goals, not attracting enough customers to keep it solvent and then going out of business.
• The company could be taken over by a larger company that proceeds to “enshittify” the service: for example, turning it into a free service with ads to attract more customers, and then optimizing for “engagement” (and consequent ad viewing) rather than learning.

Math Academy is apparently both self-funded and profitable, and its founders plan to keep it that way. But “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” and we can’t rule out the possibility that Math Academy will get “punched in the mouth” financially or otherwise and will have to look to outside investors or even an acquirer for help.

However, the most likely scenario is that Math Academy will remain a profitable company, but will never break out of its initial niches of motivated and relatively affluent home-schooled students, mathematically-talented students, and math-interested adult learners. Most people would count that as a success in business terms, but as noted above I doubt it would satisfy the Math Academy founders and staff, who presumably want to change the entire field of mathematics education for the better.

But those concerns are for the future, which remains unwritten. In the meantime, I still don’t know what an eigenvector is and would very much like to. So, on to part 3, in which I consider the Math Academy sales pitch as embodied in the book The Math Academy Way.

This all started because I don’t know what an eigenvector is. If I were a typical person, that wouldn’t be a problem. I could go through life happily ignorant of how to calculate an eigenvector, or even how to spell the word.

But in the olden days I was a college math and physics major, graduated with a 4.0 GPA, and was encouraged by my professors to consider going to graduate school. (I ultimately decided against it.) Many years later I did a bunch of data analyses in R as part of my blogging hobby and wanted to learn linear algebra (the area of mathematics that includes eigenvectors) to help me understand more advanced data science topics. I worked my way through a few chapters of an old edition of a linear algebra textbook, doing all the exercises (and blogging my solving them), but after almost nine years of working off and on I ran out of gas before getting to the chapter that covered eigenvectors.

And there things sat, until I stumbled across Math Academy, a new online education service (still in beta), via a mention on X. Doing a search for “Math Academy” on X and elsewhere brought up a bunch of enthusiastic testimonials, and since I was still peeved about not knowing about eigenvectors I was motivated to look into it.

As it happens, there’s a lot of online material explaining the Math Academy system, including an entire draft book, The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning. So, I read the book, took copious notes on it, and read Math Academy material both informal and formal. After doing all that, I decided to spring for a subscription—which at $49 a month was not exactly a impulse purchase for me—and started out again on my journey to learn what an eigenvector is.

(Since I’m getting on in years, I’d like to travel fairly quickly. My goal is to complete the Math Academy Linear Algebra course and any prerequisites to it by the end of 2025. Then I’ll begin a second journey, with a goal of finishing the Probability and Statistics course and its prerequisite, the Multivariable Calculus course, by the end of 2026.)

Because Math Academy makes some significant claims about its service’s effectiveness, and others make even more extravagant claims on its behalf, I thought it was worth blogging about. Because there’s a lot of information out there, and I had a lot of thoughts myself, I divided it up into multiple posts, one per day. For reference, here’s the complete list:

• Part 1: My eigenvector embarassment. This post.
• Part 2: A skeptical prospect. My attempt to ignore the hype and start off with a pessimistic view of how effective Math Academy might be.
• Parts 2-8: These posts contain my notes summarizing the material in The Math Academy Way, along with my occasional comments. Feel free to skip these if you’ve read the book or aren’t interested in my comments on it.
  • Part 3: The sales pitch. How Math Academy (the company) pitches Math Academy (the product).
  • Part 4: Addressing objections. Why objections to other online learning systems (supposedly) don’t apply to Math Academy.
  • Part 5: Product features. The various learning strategies embodied in the Math Academy system.
  • Part 6: Customer responsibilities. What Math Academy users (and those who may be responsible for them) need to do to ensure they actually learn something.
  • Part 7: Technology brief. The nerd section, with in-depth explanations of how the Math Academy system works.
  • Part 8: Follow-up questions and notes. The Math Academy FAQ, and material that hasn’t yet made it into the main body of the book The Math Academy Way.
• Part 9: Customer feedback (non-pedagogical). My comments on my own experience with the Math Academy system, starting with the user interface and other aspects unrelated to the actual pedagogy.
• Part 10: Customer feedback (pedagogical). My thoughts on learning mathematics with the Math Academy system, based on using it for about a month and completing one class.
• Part 11: Final thoughts. Is Math Academy worth the money? Did I learn anything? Will Math Academy revolutionize mathematics education for everybody? Or even for just a few? And is that even worth worrying about in the Age of LLMs?

UPDATE 2026-01-15: After this series of posts I also published additional updates on my Math Academy experience:

• Update 1. I completed Mathematical Foundations III.
• Update 2. I completed Mathematics for Machine Learning.
• Update 3. I completed Linear Algebra.
• Update 4. I completed Calculus I.
• My one-year anniversary of using Math Academy.
• Update 5. I completed Calculus II.

In my next post I’ll look at Math Academy with a jaundiced eye.

Moving my personal website to Hugo. I’d been increasingly frustrated with using Jekyll to manage my frankhecker.com website. I went looking for another static site generator, decided Hugo was the best choice for what I wanted to do, and spent a couple of weeks a year ago converting my old site to work with Hugo. I also made several other improvements, outlined in the blog post “New year, new blog.” I hope this will be the last re-architecture of the site I will want or need to make. (Although I don’t rule out updating the blog theme, especially if I could find a suitable person I could pay to do the work.)

Coping with the end of Cohost. Ironically enough, after I revamped my personal website I did no writing at all specifically for the site. Instead I devoted my attention to the Cohost social media site and did all my writing there, for reasons I’ve previously explained. All told, the almost two years I spent writing on Cohost for my followers, and reading what others had to say, were the most fun and rewarding I’ve ever experienced in my life online.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end sooner or later. For Cohost it was sooner, as financial reality caught up with its staff and owners, the site went read-only on October 1, 2024, and it will shut down completely sometime soon.

Fortunately Cohost staff provided an export mechanism, and I’ve recreated almost all of my Cohost posts on this site, dated to the date I originally published them. (The major exception is my “Sunday night poetry” series, for which see below.) As an extra precaution I’ve requested that the Internet Archive save a final copy of all my Cohost posts in the Wayback Machine, and I’ve updated Cohost-related posts on this site to point to the archived copies.

Writing at Okazu. I’ve been reading Erica Friedman’s Okazu blog and associated Yuricon website, ever since I got interested in yuri manga, and have been a site supporter and participant in the Okazu discord for a few years now. After the debut of GAP: The Series I also got interested in Thai yuri (aka GL) live-action shows, wrote a couple of reviews for Okazu as a guest reviewer, and then had the honor of being named a staff writer at the beginning of June 2024, with my self-chosen “beat” being live-action series from Southeast and East Asia.

What about the new year? 2025 will likely see one or two major changes in my life, but I’m not ready to talk about them yet. My main commitment is to recreate my “Sunday night poetry” series here, with some added poets and poems. I’ll also continue reviewing for Okazu, and plan to take some of my Bluesky comments and turn them into blog posts when and where that makes sense.

Beyond that, things are up in the air. I definitely plan to do some learning, but I’m not ready to publicly commit to what yet. In the meantime, Happy New Year to all of you who stumble on this post! You have my best wishes for a joyful and successful 2025.

I’ll muse here about art and artists in the world to come, a world I assume is not too far removed from the world today (for example, no AGI-induced apocalypse or rapture). If Cohost were still operating I would post this there, since my thinking is too unsettled to consider this my final and definitive take on the topic. But Cohost is dead (RIP), so here we are.

I suppose I should first define what I mean by “art.” Dictionary definitions abound, but I like the anthropologist Richard Anderson’s definition as quoted and endorsed by Cynthia Freeland: “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.”¹ “Artists” are those who encode (and in many cases create) that meaning.

I take it as self-evident that art is good and that we should have more of it. We never know where great art may come from, or what futurity may deem great.

I also take it as self-evident that we want humans to make art. I leave to others the question of whether human-instructed and -directed LLMs can produce art in the sense above. If presently-hypothetical AGIs were to be created, we can certainly imagine them having a culture and creating art. However, such art would likely be alien to us: human-influenced but ultimately profoundly nonhuman, born of different concerns in a different existence. Let the AGIs enjoy it, we need our own art.

We also want people to be able to do art full-time. While a day job may be fruitful for some, others are best suited to making art their whole existence. They would be wasted making house or baking bread (like Emily Dickinson and many other women), delivering babies (like William Carlos Williams) or managing corporations (like Wallace Stevens).

This requires artists having the means to live and create without impoverishing themselves: Suffering may sometimes create great art, but we should not needlessly inflict it on artists. Life will likely bring it to them in any case and in many forms, unrelated to their economic circumstances.

But therein lies the present-day problem: if lots of people want to make art, and they do so within a globalized market that pits all against all, they will likely (really, almost inevitably) end up on the wrong end of the log-normal distribution, in which a few make millions and almost everyone else makes nothing—a difference of four, five, or even more orders of magnitude.

What to do? First, make it cheaper for artists to live by making it cheaper for everyone to live. Reduce the economic burdens of housing and health care in particular (ubiquitous in the GoFundMe and related appeals I see on Bluesky and elsewhere). Increasing supply can help here: The more houses built, the more doctors and nurse educated, the more generic drugs approved, the less expensive life will be for artists and everyone else.

What about government subsidization of artists? Again, I think it’s best to be universal, e.g., support people through general tax credits, wage subsidies, etc., as opposed to having artists be designated wards of the state, directly or indirectly. New art forms or artists don’t look like art to bureaucrats or grant committees, so government grants and other subsidies often end up benefiting a favored few insiders at the expense of outsiders.

How could artists make more money otherwise? One possibility is to have distribution platforms do their own redistribution, e.g., “taxing” top earners to give greater payouts to low earners (for example, by charging them lower fees). It’s an interesting idea, and you can see versions of this in other contexts (for example, Apple’s app store small business program). However, since payouts for most artists on the main “creator economy” platforms (e.g., YouTube, Patreon, Substack) are so low, I suspect that to be truly effective such a program would have to provide compensation to artists above and beyond what they actually earn in sales and subscriptions, analogous to the US Earned Income Tax Credit. I think the chances of such a program being put in place are slim to none.

What about unionization? I think it’s definitely worth pursuing for animators, commercial comic artists, and others, by analogy to SAG-AFTRA, Actors’ Equity, the American Federation of Musicians, and other organizations representing artists to the organizations that hire them. But those unions were formed during a rise in labor’s power, in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The present-day political, economic, and cultural environment, along with the nature of some arts, make comparable organizing efforts harder today, possibly even fruitless in some cases.

What else can we envision to make the life of an artist less fraught? Some have proposed, and others are actively working to create, alternative venues for the economy of art: artist-owned cooperatives like Subvert or Comradery, tightly-curated services like Metalabel that emphasize the physical as much as the digital, and so on. In their various ways these all offer artists a potentially beneficial bargain: trade universal reach and a (very small) chance of outsized rewards for the opportunity to better engage their (possibly niche) audiences and exercise more control over their fate.

But what do I know? In the context of art I’m a consumer, patron, and (occasional) critic, not a practitioner. Feel free to tell me (e.g., on Bluesky) where and when I’m talking out of my hat, and let me know what specifically you’d propose instead.

I’m a long-time listener to new music, have several years of experience in the open source trenches (mainly on the policy and governance side), and have an interest in new organization forms and business models. Thus I couldn’t help but be interested when I learned of Subvert, a new organization that’s seeking to create a Bandcamp-like service organized as a cooperative venture. It’s a venture you can join as a regular supporter (not just as a musician or label), and I did exactly that, contributing $100 to become supporter #1,000.

Subvert was born out of immediate frustration with Bandcamp’s journey from indie darling to corporate concern, but also out of a long-term vision of how the structure of the music business could change:

Imagine a music marketplace where the community owns the code, controls the decisions, and shares in its success.

Subvert is a Bandcamp successor that is collectively owned, stewarded, and controlled by its community, with 100% of its founding ownership reserved for its artists, community, and workers. We’re building a platform that has artists’ interests, collective ownership, and democratic governance hardwired in its very DNA.¹

In pursuit of that goal the Subvert organizers have produced a 134-page document that lays out a business and governance model for Subvert.². The core idea is to create a two-part organization: a cooperative entity (jointly owned by workers, artists, labels, and supporters) to develop and operate the service and a cooperative-owned corporation to own the intangible properties (trademarks, source code and other copyrights, etc.) and attract investors.³

It’s clear that a lot of thought went into this plan, and it’s well worth reading in full. For those with less time or interest there’s also a general information and FAQ page that hits the high points. I’m not going to rehash those documents, but I did want to add some comments of my own.

First, the Subvert proposal and the broader vision behind it share an unspoken assumption that capitalism in some form or other is here to stay—that it’s as nonsensical to speak of “late capitalism” as it is to speak of “late agriculture.” The task is rather to try to find new ways of organizing businesses that mitigate the worst aspects of present-day capitalism. Doing so requires “applying . . . audacious thinking to the systems at the foundation of our economy” and fighting against “hardened cynicism, a belief that meaningful systemic change is unattainable or that individual interests are irreconcilable with beneficial collective outcomes.”⁴

Why would creating a “collectively owned Bandcamp successor” be a good first step in doing this? As the plan outlines, Bandcamp has a proven business model, a model that should be replicable as the basis for a financially-sustainable cooperative. Bandcamp and similar businesses are also in a favorable spot for “subverting” the existing corporate paradigm: they are not highly capital-intensive or technologically complex, and they have relatively weak network effects.⁵ (For example, since Bandcamp sells music in DRM-free formats, people can easily switch to buying music from another service.)

In the longer term (the next 50 years) Subvert seeks to replicate the success of the Mondragon network of cooperative ventures in Spain.⁶ Just as the Mondragon network started out as a single employee-owned business and later expanded into other ventures, so Subvert could serve as the “pioneer species” for a new ecosystem of cooperatives supporting musicians and the music industry.⁷

The Subvert plan takes note of many of the ills of the present-day music business and capitalism in general, including economic inequality resulting from traditional corporate models: “Ownership confers wealth, and the concentration of ownership creates wealth inequality.”⁸ But one factor it does not mention, and which the plan could help mitigate, is inequality among artists themselves. If the experience of artists on Subvert is anything like that of artists on Patreon, artists’ earnings from the platform will be extremely skewed, with the top artists making multiple orders of magnitude as much as less popular ones.⁹ This skewed distribution is likely something Subvert has no influence over, emerging naturally from the fact that the popularity of an artist is due to the multiplicative interaction of several relatively independent factors.¹⁰

However, the proposed structure of Subvert could help ensure that the most popular artists—those who therefore generate the most revenue for Subvert—do not exercise undue influence over the platform: The “one person, one vote” scheme for electing the Board of Directors and making strategic decisions gives less popular artists more influence, since they will form a larger proportion of Subvert’s user base. Other channels for providing feedback to the Subvert board and management also give less popular artists an opportunity to “punch above their weight” by making compelling arguments in favor of their positions and recruiting others in the Subvert community to support them,

Finally, the Platform Shares scheme could be used to compensate less popular artists somewhat more compared to the most popular ones, since there is no inherent reason why Platform Shares for artists need to be granted in strict proportion to their sales. In effect, Platform Shares could be used as a form of redistribution from the most popular artists to less popular artists, helping to build loyalty to the Subvert platform among the mass of less popular artists and strengthening their position as full members of the Subvert community.

In this and other ways Subvert has great potential to spark a change in the music business, and possibly more changes beyond it. It has a well-thought-out plan, and seems to be making a good start on attracting support. If you’re a musician or other artist, you should definitely check it out. If you’re not, but can afford a Subvert membership, I strongly recommend you consider joining as a supporter.

This is my last post on Cohost. I thought about writing something longer, and also highlighting people who were my mutuals and whose posts and comments I enjoyed. But I just don’t have the energy for it, and in any case I hope to resume our conversation in other places, whatever those places may be. I will only say that I have enjoyed writing on Cohost more than I have ever enjoyed writing on any other “social media” site, for reasons I laid out in a previous post. Put simply, I will miss Cohost, and I don’t know if I will find a suitable replacement for it.

In the meantime, you can find my idle comments on Bluesky at @frankhecker.com, my yuri reviews at Okazu, and my other writings and (hopefully) permanent online presence at frankhecker.com.

Thank you @staff for creating Cohost, thank you my followers for finding something interesting in what I write and then bothering to reshare or comment on it, and thank you those whom I followed for your writings in turn. Until we meet again . . .

Iro (@Iro) - 2024-09-29 16:48

I’m getting an error off your RSS feed, for what it’s worth

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-09-30 16:02

Ugh. Can you tell me what feed reader you’re using, and what the error message is? (If you’re too late to comment on Cohost, feel free to email me or ping me on Bluesky.)

Iro (@Iro) - 2024-09-30 16:04

Using Feedbro plugin on Firefox, it’s telling me:

URL https://frankhecker.com/index.xml is not a valid feed and contains no feed links.

If I just click on your feed button and not try to add it to a reader or anything then I get this error

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-09-30 16:10

Thanks for the additional info! The feed works OK in some readers (like Reeder), so I suspect it is not quite 100% compatible with other feed readers in ways I’ll need to track down. As for the error message, it’s possible that it’s due to my leaving off the “https://frankhecker.com” part of the URL when linking to images (and posts) elsewhere on the site.

Thanks again for reporting this. I will look at it as soon as I have time.

What does it mean to be an American? Are some people inherently more “American” than others? And, if so, what if anything does that imply?

[UPDATE 2024-09-27: I revised the final paragraphs of the post and expanded them into a new section “clan and country,” after thinking about a point I had not previously considered.]

Although I’m a life-long registered Democrat and would be considered “liberal” by most or even “leftist” by some, I make it a regular practice to read people who have different political beliefs than myself and who have shown themselves to be more than mere ideologues and political strivers. One of those is Tanner Greer, the (relatively) young conservative intellectual who writes at The Scholars Stage; I’m subscribed to his Patreon and follow him on X (fka Twitter).

Thus when Greer gave a positive recommendation to an opinion piece by Joshua Treviño, “America as Place and People: Understanding J.D. Vance on history and nation,” I thought it worth checking out, and after reading it worth writing in response.

Treviño urges us to watch or read Vance’s speech to the Republican National Convention. I’m sorry, but I’ll take a pass on that. Political speeches are in their essences sales pitches, and having worked in sales groups most of my life I have no desire to watch or read sales pitches when I’m off work, even those that pander to my own political views. What really matters is the end product that the American people would end up buying, i.e., what actions Vance would support Donald Trump in taking were they to win office.

But Treviño’s piece is worth reading because it functions in the same way as, say, a Gartner report does in the industry space I work in: it seeks to provide some intellectual substance behind the sales pitch and to bend the mind of the “prospect” in a certain direction, to think of the problems at hand in one way (one favorable to Vance, Trump, and others) rather than another.

Not a “propositional nation”

So, what is Treviño’s “pitch behind the pitch,” as it were? He takes as his starting point a quote from Vance’s speech, the core of which is this: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” Treviño then contrasts that with “propositionalism,” that the essence of the U.S. is in certain ideas—e.g., “all men are created equal,” “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” etc.—that exist independent of ancestry and ethnicity and could in principle be adopted by anyone and take root anywhere.

In Treviño’s view, prepositionalism “eradicated the enduring Western understanding of what a nation or a polity actually is,” goes against “millennia of tradition and political thought,” and has various ill consequences, most notably including the acceptance of high levels of illegal immigration and the “demand that the deeply rooted peoples of the land adapt themselves to the newcomers, but never vice versa.”

Treviño’s position is rather that America arose in a particular historical context: “the Christianization of England, the Protestant Reformation, the Elizabethan settlement, the English Civil War, King Philip’s War, the Glorious Revolution, Locke, and so on.” That in turn implies that although it is certainly possible for anyone to become an American, some Americans are more closely associated with that historical context than others, and are thus “more-normatively American, and more fully constitutive of America” than others. Therefore “the community and the history that made the America to which the immigrants arrive is the standard—and deserves a positive defense.”

Treviño protests against those who would immediately leap to interpret this argument as justifying bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment. So rather than jumping directly to evaluating the good and bad in this line of argument, and arguing points in opposition to it, I’d rather start by talking about mathematics.

A mathematical immigrant

Although mathematics is often thought to exist independently of mathematicians themselves, in fact modern mathematics as we know it (from the Renaissance on) arose in a particular historical context and in a particular set of Western European nations. Whether it could have arisen elsewhere in the same form is an open question, but in practice it did not.

That history privileged not only surface aspects like mathematical notation but also particular ways of doing mathematics and beliefs about which mathematical questions were considered most important. That history also manifested itself not only in distinct national differences (it was in no way an oxymoron to speak of “French mathematics” versus “German mathematics”) but also in families in which multiple generations were mathematicians. Where no actual family ties existed, mathematicans constructed fictive families of a sort, in which one mathematician taught others who then went on to teach others still, so that each mathematician could look backward to their own line of mathematical “ancestors.”

Therefore, “as a purely objective matter” it would be true that (say) a third-generation Bernoulli would be more “more-normatively [a mathematician], and more fully constitutive of [mathematics]” than (say) a poor Indian of humble origins working as an accounting clerk. Then the question might arise, what should be done if such a person were to come knocking at the door of European mathematics asking to be let in?

Those familiar with the history of mathematics will recognize this as the story of Srinivasa Ramunajan, a prodigy who sought to bring his work to the attention of mathematicians in England. Some shut the door against him, including E. W. Hobson and H. F. Baker, but eventually J. E. Littlewood and G. H. Hardy let him in, to their ultimate benefit.

But this was not a one-way affair. While receiving the fruits of Ramanujan’s genius, at the same time Hardy and Littlewood indoctrinated him in the “norms” of European mathematics, including in particular what constituted a valid proof of a result and what did not. They were not always successful in this, but they made the effort and considered it important to do so, because “the community and the history” that made the European mathematical tradition was “the standard.” For those rooted in that tradition and Ramanujan to mutually benefit from their interactions, Ramanujan needed to adapt to the ways of the tradition’s “natives” as much or more than they needed to adapt to Ramanujan.

Immigration policy as if assimilation mattered

Coming back from European mathematics to American politics, we can immediately derive some reasonable implications for immigration policy:

First, that some sort of gatekeeping is necessary, but it should be combined with openness to those who seek to come and could enrich the native tradition. Hobson and Baker were not wrong to dismiss someone who could well have been simply a mathematical crank, but at the same time it was and is a blessing to mathematics that Hardy and Littlewood were willing to take a chance on Ramanujan.

Second, as Anton Ego might have said, not everyone can be a good American, but a good American can come from anywhere. Thus immigration policy and indeed American society at large should self-consciously select for immigrants who would make good Americans, not by ethnicity or country of origin but based on more personal characteristics: their willingness to abandon “clannishness“ in favor of a law-based liberal order, personalities that put them in the higher percentiles of traits we associate with stereotypical Americans, and a level of relaxed tolerance sufficient to enable them to coexist with their neighbors wherever their American journey might take them, whether that be New York City, Salt Lake City, or somewhere that’s not a city at all.¹

This selection process could occur either before or after immigrants arrive. There is nothing wrong with encouraging certain types of people to immigrate as opposed to others. And if an immigrant is not willing or able to conform to American social norms, there’s nothing wrong with encouraging them to voluntarily return to their home country, and assisting them in so doing. But if they like America and fit in to American society, then we should endeavor to give them a sure and certain path to full citizenship.

Immigration policy in the time of Trump

However, having floated an alternative vision for immigration policy, I presume that the chances of anything like this being implemented are slim to none, given the need for at least partial GOP buy-in. Attempts to find a bipartisan consensus on border security appear to have been blocked by Donald Trump’s decision—and Mike Johnson’s acquiescence in that decision—to inflict upon the nation several more months of “chaos at the border” in the hopes that it would improve his election chances.

Then there’s the proposal to keep non-citizens from voting, presumably while continuing to count them for purposes of Congressional reapportionment, thus depriving one group of political power in order to increase the political power of others. It’s a strategy not unknown in American history, here more effective because it would count the disenfranchised at their full numbers rather than at just a fraction.

As for the possibility that the Republican party might find a more nuanced approach to immigration policy based on a rejection of propositionalism and the valoration of a “shared history and common future,” in the end I don’t think it matters what Treviño thinks, or even what J. D. Vance thinks. As Tanner Greer points out in another article (riffing off Jo Freeman), the Republican party is controlled by whoever happens to be its leader, and right now that leader is Donald Trump. Vance will adapt to Trumpism (indeed he already has) and not vice versa. And thus Vance’s wife Usha, whose parents arrived here from India, got to make her speech at the Republican national convention confronted by a sea of RNC-printed and -distributed signs reading (in all caps) “mass deportation now.”

If not a “propositional nation,” then what?

If America is not to be a “propositional nation,” what are the alternatives?

One possible left-wing response is to view those propositions as nothing more than empty promises, and the history of the US as nothing more than a history of genocide, oppression, and imperialism. One possible right-wing response is to reimagine America as an ethnostate in which all Americans are “real,” but some are more “real” than others.² We’d then have to go to Ancestry.com to see who trumps whom.

Both these responses are lacking. The left-wing response leads some to excuse similar or worse genocide, oppression, and imperialism as practiced by foreign dictators, as long as those dictators present themselves as anti-American. The right-wing response puts new Americans in a permanently inferior position relative to the “natives,” like people who move to an insular small town, live there for most of their lives, and still are regarded as “newcomers” not truly accepted into small town society.

Moreover, both these responses devalue what it means to be an American, and destroy that sense of American exceptionalism on which we have always prided ourselves. If America is just an ethnostate, with an in-group of “natives” and an out-group of “others,” what distinguishes America from China, Japan, Korea (North or South), or any other country organized around blood, not beliefs?

And why would Silvestre Herrera, the Medal of Honor winner lauded by Treviño, have charged so boldly into a hail of machine gun fire if he did not believe that America was as much in him, and he in America, as anyone who could boast of “a six-generation lineage on the western-Appalachian slope”? As Abraham Lincoln said regarding Blacks enlisting in the Union Army, “Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive.” Some may dismiss the propositions with which America was birthed and preserved, and others sneer at the “magic dirt” that supposedly can turn Them into Us. But the promise that all men are created equal, and the extension of that promise to those formerly excluded from it, have proved to be among the strongest motives of all.

What makes a nation

If not blood, what makes a nation a nation, and its citizens members of it? Shared life experiences both small (e.g., typical school life) and large (e.g., wars, political, social, and economic upheavals, etc.). In-group markers like language and accent, religion, style of dress, food preferences, and so on. Particular personality traits treated as desired national norms. And last but not least, acceptance of a particular national narrative (“stories nations tell themselves”) and one’s participation in it.

New immigrants lack the first two, but they can certainly act like Americans, and they can accept and take part in the story of America, so that the problems of America become their problems to deal with, and the triumphs of America victories in which they can take pride. Those born to immigrants in the US, or who have come to the US as young children, have all four: they have shared their life experiences in school, play, and elsewhere with their peers, and from their peers they have acquired accents, tastes, and attitudes similar or identical to those of other Americans their own age. And of course they have literally been schooled in American history and the propositions associated with it. It is an insult to them to look at, say, a picture of American winners of an international mathematics competition and (as one person did on X) refer to them as “Team China USA.” They are Team USA, period.

Clan and country

However, perhaps I’m doing Treviño an injustice. Let’s look more closely at his argument as it might apply to Treviño’s own Chinese-born son, who “bears the name and the inheritance of one of the original Americans.” If one were a true ethnonationalist then Treviño’s statement would seem to make no sense: Presuming his son was adopted, how could he be the rightful heir to “the name and the inheritance of one of the original Americans”? A true ethnonationalist could and presumably would argue that Treviño’s son has no right to that name, that his bearing it is simply a form of “stolen valor.” By those lights his true inheritance is instead that of the Wangs and the Zhangs.

How to reconcile this? One way, and perhaps the way that Treviño intended, is to consider lineage not as determined (solely) by genetic descent, but (also) by the transmission of culture from parents to children, who then pass it down to their children in turn, and so on down through time. The deeds of ancestors are honored by their descendants, and their precepts instruct and inspire them.

From this point of view, what matters is not the circumstances of Treviño’s son’s birth but the consequences of his upbringing: By growing up in a family that can trace its roots (biological and cultural alike) to the earliest days of America, he is now considered a full member of that family—a social fact, if not a biological one. As such he can presumably be considered “more-normatively American, and more fully constitutive of America” than, say, a hypothetical twin brother who was born at the same time and place, and arrived in America at the same time, but who grew up within their own (Chinese immigrant) family.

This is certainly a more palatable argument than one that relies solely on ethnicity as the mark of a “real American.” There are also positive aspects to emphasizing the importance of families and their traditions. But I still have a problem with the idea of elevating Treviño’s son over his hypothetical non-adopted twin when it comes to measuring “American-ness,” when both grew up in the same American cultural milieu and would both almost certainly appear equally “American” to those ignorant of their different family situations.

I also think this argument risks returning us at least partially to the days when one’s membership in and loyalty to one’s extended family—in other words, one’s clan—was considered far more important than one’s membership in and loyalty to the nation of which one’s clan was a part. We spent several hundred years liberating ourselves from the “rule of the clan,” and I for one do not wish to go back to it.

I would much rather echo the sentiment of the man who quoted this letter from a constituent:

Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Now that I’m semi-regularly writing reviews for the Okazu site, I thought I should be a little more systematic in the way I rate things. I happened to stumble across the rating systems Robert Christgau has used for his consumer guides to music — one for music prior to 1990 and a second for music since then — and thought they might be worth adapting my own purposes.

Below is my attempt to harmonize these two schemes and adapt them to a 10-point scale. As always, any score I give will be a personal opinion expressed in the moment of my reviewing something. Howver, my goal is to score works such that when I look back at a given work, having reviewed more new works in the meantime, I would adjust my previous score by no more than one point either way.¹

In the list below I’ve included in parentheses the corresponding ratings that Christgau employs in his earlier and later reviews. Most of the phrasing is Christgau’s, modified to be more general.

• 10 (A+ / A+). A masterpiece of sustained beauty, power, and insight that should be experienced at least once by anyone even vaguely interested in the medium, and can be revisited repeatedly with pleasure by fans of it.

  I have not given a score of 10 to anything I’ve reviewed for Okazu, and I would be both surprised and delighted if in future I found something that deserved it.

• 9 (A / A), A great work that offers enduring pleasure and surprise with minimal moments of dullness or drops in quality; anyone who calls themselves a fan should experience it.

  I gave an overall score of 9 to volume 2 of Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord. I vacillated between an 8 and a 9, but ultimately decided on a 9 because the manga is consistently excellent.

• 8 (A- / A-). A very good work, at least half of which provides intense and consistent satisfaction to anyone open to its aesthetic.

  I gave overall scores of 8 to season 2 of Blank: The Series and to 23.5: The Series; both have issues here and there, but for the most part are very good.

• 7 (B+ / B+), A good work that is remarkable and of lasting interest in parts but also flirts with the humdrum or the half-assed.

  I gave overall scores of 7 to season 1 of Blank: The Series and to Chaser Game W; the former I marked down for the subtitles (among other things) and the latter for the rushed and somewhat unsatisfying ending.

• 6 (B / ***Honorable Mention). An enjoyable work that fans of the particular style or artists may treasure.

  I haven’t rated anything 6, 5, or 4, but will likely do so in future reviews.

• 5 (B- / **Honorable Mention). A competent or mildly interesting work that fans of the particular style or artists may enjoy.

• 4 (C+ / *Honorable Mention). A possible failed experiment or pleasant piece of hackwork that fans of the particular style or artist(s) may still like.

• 3 (C / Neither). A work that may impress in one or two parts with consistent craft or an arresting moment, but not elsewhere.

  I gave an overall score of 3 to the six episodes of Show Me Love that I watched. Heidi Amanda Jensen’s scenes were the only interesting parts of that show to me.

• 2 (C- / Choice Cut). A work worth consuming only in the form of an isolated scene on YouTube or a humorous meme.

• 1 (D+ / Dud). A work so bad that it’s not worth more than a moment’s thought, and then only to emphasize how bad it is.

Christgau’s first scheme includes even lower ratings, for example for works that “are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.” But I am not a cruel person, and I doubt I would ever review something that I’d score lower than 3.

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2024-07-05 18:34

The way the wording for the definitions of the numbers is formulated doesn’t seem like it’s really in terms of someone rating things according to their personal tastes.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-07-05 20:26

Personal taste comes into play in determining what is good and bad in a particular work. Chaser Game W is a good example. Because of traditional “kill/fridge/separate the gays” practices in TV shows and movies, a lot of people prefer happy endings to lesbian romances like that in Chaser Game W, and react negatively when that doesn’t happen. I’m cognizant of that, but I also value consistency and artistic unity in a work, and I thought the ending of Chaser Game W was (depending on your perspective) either not consistent with previous plot developments or not adequately prepared for. So I gave it a lower score where others might have given it a higher one.

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2024-07-06 02:47

Right, presumably you are rating according to your values. Different people would rate differently.

The problem is that those descriptions imply something else.

(I was going to publish this soon after New Years Day–hence the title–but never got around to it. But better late than never, so here it is. I couldn’t think of a better title.)

I’ve maintained a personal domain and associated website since the turn of the century. Every once in a while I get the urge to revamp it in ways large or small. This is the latest version, created using the Hugo static site generator working from source files in Markdown format. I switched to Hugo from Jekyll, used for the previous version of the site. Besides being considerably faster to generate the site and considerably simpler to install and maintain, Hugo also allowed me to re-use a different style of URLs from a previous site organization, which (fingers crossed) should allow old links to once again work.

Like an ancient city periodically rebuilt over the ruins of an older one, previous versions of this site are still visible here and there. The site has had the following forms over the years:

• 2000: I created my first personal website, hand-coded in HTML and published at the domain name www.hecker.org. (I hosted it on a Dell server running what later became Red Hat Enterprise Linux; a coworker of mine had bought the server for his own websites, and let me host my own stuff on the server in exchange for administering it.) The “interests” page is a mostly-unmodified page from that site, and a good guide to what I was reading and listening to back then.
• 2004: I adopted the Blosxom blogging software and did quite a bit of work to make the site as standards compliant as possible (and in the process learned a great deal about how the HTTP protocol works). You can find a number of in-depth posts about that work using the “blosxom” tag.
• 2006: I started a separate blog Swindleeeee!!!!! on Wordpress.com to discuss the eMusic service. I later folded that blog back into my main blog; see the “emusic” tag for those posts.
• 2008: I moved my main blog to Wordpress.com as blog.hecker.org. (I continued to host the hecker.org website on the same server as before, so that older posts remained available.)
• 2011: I changed the blog’s name to frankhecker.com.
• 2015: I moved off Wordpress.com and created a new blog civilityandtruth.com using the Jekyll static site generator.
• 2019: I started a separate Substack newsletter, also named Civility and Truth.
• 2021: I closed down the Substack newsletter and renamed my blog back to frankhecker.com, still using Jekyll to generate it.
• 2024: I converted all Markdown posts to the format used by Hugo, corrected typos and missing images where I found them, fixed the quotation marks in posts that had been stripped of them (an unfortunate side effect of moving off Wordpress way back when), re-added comments submitted to the old Blosxom and Wordpress versions of the blog, and re-incorporated old pages that had been left behind in the various blog migrations. I also generated a web version of my book That Type of Girl.

My goal for this version of the blog is to serve as a permanent record of my writing, in a form that is relatively low maintenance and should be readable for many years to come. Except for the occasional post I no longer write directly for the site; almost all my current writing is done on the Cohost site, where people can comment on it and share it with others. As time goes on I’ll bring some Cohost posts over here (after slight revisions); if Cohost threatens to go under (a real possibility) I’ll accelerate that process.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I recently contributed to a (ultimately successful) Kickstarter campaign for a new music service, Mirlo. I’ve also been reading off and on articles on the furialog blog, written by Glenn McDonald, who used to work at Spotify before he was laid off, and who (among other things) created the Every Noise at Once site mapping musical genres. McDonald’s latest post, “10 aspirational rules for the moral operation of a music service,” is particularly relevant to Mirlo and other would-be alternatives to Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.

You can read the full list yourself, but I was particularly struck by #3, “The feature goal is to connect individuals to communities. Music is a social energy.” This echoes things the folks in 65daysofstatic have been saying to the effect that music is always and everywhere a community phenomenon, in contrast to the view of music as “content” that LLMs can generate as well or better than people. It also reminds me of McDonald’s own comments that “[musical] genres are communities” that cannot be adequately captured by machine learning algorithms looking at sonic similarities.

McDonald has a book coming out later this month, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. It looks interesting; I’ve preordered it.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I’m not sure whether I’ll make a habit of writing posts like this. But after importing Megan Carnes’s discography into Apple Music and seeing who came next in alphabetical order in my music collection, I got the urge to once again listen to one of the most important groups of the 1980s post-punk British music scene, Mekons.

Mekons have at least two essential records. In the first, Fear and Whiskey (released in 1985), they had the brilliant idea of combining country music with 1980s leftist post-punk. Along with Meat Puppets II (released the previous year), it’s often credited with creating the genre of alt-country.

But Mekons were (and are) much more than an alt-country band. Their genius was taking the Christian idea behind much country music, that we are all sinners living in a fallen world, and recasting it in a Marxist context, in which the original sin was the creation of capitalism. Fear and Whiskey is haunted by the failure of the 1984 coal miners’ strike (see, for example, “Darkness and Doubt”), while The Mekons Rock ’n Roll (released in 1989, and more rock than country, as the name implies) looks upon Thatcherism and Reaganism triumphant. (“Empire of the Senseless” in particular namechecks Iran-Contra and Section 28—and takes its title from Kathy Acker’s 1988 experimental novel.)

Mekons are still going strong, almost 40 years later, and have lots of albums on Bandcamp. Give one or both of these a listen, and let me know what you think!

M. Campbell (@voidmoth) - 2024-04-09 18:01

such a cool band

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-04-09 19:19

And to think, they were only one of the great bands that came out of the University of Leeds in the 1970s. (I think I’ll post about another one in the coming days.) Thanks for commenting!

We’re well into March now, but it’s never too late to highlight @Goyavoyage’s Februaryuri reviews. I have some comments to add to her review of Goodbye, My Rose Garden:

First, like @Goyavoyage I will point you to Dee’s Anime Feminist article about Goodbye, My Rose Garden, which I think is a shining example of Anime Feminist at its best: review articles that combine stylish writing with rigorous sourcing and insightful analysis — like a good academic paper but without the academic stuffiness and obscurantism.

Second, a major virtue of Goodbye, My Rose Garden is that its characters actually think and act as one would expect of people living in that time and place. In a lot of manga and other works featuring historical and semi-historical settings, the protagonists come off as people of modern sensibilities isekai-ed into the past and cosplaying as natives. Like typical isekai protagonists, as characters they’re unrealistic at best, smug and annoying at worst.

On that note, if you want to get a good feel for the sorts of queer-coded fictions created by contemporary writers of that era, I strongly recommend checking out Sarah Orne Jewett’s story “Martha’s Lady,” referenced in the manga. It’s a lovely story in its own right, and also a good example of how a premise like that of Goodbye, My Rose Garden might have played out in real life.

Finally, if you’re inclined to write your own historical fiction on queer themes, you could do a lot worse than to consult the various articles Heather Rose Jones has created as part of her Lesbian Historic Motif Project, which collects and presents information “that would be useful in grounding a fictional lesbian character in the context of historic human experience.”

You know, I’d really rather be posting about poetry than writing yet another post about the travails of Cohost. But here I am, since a share of one of my posts has been “doing severals” and has occasioned some responses.

I would recommend in particular a post (now deleted) by @renkotsuban, which I think is fair and well-reasoned. I commented in response to it, and will expand a bit on those comments here, especially for people who don’t follow them. (Since they’ve locked the post from being shared, you’re not going to see it otherwise.)

First, my own position: I have a vested interest in seeing Cohost continue since I enjoy posting here, more so than on any other social media site I’ve used. I make more than $94K/year, so it’s not a burden on me to pay for more than one Cohost plus subscription, and my comments promoting the idea were directed solely at other people in my position. No one, let me repeat, no one, should be paying for Cohost plus, let alone paying for more than one subscription, if it would be a financial hardship for them. It should be like a decision between treating yourself to a lunch out or saving the money for something else you’d like better.

I also second the recommendation to not prioritize spending on Cohost over contributing to other causes. Over the past year I’ve contributed an order of magnitude more just to GoFundme’s than I have spent on Cohost, and supported a bunch of other good causes as well. Again, I recommend others do likewise. You should think of Cohost as something extra you can consider supporting once you’ve taken care of the important stuff.

Now, let’s talk about @staff and their actions. If I were treating this as a purely economic transaction I wouldn’t be paying for Cohost at all; I’d free ride on others’ contributions, not bother to comment on how the site is run, and be indifferent to whether it succeeded or failed. But since I am paying for Cohost plus, and am spending more on Cohost than the typical user, I have no problem with giving unsolicited advice to ASSC, and holding them accountable for taking whatever actions are necessary to keep the site running.

Given that labor expenses are the major issue, the obvious course of action is to either cut staff or cut salaries, or both, to try to reduce costs to a level that is sustainable longer-term. That includes stopping development on features that have no reasonable chance of contributing revenue in the short term. I would certainly put tipping in this category, if Cohost isn’t planning to take a percentage for itself, and likely subscriptions as well, since I suspect any short-term revenues from Cohost’s cut won’t be enough to justify the labor cost of developing the feature.

If ASSC still thinks it’s important to develop those features then they should consider ways to get other people involved without incurring significant costs. This does not necessarily mean releasing the Cohost source code as open source, i.e., under an open source license. They could keep the code under a proprietary license and just allow others to read and contribute to it, either as volunteers or as contractors paid a very minimal amount (maybe just $1 a year, in case they need to form an enforceable contract). They could also have contributors do copyright assignment to ASSC, so that ASSC can comply with whatever legal agreements they’ve made with their funder regarding ownership and disposition of the code.

Of course, lots of developers—probably, most developers—would balk at contributing their labor under these terms. Fine, they can and should contribute to other projects instead. And ASSC might balk at “exploiting” developers in this way. Fine, that leads to my next comment:

The bottom line is that ASSC needs to take actions to put the site on a sustainable footing within the next month or so. That does not include just taking out more loans, whether from the original funder or anyone else. That’s just extending the runway while still having little or no hope of taking off. I’m talking about having costs be less than revenue, both now and going forward. If ASSC can’t or won’t do that (for example, because it would violate one or more of the principles important to them) then I’d agree with folks who recommend stopping support of Cohost and letting economic reality take its course.

In the meantime, people should absolutely be saving a copy of anything they want to keep, under the assumption that the end of Cohost may well be chaotic and sudden rather than drawn out and well-planned. That includes making a list of your favorite posters and their handles or URLs on other sites, so you can continue to follow them, as well as advertising your own other social media accounts to your own followers.

One final thought: if you want to write or create art, music, games, whatever, the one thing you absolutely should do, before doing anything else, is to procure your own personal domain name and make plans to spend the relatively small amount it will cost every year for the rest of your life, or at least as long as you continue to be on the Internet. With some services (like Bluesky) you can have your domain name be your handle. And in any case you’ll always have the fallback of posting stuff to your own personal site, maintaining it yourself if you have the time and expertise to do that.

[The following comment by me was in response to a comment that was later deleted by the commenter.]

Frank Hecker ([@hecker][]) - 2024-03-16 08:53

Thanks for commenting! I don’t have a lot to add to what you said, most all of which I agree with. Some brief thoughts:

You’re correct that ASSC has no obligation to listen to what I, you, or anyone else says. My posts are basically expressions of opinions, with no expectation that anything I write will be heeded by, responded to, acknowledged, or read by ASSC.

Based on the latest financial post, it sounds like they have a few more months of runway, but no obvious path to sustainability. They (likely deliberately) don’t provide enough financial details to tell for sure, but it seems pretty clear that their basic problem is high fixed costs in salaries and that their hope is that between adding new users and getting more revenue from existing users they can cover those fixed costs. Time will tell.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Recently in an online forum I frequent there was a discussion about the currently-airing anime Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. The gist of the discussion is that some people began watching Frieren intrigued by the first few episodes and their themes of the transience of human lives versus that of the long-lived elf Frieren. In subsequent episodes they were then confronted with, and repulsed by, Frieren’s attitude toward the demons who are positioned as humanity’s enemy.

The essence of their complaint was that Frieren (the character) was advocating that genocide be committed against the demons, that by implication Freiren (the story) was excusing genocide in the real world, and that (again by implication) those who enjoyed watching or reading Frieren risked becoming apologists for such genocide, and potentially complicit in it. One might be tempted to quickly dismiss this argument (“this is fiction, not reality”), but I happen to think their concern is a serious one worth addressing. This post is my attempt to address it.

Note: This post contains spoilers through the most recent episode 26 of Frieren the anime (which corresponds to chapters 54 and 55 of the manga it’s based on), as well as spoilers for the entire run of the webcomic Mage and Demon Queen, a work I contrast with Frieren.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

Frieren the anime (and manga) is set in a typical fantasy world inhabited by humans, elves, dwarves, and demons. Frieren the character was a member of the “heroes’ party” that defeated the Demon King. After a brief introduction, the story proper begins fifty years after that event, as Frieren begins a new journey with a new set of companions. In that journey they encounter more demons. Frieren kills them (sometimes with the aid of her companions) in a business-like manner, shows no remorse whatsoever after the fact, and flatly states her opinion that all demons should be killed likewise.

In the context of the story, demons are characterized as sentient monsters: they can talk like humans, but they have no human-like feelings. They do not have families as humans do, and are portrayed as extreme individualists whose relations with other demons are based solely on power. They show no gratitude to humans who help them, they lie freely, and their word cannot be trusted. They view humans solely as prey.

What is one to say about this? First, demons are clearly based on the common stereotype of a human psychopath: a person who views others solely as objects to be manipulated, tricked, exploited, and (potentially) killed.¹ According to the common stereotype such people cannot in any way be rehabilitated; at best they must be imprisoned for life, at worst they should be executed, judicially or otherwise. Likewise for demons as envisaged in Frieren.

Second, while an individual demon may be plausible (like an individual human psychopath), a whole society of them is much less so. If they know nothing of family and family ties, how could they ever be socialized into such a society? If they are so staunchly individualist, how could they ever organize themselves into a society that could rival and threaten that of humans? Great apes and other animals have dominance hierarchies based on brute strength, and demons could do likewise, but such societies are no match for humans, who are adept at cooperating with each other when they can jointly advance their mutual interests.

That I think is a key theme of Frieren: that the long war with the demons has driven human to band together and find more effective ways to fight them, learning how to use magic and how to turn the demons’ spells against them. And given that the story has “stacked the deck” in the way that it characterizes the demons as implacable and irredeemable antagonists, it implicitly endorses any measures humans (and elves like Frieren) might take in that war, up to and including total extermination of the demon race.

Frieren thus echoes in fiction the grim reality of human history, from prehistoric times onward, as organized societies found cause to attack and conquer other societies, often wiping them out entirely. We ourselves are the descendants of those successful conquerors. (For the most part the conquered left none.) We are heirs to their genetic and cultural legacy, one element of which is the tendency to characterize our enemies (real or imagined) as less than human and undeserving of mercy. Frieren and Frieren are uncomfortable reminders of that.

Lord of the Rings

Is Frieren the only work of fantasy that takes such an uncompromising position toward an entire race of beings? I would say, not at all. In fact, I claim that Lord of the Rings, one of the most important influences on modern fantasy (not excluding Frieren itself), is guilty of this.

Yes, as someone in our discussion pointed out, the wizard Gandalf, portrayed as one of the most wise and noble characters in LOTR, is not a straightforward advocate of genocide. Among other things, he praises Frodo’s decision to not kill Gollum: “Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. . . . I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.”

It’s a heartfelt speech to be sure, but does Gandalf—or, for that matter, any of the other “good guys” in Lord of the Rings—apply its lesson to the orcs, the closest LOTR equivalent to the demons of Frieren? I don’t recall that being the case. Instead the orcs are portrayed solely as beings hostile to humans, elves, and dwarves, and large sections of LOTR are devoted to fighting them in battle. I don’t remember anyone showing mercy to orcs individually, or attempting to negotiate a peace settlement with them collectively. They are viewed as creatures of Sauron, no more and no less, and the preferred approach to dealing with them is simply to kill them.

Lord of the Rings also prejudices the reader against orcs in a way that is very similar to the way Frieren treats demons. We are not shown any elements of orc society apart from their armies: no orc couples or families, no innocent orc children, no orcs peacefully farming or following a trade, no orcs mourning the death of their friends and comrades. Indeed, orcs are depicted as being just as individualistic and untrustworthy as the demons of Frieren: in one of the few scenes where individual orcs are portrayed, when Frodo is held captive in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, they quarrel amongst themselves and ultimately kill each other in their zeal to take Frodo’s shirt of mithril mail.

The ultimate resolution of the story of Lord of the Rings also resembles that of Frieren: the leader of malign forces is overthrown, his armies are defeated, and eventually humans come to rule the world in the Fourth Age, with elves, hobbits, and dwarves having faded away, and the race of orcs presumably having been completely exterminated.

Yet Lord of the Rings is not typically seen simply as a tale of genocide, and its fans are not typically accused of being advocates and apologists for genocide. Why does it for the most part escape the criticisms being leveled at Frieren? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer to this, but I offer a tentative one below.

Mage and Demon Queen

But before I do that, I thought it would be interesting to consider the webcomic Mage and Demon Queen, a work that is a polar opposite of Frieren in its attitude toward demons, and indeed can be seen as going out of its way to cater to present-day sensibilities. Mage and Demon Queen is a relatively light-hearted romantic comedy, which helps account for some of that, but I think not all.

First, the demons of Mage and Demon Queen are not depicted as inherently and irredeemably evil. Velverosa, the demon queen herself, is imperious and hostile to humans, including the adventurer Malori who’s infatuated with her, but she is shown to have good reason for that hostility. And over the course of the series she softens that attitude, to the point of eventually succumbing to Malori’s charms and becoming her lover.²

This is a particular example of a general trend in modern fantasy, in which beings traditionally viewed as unrelievedly evil—demons, vampires, servants of Satan, etc. — are “de-fanged,” as it were. For example, contrast C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape, who is entirely sincere in his desire to tempt humans into sin and condemn them to eternal torment, with Crowley of the novel and TV series Good Omens or Dewiela of the manga Eniale and Dewiela. The latter demonic minions are portrayed as much more benign than Screwtape, even to the point of causing fans to ship them with their angelic counterparts.³

Mage and Demon Queen also continues the trend toward the “gamification” of modern fantasy, that is, carrying over tropes from video games into other works. Mage and Demon Queen does not go so far as to put stat screens above the characters’ heads, but it does feature the common trope that one can escape death simply by respawning in a different location. Others may differ, but I think one effect of this is to trivialize death and the suffering that accompanies it; in the opening chapters of Mage and Demon Queen Malori dies multiple times in her quest to get Velverosa’s attention, but is never shown to be traumatized by the experience.

Another gaming-related issue is not present in Mage and Demon Queen, but arose in our discussion: one person opined that Frieren disturbed them because the killing of demons was featured so prominently, and that they were more comfortable with games in which killing orcs and demons was much more of a background element, just another task needing to be completed in order to win the game.

Here I have to ask: assuming that art can influence life at all, what sort of work might be more likely to make someone indifferent to genocide: a work like Frieren in which the protagonists know the names of their enemies and kill them face to face in single combat, or a work in which nameless NPCs are summarily dispatched at the roll of a die, or in a frenzy of button mashing?

In the final arc of Mage and Demon Queen the bodies do in fact pile up by the scores—but, again, no worries, since the people they belong to will all be soon resurrected. In the meantime we’ve had the satisfaction of seeing the demons fight back against humans in a worthy cause: the demons are ultimately shown to be an oppressed and marginalized minority, who wish only to live in peace (and in fact do live in peace with one group of humans). But unfortunately they’ve been attacked by humans eager to displace them from their land, of which they now occupy only a tiny fragment.

Thus Mage and Demon Queen completely upends the traditional place of demonic beings in fiction: it purges itself of the racial essentialism that many find so distasteful in traditional fantasy works, and in the process turns demons into (or reduces demons to, some might say) humans who just happen to have horns and other unusual physical characteristics, who are more oppressed than oppressors, and whom one can find fulfillment in both saving and romancing. A far cry from Frieren.

A tentative conclusion

So to return to the question I asked above: why does Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End offend people in ways that other works like Lord of the Rings apparently do not? And what should our attitude be toward it?

Perhaps it’s because Frieren the work is so upfront and unequivocal about the stance Frieren and other characters take toward demons. Unlike Lord of the Rings, readers and viewers cannot point to fine speeches advocating mercy within the work, or to material outside the work in which the author in effect says, “no, mass murder even of orcs is not okay.”

The choice in Frieren is stark: though demons may be a minority, as in Mage and Demon Queen, they are shown to be aggressors against humankind, aggressors whom it’s impossible to make peace with. The real choice presented in Frieren is not between making war and making peace. It is between finding meaning and fulfillment in the continued fight against demons (the elf Serie appears to be in this camp) and wishing to conclude it as soon as possible in complete and total victory (as Frieren does), even if that means killing the enemy to the last being.

That’s an unpopular position to take in the present day, even in fiction, given how much it reminds people of real-world events. I can understand why some people might be repulsed by it, and I do not think less of them for that. Nevertheless I do not share that feeling. The author of Frieren has indeed manipulated its audience into applauding the extermination of sentient beings (just as the author of Mage and Demon Queen has manipulated its audience to different ends). But I’m under no compulsion to do the same in real life.

And in fact I think Frieren may subvert its own message, whether it knows it or not. As I noted above, the world of Frieren echoes in many respects human history and prehistory, an endless cycle of conquest and genocide, driven by innovation in ways to organize societies to better attack and defend. Would killing off all demons really bring lasting peace to Frieden’s world? Far more likely, I think, is that having gained the power of magic and successfully used it against demons, humans would then turn it against each other, seeing their enemies (real or imagined) in the same way they once saw demons, as wholly evil and deserving of death.

Thus to me Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End has an inevitable air of tragedy about it, beyond the themes of transience, remembrance, and building connections that first attracted people like me to it. To my mind that adds to, rather than detracting from, its appeal as a work of art.

maddie (@ninecoffees) - 2024-03-09 19:10

A good read, also Mage and Demon Queen is a good recommend if anyone’s looking for some more light-hearted yuri

hecker

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-03-09 19:55

I second the recommendation for Mage and Demon Queen. I was somewhat unfair in positioning it against Frieren, but it was relevant to the point I was making: that Frieren is in many ways a throwback to traditional fantasy works in its treatment of demons, while Mage and Demon Queen is a more acceptable modern version.

WallaceCrow (@WallaceCrow) - 2024-03-10 11:56

I find it interesting how Frieren interrogates the the idea of humanoid creatures that are fundamentally different from humans. Many Lord of the Rings inspired fantasy works inherited the concept of humanoid creatures that are “evil” and therefore fine to kill without interrogating the concept. Identifying that this parallels the dehumanization of groups of people in real life, many modern fantasy works will depict humanoid creatures as similar to humans but with different socialization. This makes humanoid creatures less of a monolith (“evil” creatures can be raised in a “good” society) and reframes “good” vs “evil” as a clash between societies.

Spoiler for Frieren chapters 77+:

The El Dorado arc keeps the idea that demons are fundamentally different from humans, but explores how the demons’ experience differs from humans. The demon Macht recognizes that “guilt” and “malice” are emotions that humans feel. However he does not experience those emotions, despite active attempts to do so, and thus cannot comprehend their meaning.

Rather than viewing humans as objects, Macht recognizes humans as sentient and seeks coexistence. Despite these intentions, the conflict in how demons and humans experience the world results in a lack of understanding of violence. He cannot understand how coexistince and killing are mutually exclusive ideas.

This approach feels more like Le Guin than Tolkien to me. The reader empathizes with the other despite our fundamental differences. The El Dorado arc is a tragedy, not a story of “good” overcoming “evil.”

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-03-10 16:11

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I haven’t read the manga past where the anime is now, but I’m sorely tempted (and I didn’t mind being spoiled in this case). Based on your description I’m looking forward to this arc. (However, I suspect it will have come too late for the folks who already noped out of the anime.)

Once again I am doing a time-delayed share of a @Goyavoyage yuri recommendation. To add to what she said about Even Though We’re Adults: In addition to featuring adults only (I don’t recall any teenage characters in the manga, though maybe I missed one),¹ it’s relatively unusual in having a male character who is treated somewhat sympathetically, not as either a villain or as a mere speed bump on the road to the main characters’ happy ending.

Regarding Sweet Blue Flowers, @Goyavoyage is correct that there are problematic aspects; however teacher-student relationships are not one of them. Never in the manga does a teacher (or any other adult) approach a student in an inappropriate way. And in each and every case where a student approaches a teacher that they have a crush on, the teacher quickly and unambiguously rejects them. Whether Shimura consciously intended this or not, the manga’s treatment of these incidents supports my theory that a major theme of Sweet Blue Flowers is a rejection of relationships based on a hierarchy of some type (e.g., senpai-kohai or teacher-student) in favor of relationships based on equality between individuals.

Finally, if anyone does want to check out my book on Sweet Blue Flowers, I’ve created a web version so that you can easily check out individual chapters — many of which started out as Tumblr posts. For example, see my discussion of Maria Watches Over Us, a series that I think, unlike Sweet Blue Flowers, very much advocates for and celebrates relationships embedded in an age-based hierarchical order.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. Where linked-to articles were not archived, I’ve updated the links to go to non-Cohost copies.]

Once again I’m sharing a @Goyavoyage post with one of her yuri manga recommendations, because I think these are great and deserve a wider audience. I like to add a bit to what she writes, so . . .

I’ve embedded above the 5-minutes-plus-credits “Kase-san and Morning Glories” video that @Goyavoyage mentioned. You can think of it either as a teaser trailer for what later became the Kase-san OVA or as a music video that stands alone. Either way it’s a lovely video, and you can tell that the people who made it really love the manga and put their hearts and souls into animating it. I’ve embedded the official Pony Canyon version, which I’m pretty sure won’t disappear. Unfortunately it doesn’t have English subtitles; here’s one that does.

One thing that is a virtue of the Kase-san series that I think eventually becomes a weakness: the series has a bright and rose-colored view of the world that is very endearing and inspiring. Pretty much everybody loves Kase-san and Yamada, both within the story and without. So whatever conflict and angst exists arises primarily from internal sources, e.g., Yamada’s fears and jealousies.

This works well while their relationship is being established, but once they become a couple for real and the story moves to them attending university (i.e., in the Kase-san and Yamada sequel) it gets to be a bit contrived and repetitive. It might have been better if Takeshima had turned the manga into a pure slice-of-life rather than trying to periodically inject fresh doses of drama into it.

But that’s a minor quibble. Overall the entire series is one of the best (if not the best) examples of “wholesome yuri.” (I mean, even the sex scenes are wholesome!)

I’ve been sick and not able to comment on these before now, but @Goyavoyage has a really solid list of recommended yuri titles and is doing a great job of highlighting them.

How Do We Relationship? in particular I would easily put in the top three of yuri titles currently being serialized. And here’s something @Goyavoyage didn’t mention: if you live in the US or Canada and can afford $1.99 a month (in the US) for a Viz Manga subscription (not to be confused with a Shonen Jump subscription) then you can read new chapters of HDWR as soon as they’re published in Japan (currently up to chapter 114). (The Viz Manga site is missing chapters 84-93, corresponding to volume 10, so you’d have to buy that separately.)

Voyage (@Goyavoyage) - 2024-02-06 01:21

I wish you a quick recovery! Also– thank you. Your words mean a lot.

And you’re right! I learned of that simultaneous publication thing super recently when seeing people commenting chapters beyond vol. 10. I’m realizing just now that it’s North America-restricted though. Bummer. (Well, I have vol. 9 and 10 to catch up to anyway!)

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I had uninterrupted time this afternoon to sit down and watch the BD of the 2020 film Last and First Men. If you like

• the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon
• the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson (who also directed)
• the voice of Tilda Swinton
• brutalist architecture
• stately black-and-white cinematography on 16mm film stock

then I think you’ll agree with me that this film is pretty darned great.

Lucas Moura (@DrTeflon) - 2024-01-21 16:22

This movie is SO FREAKING GREAT

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-01-21 17:57

Isn’t it though?!

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2024-01-27 11:48

Ill check this out! Also, thanks for sharing the poetry as always!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-01-28 18:00

You’re quite welcome! I’m glad you’re enjoying the Sunday night poetry series; it’s great fun to research and write.

• are interested in in-depth, data-based, non-partisan commentary and analysis of issues relevant to Howard County, Maryland, and the world beyond
• are willing to put up with periodic posts on other stuff that interests me

The blog used to be more Howard County-focused than it is now, as my interests have changed, but there’s lots of stuff in the archives of local interest.

A guide to past posts and other material

Posts on education include an extensive series on the Math Academy math education service and the similar PhysicsGraph service for physics.

Posts on Howard County include my “Creating the Chrysalis” series on the design and construction of the Chrysalis amphitheater in Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods in Columbia, Maryland, as well as additional posts on the overall Inner Arbor plan for the park.

Posts on politics include my “Seven Answers” series, in which—though not a candidate myself—I respond to a candidate questionnaire from fellow Howard County blogger Jason Booms; this series also serves as a survey of my political views on various topics circa 2018. In a lighter vein, I did critiques of Howard County campaign signs in the 2010 and 2014 primary elections. I’m also author of the self-published book Dividing Howard: A History of County Council Redistricting in Howard County, Maryland.

Past topics on previous incarnations of this blog have included Mozilla and open source, life as an eMusic subscriber, and my thoughts about music and the music business in general. (The eMusic- and music-related posts were formerly on my Swindleeeee!!!!! blog, which I’ve since discontinued and merged with this blog.) I also have a set of posts about my past experiences running the Blosxom blog software which may still be of interest to any remaining Blosxom users.

Next is a set of early writings of historical interest, some published on the first incarnation of my personal web site (circa 2000), and some circulated via email. That website also included pages relating to my then tastes in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and music.

Finally, I took a break from blogging on my usual topics to write a book about the yuri manga Sweet Blue Flowers. (It’s not a total break though, as I took the opportunity to talk about Japanese society and history.) That led in turn to my becoming a staff reviewer for the Okazu yuri news and review site.

The fine print

Unless otherwise noted, all content on this site was created by me (Frank Hecker) and is freely available for commercial and non-commercial use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For uses beyond the scope of “fair use” you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests that I endorse you or your use. For detailed terms of use please see the full license.

All posts are my own opinions as an individual and do not necessarily represent the official positions of any of my employers past, present, or future, or of any other organization.

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The site is self-hosted using a Linux-based virtual server provided by Digital Ocean. It is designed to be accessed via HTTPS only, with all web traffic to and from the site encrypted using strong cryptographic algorithms.¹ (Connections made via HTTP will be automatically redirected to the HTTPS URL, and modern browsers told to never use HTTP for the site again.) The site is accessible via both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

This site contains all blog posts and other material previously posted to the sites civilityandtruth.com, blog.hecker.org, and hecker.org. URLs for posts originally posted to those sites will automatically be redirected to this site, so that existing links will continue to work. If you find any links that produce errors please notify me by email.

I deliberately did not implement a commenting system for this site. (I got very few comments on my older blog, and most of the ones I did get were spam.) I publish notices of new posts on Bluesky and sometimes on X (formerly Twitter) or (even more rarely) Facebook; you can make comments in those places if you wish, or just send them to me via email.

One of the people I read fairly regularly (though not enough to actually pay for a subscription) is Ted Gioia, who writes at honest-broker.com on Substack. His most recent post on the macroculture (mainstream media like the New York Times, Disney, etc.) vs the “microculture” (basically, people posting stuff on YouTube and other places) is free to read, and worth reading, given that pretty much everyone on Cohost, including me, is participating in the “microculture” one way or another.

You can read the article for yourself, so I won’t attempt to summarize it, but I do want to comment briefly on some of his points.

First, he doesn’t understand why people in the “macroculture” aren’t paying attention to what’s going on in the “microculture,” unlike the attitude of mainstream media to counter-culture media in the past. This is easy to explain: in the era he’s thinking of (1950s and 1960s), the major difference between mainstream media and “alternative” media was one of scale: your local alternative weekly was essentially the same sort of thing as your main local daily newspaper, except everything was smaller: it had writers and editors, it ran news stories and reviews, it had ads, it was printed on paper, and it was distributed either to readers’ homes or (more commonly) to places they frequented.

It was relatively easy for a talented writer or editor to move from the “minor leagues” of alternative media to “the show” of a mainstream newspaper, because those hiring them were the same sort of people doing the same sorts of things, and could evaluate them accordingly. Ditto for small presses vs. large book publishers, and indie music labels vs. large corporate labels.

But today there’s a world of difference between what mainstream media do and what people on YouTube, Patreon, etc., are doing. The medium is different, what it takes to succeed is different, how you get paid is different, and so on. No wonder people in mainstream media are out of touch; nothing in their experience has prepared them for this environment.

Second, when discussing why “microculture” will win, he doesn’t touch on a key point: YouTube, Patreon, Tiktok, Spotify, OnlyFans, etc., are brutally competitive environments that take in an extremely large number of aspirants to fame and fortune and pit them against each other in a contest to win the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners. Those who reach the top ranks have benefited from a fair measure of luck, but having bested others in the competitive free-for-all they are also on average very very good at doing what they need to do to attract an audience. No wonder their offerings can command audience sizes and the associated outsized rewards that rival those of the “macroculture.”

(And the rewards are indeed outsized. A writer in the 1960s working at the New York Times might make ten times more money than a writer at a 1960s alternative weekly, maybe a hundred times more at most. However, as I wrote in my post on the distribution of Patreon earnings, top Patreon projects make about a thousand times more money than typical projects.)

Finally, when Gioia writes that “even the biggest potential enemies of microculture (those billionaires in Silicon Valley) need it for their own survival,” he mistakes where the true power lies. Yes, YouTube (for example) creates very little on its own and instead relies on the work of people making and uploading videos (“user-generated content” or “UGC,” to use the ugly marketing term). But there are millions of them, and only one YouTube. If a top vlogger decides to leave YouTube, there’s a horde of people standing in line to take their place. But if YouTube kicks off a vlogger (big or small) then there are few if any comparable channels of distribution they can turn to.

That’s because hosting video at scale is a natural monopoly: only large and well-funded corporations can build the centralized hosting services required to serve an audience of hundreds of millions or more, the recommendation engines needed for artists to come to the attention of others and potentially “go viral,” and the ad networks that are typically the means by which artists can be paid.

It’s also the case that the money that these platforms make is mostly not from the top tier of artists: again, as I saw in my Patreon analysis, their revenue from the top 100 artists is likely matched by revenue from the next 1,000, which in turn is matched by revenue from the next 10,000, which in turn is matched by revenue from the next 100,000, and so on. Since most of their revenue is from a large mass of typical artists, each of whom individually has little power, the platform can afford to squeeze artists, retain as high a percentage of revenue as they feel they can get away with, and screw over artists in various ways both large and small.

So the chief winners in the “war between the macroculture and the microculture” are not going to be writers, musicians, or graphic and video artists. They are going to be the large corporations that control distribution in the (ironically-named) “creator economy,” and the “Silicon Valley billionaires” who own them and run them.

kastelpls (@highimpactsex) - 2023-12-06 21:01

yeah, reading this was interesting because it’s not like i necessarily disagree with the claim that microculture (or as i prefer to call it, subcultures) is “winning”. indeed, it’s the companies that provide the infrastructure/ecosystem of microcultures that are winning. they’ve bet on the rise of fresh talents providing “user-generated content” and basically won as people became skeptical of mainstream media.

it’s true that traditional media like NYT is failing at least and that’s because they refuse to adapt to the times or hire actual people outside their circle. but i expect them to truck on for a little bit longer because their prestige/brand is still wroth it – i’m more surprised that newspapers and magazines have not followed the cynical path of reuters leasing their brand to anyone who pays.

i think what will end up happening (if it hasn’t now) is the creation of social classes within microcultures. there’s clearly a group of people who has made a living out of this while many others don’t. it’s hard for me to see how this isn’t some fractured community.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-12-07 12:36

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You’ve hit the nail on the head — I have nothing to add to what you’ve said.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

As a certified old person, I find it fascinating to contrast my life experiences and attitudes with those of my younger online acquaintances. In particular, I’m struck by how many of them view capitalism as a totalizing force—omnipresent and inescapable. I also wonder how much that might be due to their watching television as children.

The basic idea is that the media we experience as children influence our view of the world—that, for example, because conservative Boomers see the 1950s as reflected in TV shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66) and Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963) that they watched in their childhood, they see that decade as one reflecting traditional conservative family values, like heterosexual marriage between a male breadwinner and a female housewife. But the 1950s were also the decade of (for example) the Mattachine Society (1950), Playboy magazine (1953), and the Daughters of Bilitis (1955).

Which brings me back to cartoons: As a child I watched shows like The Flintstones (1960-66), The Jetsons (1962-63), George of the Jungle (1967), and so on. They were clearly commercial productions, but existed as standalone pieces of media for the most part, with few if any commercial tie-ins. I also watched some shows that were positioned as more than mere entertainment, like Captain Kangaroo (1955-84), but they were not clearly delineated from the other shows and ran on the same (commercial) television networks.

But as time went on and restrictions on advertising on US children’s shows were loosened, many if not most children’s shows became simply vehicles by which to sell children’s toys: He-Man (1983-85), G.I. Joe (1983-86), Transformers (1984-87), etc. The most prominent exceptions to this trend were shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001), Sesame Street (1969-), and Reading Rainbow (1983-2006) that were shown on public television and were explicitly promoted as noncommercial and (more or less) educational in nature.

Those who were children in the US in the 1980s and beyond thus lived in two disjoint worlds. The first was a world ruled by corporations, in which the distinction between “entertainment” and “advertising” was abolished, and children’s participation in media culture was implicitly reduced to an endless series of economic transactions—a model of oppressive capitalism. The second was a world shaped by governments and nonprofit organizations, from which commerce was banished and in which children were viewed primarily as the targets of instruction and advocacy for progressive values—a model of benign socialism.

This may just be me as a old person attempting some amateur psychoanalysis on the younger generation, but it seems as if this dichotomy might help explain some of the particular forms the “culture wars” and the controversies over “wokeness” have taken.

Thus, for example, the idea that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” that by watching a TV show or film, or reading a book or comic, one is inextricably entangled with capitalism in all its aspects (arguably true of those watching He-Man and similar series) and (more contentiously) that one is then implicated in all of capitalism’s crimes and ills.

But of course children in their innocence are not aware of all this, simply enjoying these shows and comics as entertainment. When grown to adulthood their remembrance of that enjoyment then exists in tension with their knowledge of the social and economic context in which those works were created and consumed, and the purposes to which they were put. And the implied continuation to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is often “but I’m of a mind to do it anyway.”

Thus, then, the urge to retroactively redeem childhood favorites by importing into them the values of the public television shows they existed in opposition to: Not a new story of a growing love between two young lesbians, but a reboot of a He-Man spinoff in which Adora/She-Ra and Catra go from enemies to lovers. Not a contemporary bildungsroman featuring a biracial teenager thrust into “great responsibility,” but Miles Morales as a successor to the role of Spider-Man. And when the patriarchy is to be fought, Barbie is drafted to do it.¹

And thus, on the flip side, the reaction of people (usually male) who think such changes “ruined my childhood.” After all, these media “properties” are not in their eyes like the Mona Lisa, Seven Samurai, and other traditional works of art. They are instead products that as consumers they have paid for many times over during childhood and beyond, often to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. No wonder they react like regulars at a restaurant when the chef changes the recipes for their favorite dishes, complaining loudly to the manager and then hastening to Yelp to write negative reviews.

I enjoyed The Jetsons when I was in elementary school, but it holds no interest for me today. It was made as disposable entertainment for children, it served that purpose well, and it can now be tossed into the trash bin of history. I have no interest in reading an academic paper on how it propagandizes for “late capitalism,” or an opinion piece on its positive vision for “accelerationism.” And I definitely have no desire to see it rebooted as a “bone-chilling dystopia.”

Give me some new stories, and let the old ones stay in the past to which they belong. If I ever want to revisit them, I know that I’ll be entering a different country, and will be mindful of the flaws and injustices I find there—not forgetting or excusing them, but also not letting them completely obscure the power of a work of art to entertain or enlighten me.

@AndreL (@AndreL) - 2023-12-02 19:33

The fall of the Soviet Union is missing from your analysis. In the seventies there was was, so the story goes, a seemingly serious viable alternative to capitalism, which was soundly defeated and shown to have always been a false dream.

(My seventh grader says that Barbie is cool in a way it wasn’t a year ago — Barbie t-shirts are fashionable in middle school — and argues the movie is a shrewd way to buff the brand and increase sales.)

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-12-03 09:28

You are correct re the Soviet Union, though I suspect children at the time would have probably had limited awareness of that. (I can’t say, as I was already an adult by then.) But it’s certainly true that as adults looking back they might have seen it as the “end of socialism”; it was a fairly common sentiment at the time.

As for the Barbie movie affecting the Barbie brand, this seems another instance of what many people have seen as a central feature of capitalism: absorbing any criticism of itself and transforming it into a product to be sold.

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost. The post is obviously moot now that Cohost is dead, but I think it’s still relevant as commentary on the difficulty of creating a financially-sustainable social media site that is not venture-funded. Some people accused me of trying to guilt-trip people into supporting what was in reality a commercial venture, or of ignoring the financial naïvety and frequent stumbles of the Cohost staff. However, I remain firm in my conviction that with any social media site where users are customers, not the product, they are going to have to step up and pay something.]

It’s hard out there to be a social media site. Tumblr is the latest high-profile casualty, put on life support after a failure to make it into a going concern. I haven’t used Tumblr in a while, but I read Cohost every day, and write something for it every week; it’s one of my favorite places on the Internet. I’m thus concerned that Cohost may at some point also end up on the scrap heap of failed social sites.

Based on the June 2023 financial update (the latest available at the time of writing), Cohost’s financial situation is improving, but it’s still not at the point where it can be self-sustaining without the need for additional investment. Patreon-style subscriptions are planned, from which Cohost would take a cut, and paid ads are at least a possibility.

But I’m still worried about Cohost’s future, especially with a population of users many of whom themselves seem to be financially stressed, based on the increasing number of GoFundMe posts showing up in my timeline. That’s why my thoughts turned to Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie was a 19th-century millionaire (billionaire in present-day terms) who grew up in poverty in Scotland, emigrated to the US with his family, went to work at 12 in a textile mill, was rescued from that situation by a fellow countryman who saw talent in him, served an apprenticeship as a telegraph operator, worked for a leading railroad, became a financial speculator and made a pile of money, bought steel mills and worked to drive down the price of steel, then sold his steel company and made another pile of money. He then retired to devote himself full-time to giving away money according to his own personal philosophy, which he outlined in his essay “The Gospel of Wealth” (also included in his book The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays).

Shorn of its 19th century prose and attitudes, Carnegie’s essay can be summed up as follows:

• Capitalism is here to stay, having proved its success in raising the absolute wealth of the entire population.
• However, capitalism and the free market system by their nature increase relative wealth inequality, enabling a few people to become orders of magnitude richer than others.
• Given this inherent inequality, the wealthy have an obligation to use the vast majority of their wealth for the betterment of society, and to do so within their own lifetime.
• This task is best accomplished not by making indiscriminate donations to charitable causes, but by establishing community institutions such as libraries (Carnegie’s particular obsession), hospitals, universities, art galleries and museums, and the like.
• But such institutions should not be founded in the first place unless the communities that they serve agree to take on the responsibility of funding them once they’re established.

Carnegie’s attitude was an example of what’s sometimes referred to as noblesse oblige: that those who live in a society that has enabled them to become wealthy in turn have a responsibility to give back to that society.

The person who provided the initial funding for Cohost was—self-consciously or otherwise—acting in accordance with Carnegie’s philosophy. Yes, theirs was nominally an investment, with the investor getting ownership of the Cohost source code if ASSC can’t pay back the funds provided. But, seriously, does anyone think that that source code has any significant value divorced from the community of users it supports?

Better I think to see this anonymous benefactor as using their wealth to provide Cohost users the modern analog of a Carnegie library. We as users then collectively have an obligation to ensure that Cohost as a service receives the funding it needs to survive once the initial funding is exhausted. Fortunately, we have a vehicle ready to hand by which to do that, namely purchasing one or more Cohost Plus! subscriptions.

Of course, not every Cohost user can afford the $5 (US) a month for a subscription, but many others can. Furthermore, a few people can afford to spend $50, or even $500, as easily as others can afford to spend $5. It’s those people who can and should take on the responsibility of supporting Cohost on an ongoing basis, signing up for as many Cohost Plus! subscriptions as they can.

Some might object, “you don’t get much by buying a Cohost Plus! subscription, why would you ever buy more than one?” That risks succumbing to the logic of capitalism at its most extreme, in which a life that could be a rich tapestry of personal and social relations is reduced to an endless series of economic transactions—trading value for like value, continually vigilant in every exchange to ensure that one is not taken for a fool or (worse) a mark.

Others might object, “you’re just putting a bandage on the wounds inflicted by capitalism, under socialism Cohost wouldn’t need to beg for scraps from the rich.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see the Revolution happening any time soon. In the meantime, what’s wrong with building “socialism in one website,” according to the principle “from each according to their ability”?

The ultimate question is, do you want to keep shopping for new social media sites like you’d shop for bread or a new PC? Or is the community (or communities) you find on Cohost important enough to you that you want to help make sure the site sticks around for the long haul? As @staff noted in a previous financial update, social media sites are inherently unprofitable. So let’s stop treating them solely as businesses.

Let’s encourage those who can to go above and beyond to support the site, let’s recognize those who want to be recognized for doing so,¹ and let’s feel free to lay a guilt trip on people who use Cohost a lot, could afford to pay more, but don’t. That’s what Andrew Carnegie did back in the 19th century, and we should consider doing likewise in the 21st.

Plum (@plumpan) - 2023-11-19 15:55

Generally agree with this but 100% against showing your cohost plus status in your profile, even less so showing how many. Even if it’s optional, really really really don’t like the kinda class symbol that ends up being, even if it’s because they did a good thing. No golden eggbugs.

For better or worse I’m also of the opinion that, until we fix capitalism as a whole and while that should be a priority, if you’ve got enough money that you get to pick and choose your luxury expenses then you have some duty to try and spend it more responsibly. More money to people doing what they love and/or making the world better, less directly to awful people and big companies trying to eat the world. Yes no ethical consumption and all that, but people have used that as a hand wave enough before throwing their money directly to bad people for tiny dopamine hits that I’ve long stopped caring. Paying cohost monthly instead of say, a streaming subscription (or worse, paid youtube), is an excellent example of that.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-11-19 17:24

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

On the Cohost Plus! status thing, I personally wouldn’t take advantage of that, but some people might and (playing devil’s advocate) why not let them if it leads to them increasing support for the site? If other people think it’s cringe then they’re welcome to dunk on the folks doing it, like people dunk on the Twitter/X paid blue checks. But (as you note) spending money to support Cohost is a lot different and more justifiable than spending it on Twitter/X or many other things one could think of.

Brett (@bck356) - 2023-11-20 11:15

Man I have super mixed feelings about this

Carnegie’s fundamental point (the wealthy should distribute their wealth downward) is obviously correct and I have no objection to that

but my objection is with people becoming that rich in the first place? Especially when luck is by far the dominant determinant for that (including Carnegie himself given your provided context). I know that’s a direct contraction with one of his core points (capitalism is here to stay) but do we really want a system where our leaders are ultimately determined by chance? It sounds like Carnegie was mostly not an asshole (well sort of, you know what they say about it being impossible to become that rich without massive exploitation and I refuse to believe he was an exception) but you can’t hardly read the news without tripping over a story about the modern hyper wealthy being assholes who barely pretend to be philanthropic

And also if wealth distribution was like, even a LITTLE bit more even, people would have far more freedom to support causes and networks they care about. Carnegie is clearly not accounting for people who barely have enough for survival

So while I do get the idea of noblesse oblige it sounds like it would be far more optimized as an anarchic, socialist system. Which maybe he wouldn’t even necessarily object to if that was suggested to him, idk, he’s dead

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-11-20 17:27

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

The comment re anarchy is interesting, because in the 19th century all US governments (Federal, state, and local) were much much smaller than they are now, and provision of public goods was pretty minimal. Carnegie’s strategy was in effect to provide the startup investment for public goods (libraries, in his case) with the understanding that governments (local governments, in the case of libraries) would then take over their funding and operation. Of course, today we’re used to governments funding those things (albeit with that funding often under threat), so a Carnegie-style strategy today would focus on public goods that are not yet provided by governments but could be. (For example, things similar to the Internet Archive, arxive.org, an authorized version of Sci-Hub, etc.)

Re assholes, Carnegie was not an exception. He was a contradictory person in many ways: valorizing “honest work” but also making money with often dubious financial speculation; radically democratic in his views, but also a fan of Social Darwinism; expressing support for workers but also letting his business associates brutally suppress a strike. It’s worth reading some of his essays just to experience a 19th-century mentality at work.

Brett (@bck356) - 2023-11-21 11:24

Actually reading this comment again I realized that government funding is provided by taxpayers (obviously). So taxes going into public services is already Carnegie-style wealth distribution, just with representatives deciding what gets funding instead of individual people. The lack of new projects has more to do with representatives deciding that they are unworthy than a lack of actual funding existing for them

I don’t really blame Americans for being so insistent on low taxes when it feels like they just get siphoned up into things that don’t help anybody

AndreL (@AndreL) - 2023-11-21 02:38

I’ve wondered about whether public broadcasting provides a model for Cohost. But public broadcasting relies heavily on a combination of government support and grant money, neither of which are readily available to Cohost. And paid ads (“underwriting”) are also important to public broadcasting, with the advantage of a locality nexus which Cohost doesn’t have.

Would changing Cohost’s legal status from worker-owned co-op (I think that’s the current structure) to a tax-exempt organization help attract grants/donations? I don’t know. I have seen people complain that Beats Time and some extra Eggbug emojji aren’t worth the cost of Plus, and maybe they’d be happier paying if Cohost were legally non-profit (which in the US isn’t quite the same thing as not-for-profit). But I imagine some people are paying for Plus because they like supporting a co-op.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-11-21 09:23

Thanks for the comment!

Re attracting donations, currently in the US the standard deduction amount is so high that for the vast majority of people it doesn’t pay to itemize deductions, including charitable deductions. I’m actually about to stop keeping track of my charitable deductions in my tax record keeping.

Nonprofit status does mean an organization will do a basic level of public reporting, and is protected against being bought out by people not aligned with the nonprofit’s purpose. But ASSC already is fairly transparent re its finances, and as a worker co-op its owners are aligned with its stated goals and likely to remain so.

On the flip side, 501(c)(3) status in the US comes with a bunch of semi-arbitrary restrictions on how you can sell stuff and get revenue, and having seen how that works in action (as a nonprofit employee) I wouldn’t wish that on ASSC and Cohost.

AndreL (@AndreL) - 2024-04-11 14:32

This comment has been in the back of my mind, and I’m in the middle of the calculations right now… you’re right that federally it is doesn’t matter for most people, but in some high-tax states (California for me) the deduction is just high enough to make the paperwork hassle of tracking donations worthwhile.

All you DJ Sabrina virgins out there, consider taking some time out today or this weekend to listen to the (not quite) 4-hour magnum opus that is Destiny. And if you think you don’t have the time, you can instead skip watching yet another crappy Marvel movie and listen to the 1 hour 40 minute abridged version.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

For those watching the currently-airing anime of The Apothecary Diaries and wondering whether to read the manga or the light novels:

1. Like the anime, the manga (which I’ve not yet read in full) gives you a concentrated dose of the exquisite poison that is the story of Maomao. The LN is more like microdosing yourself; there are stretches where you’re just not going to feel the tingle.
2. Maomao and Jinshi have a seriously fucked-up relationship.
3. Speaking of that, the manga has not yet gotten to the conclusion of volume 8 of the LN, in which Jinshi [REDACTED] for reasons and Maomao has to [REDACTED].

So there’s that.

Lotte ‘just an idiot’ May (@LotteMakesStuff) - 2023-10-28 14:54

oh heck is that a good redacted or a bad redacted… actually I do not want to know

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 14:57

I’ll just say that I think you will appreciate the [REDACTED].

Lotte ‘just an idiot’ May (@LotteMakesStuff) - 2023-10-28 15:00

o7

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost. It was originally created in response to a question from a reader: “After reading your latest post, I’m curious: what was your early career like? Technology was very different back then.”]

First, thank you for the ask! This is the first one I’ve gotten. I am not by nature inclined toward nostalgia, computer-related or otherwise. (That’s why I spend my time on Cohost nowadays and not on Facebook.) But since you want to know, I will tell you how things were.

When people think about computing decades ago they normally contrast the hulking mainframes beloved of old movies, all spinning tape drives and flashing lights, with the “supercomputer in your pocket” that is the present-day smartphone. But many things have not changed as much as you might think, and in some cases I’d highlight changes in culture, especially including work culture, as much as I would changes in technology.

To expand on this in terms of my own career:

A corndog meets a computer

My first introduction to computers was when I visited the college I would later attend. Though a small school, they prided themselves on having modern facilities and equipment, one of which was a DEC PDP-8/E minicomputer. (I naïvely asked if it was an analog or digital computer; as D. Boon might say, I was a “fucking corndog.”) Once I was a student, I and others had fun learning BASIC, tediously pecking out programs on a Teletype machine to be recorded on paper tape and then read back and executed.

Later I assisted my physics professor with some programs he was creating. These were in FORTRAN, and to run them we had to drive half an hour to the nearest university computing center. There we spent our time typing out new punch cards for program changes, submitting them to the computing center help desk to be run on their IBM 370 mainframe, and then waiting for the output. We typically got in one run a day, and did this one day a week.

My last semester in college I spent at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, helping two researchers improve their computations of how electrons were absorbed by water (a problem relevant to radiation treatments for cancer). This was another FORTRAN batch job gig, but I was able to use a Wang 2200 system (see above) to do preliminary calculations in BASIC. (The full calculations were too much for the Wang.) This was my first experience with usable interactive computing.

My life as a software developer

After college I went to work as a software developer for a small (20 person or so) software company, SIMPLAN Systems, developing econometric modeling software. This was pretty interesting: the program featured an embedded interpreted language you could use to write and run econometric models on time series data. It included various statistical functions, and was in some ways similar to the later R language. The software itself (parser, runtime, etc.) was written in PL/I (not “PL/1,” thankyouverymuch), and I worked on adding new language features.

And here’s where the software development itself was not necessarily all that different from what is done today. The PL/I language was created by IBM as a successor to COBOL and FORTRAN, but never achieved their level of success. However as a language it was relatively advanced for its time, and except for the use of ALL CAPS (a holdover from the punch card era) a present-day C or Python developer would likely find the syntax of a PL/I program to be relatively familiar and its semantics readily understandable.

The actual development process may not have been all that alien to a modern developer either. When I started there, we didn’t have an actual computer in our office, but instead used Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminals to connect to a time-sharing system (IBM TSO, and later VM/CMS) at a university computing center some distance away. The Silent 700 combined a keyboard, a printer that used thermal paper, and a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem that you stuck your phone handset into.

This was a more congenial way to work than you might think. I can’t write code at a rate of more than 30 characters per second and I can’t read code much faster than that either, so the connection speed wasn’t much of a problem. The editor we used was similar to the “ed” line editor still found on Linux and macOS, and we used it in very much the same way: find where you wanted to change or add lines, print the code around it, make the change, print some more lines to check the change, save the file, compile and link it, and then run it with sample input to test the change. With VM/CMS we actually instantiated a virtual machine, attached our persistent storage to it, and ran the code in an isolated environment.

What strikes me as really different in retrospect is not the computing technology, but rather the environment in which we worked. When I started I got a real office (i.e., floor to ceiling walls) with a solid and pretty soundproof wooden door, an office I had all by myself for a while until a new developer came on board. We could work in our offices without distractions: no emails, no Slack notifications, no smartphone apps or websites to grab our attention, and (at least in our company) no endless rounds of staff meetings, code reviews, etc. And because the Silent 700s were portable, we could even take them home and work from there with even fewer distractions—not even phone calls could interrupt us, because the phone line would be tied up with the modem connection.

The real hassle came with software distribution. We sold the software to corporate economists (at about $50-100K US in present-day currency), and I was the main person tasked with installing it for them. I had to login and run a job to generate a copy of the software on magnetic tape, drive out to the university computing center to pick up the tape, and then drive to the nearby airport to fly out to the customer’s offices, there to give the tape to their computing center staff and work with them to get it installed.

Exit the mainframe, enter the supermini

Eventually SIMPLAN Systems got its own computer system, a “superminicomputer” from Prime Computer. Since the company didn’t have a lot of money we had a relatively low-end system, with only 512KB of memory and (I think) 80MB of disk storage. It also had an interactive operating system (PRIMOS) with a command line shell, and either then or a bit later a (non-GNU) version of the Emacs editor. That together with a Prime CRT terminal (similar to the famous DEC VT100, the ancestor of today’s terminal.app) was my introduction to full-screen editing.

After doing some work to help port the SIMPLAN software to the Prime system, I moved to Washington DC, left software development behind, and went to work for Prime Computer itself as a so-called “systems engineer” assisting with the sale of Prime systems to commercial and government customers. (I had enjoyed working with customers, got along well with salespeople, and was bored doing programming full-time.)

Prime and PRIMOS were also relatively advanced for the time. The operating system was written in PL/P, a dialect of PL/I, and since customers got source code for PRIMOS you could even make your own mods to the OS. Prime systems could also be connected to a (Prime-proprietary) local area network, and eventually we even got access to the Internet and acquired real email addresses to use with it, as well as FTP access to download software.

But even better than the Internet was getting access to actual text processing software. I’ve never been a fan of WYSIWG word processing software, so I was happy when Prime got us copies of the Scribe markup language software, and I later got a copy of the TeX mathematical typesetting software myself. These along with one of the recently-introduced laser printers enabled me to finally get away from using typewriters to create documents. (As an example of the crap output we were stuck with in the pre-TeX era, see the paper I wrote at Oak Ridge.)

As at SIMPLAN Systems, software distribution continued to be a pain in the ass. In addition to using magnetic tapes, we also resorted to carting around removable disk packs, which we pulled out of the actual drives (which resembled washing machines—see above), put in plastic containers, and then took on planes as carry-on items when we needed to visit the corporate HQ. Given that the disk platters were exposed to the open air while we were moving them around, I’m surprised we never had one crash on us.

My period at Prime also introduced me to Unix, as Prime created a new line of “super micro” systems based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor and running Unix System V. That’s when I made my entrance into the online historical record, since I ported GNU Emacs to the Prime EXL line and then posted about it to Usenet.

Or, to be more precise, I posted it to a mailing list that was gatewayed into a Usenet newsgroup. I didn’t have access to Usenet proper until a later job at which a co-worker of mine had set up a working connection to other Usenet nodes. He was an evangelical Christian, and I found it amusing (and never told him) that taking a full Usenet feed, including the alt.* newsgroups, meant that—in addition to innocuous stuff like the comp.sys.ibm and rec.arts.movies newsgroups—he was storing on company systems multiple megabytes of text-based erotica, along with even more megabytes of uuencoded erotic art and photos.

That brings me back to contrasting the differences in culture then and now vs. differences in technologies. The environment in which we worked was almost completely white, almost completely male, and pretty much completely cishet. Because we were expected to be “professional” and be ready to visit customers at any time, I had to wear a full suit and tie Every.Fucking.Day.

If I recall, we only had a few women in our sales office, one a salesperson and one a pre-sales technical person like me, plus a receptionist and secretary or two. The pre-sales technical person I suspected of being a closeted lesbian after I got invited to her going-away lunch (the only man to be invited, if I recall correctly) and met her very butch “friend”; she would never have dared to talk about this with her co-workers. Somewhat later I had a co-worker who was a trans woman, the first one I’d met, but this was a bit more understandable since she was a software developer and I was working at a small company again. (She’s still working in the tech field; I found her on LinkedIn when I did a search last night.)

This is all to say, that if those of you reading this on Cohost were transported back 30 years or so, I suspect you’d be far more shocked by the “backward” culture than you would be by the “backward” computing technologies.

Last days before the Web

During this general time (late 1980s, early 1990s) I also worked with a number of Unix-based workstations. I’ve written about this previously, so I’ll be brief and just say that I never want to see—let alone lift—a CRT-based workstation ever again.

This brings us to the mid-1990s, and I think an appropriate place to stop. Everything changed when the World Wide Web hit the scene, but in some senses a lot of things haven’t changed much since that time: I used Mac laptops then (Powerbook 140 and its successors), I use a Mac laptop now (MacBook Air). I used a web browser then (NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape Navigator), I use web browsers now (Safari, Firefox, and sometimes Chrome). I did occasional programming in an interpreted language then (Perl), I do occasional programming in an interpreted language now (Python). We had websites, blogs, and online forums then, we have websites, blogs, and online forums now.

There are in fact new things in computing in the 21st century: smartphones, cloud computing, maybe LLMs if they become more useful. But it’s also true that there were a lot of innovations in computing back in the day, innovations that in many cases got left by the wayside, never to be followed up or revisited. (Brett Victor hammers home this point in his presentation “The Future of Programming.”) They were interesting times to be in the computing field, and I hope this post has given you a bit of a taste for how things were.

effika (@effika) - 2023-10-28 10:26

This was very interesting! And I’m never going to be mad at a long download time again.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 10:56

Thanks for stopping by to comment! In a predominantly text-based online world, the slow speeds actually didn’t matter all that much; with software and anything else sizable you bought it in a box or downloaded it off-hours. But when the web hit and people went wild putting 1MB+ images on their sites, the pain was real.

Kay (@kaybee) - 2023-10-28 11:34

thanks for sharing, Frank! this was a fun read

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 11:49

I’m glad you enjoyed it. It’s now incumbent on you to write a post like this in 30 or 40 years :-)

vaporware (@vaporware) - 2023-10-28 13:05

oh i guess is should stop using perl huh… lol. thanks for posting!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 13:20

Heh. Well, I stopped using Perl, doesn’t mean everyone has to :-) Thanks for stopping by to comment!

Plum (@plumpan) - 2023-10-28 19:41

Thank you for sharing and my apologies for falling into the trope of “old computer stuff gets you more attention than anything else on cohost”

Blessing and a curse

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 22:35

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I’ll confess I was surprised by how popular this post was. I guess if you’ve lived through past eras of computing yourself it’s not nearly as interesting as it might be for those who haven’t.

Plum (@plumpan) - 2023-10-28 22:47

I can’t speak for others but I’ve found it interesting how computer stuff has changed just in the time I’ve been exposed to it, primarily in the context of building PCs at home. I find oral history stuff of old (read: beyond my time with them) computers fascinating, be it using mainframes in the 70s and 80s or people doing game dev in the late 90s and early 00s. I’ve used enough “old” computers now to also know that aside from a few very niche use cases they’re utterly useless and just take up space, at least for me!

I’ve heard similar less-nostalgic takes from those who used late 80s and early 90s home computers for music production in the early 90s, and how they’re so incredibly glad those things got replaced by something better. But I also know some big producers that weren’t around back then that now keep an old atari ST around for making tunes. Funny how that works.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

The past few days I’ve been going back and relistening to some of the early minimalist pieces I used to love. A lot of these are available on Bandcamp, so I thought I’d highlight some of my favorites here in case there’s ever a Bandcamp Friday again and you’d like to pick one or two of these up.

A word of advice: some of these pieces are very minimal, and if you’re not familiar with this style of music you might find yourself bored or annoyed or both. One of the keys to appreciating them is listening for the subtle changes and shifts that occur over the course of a piece. I find it helps to listen to them using headphones or ear buds, and to walk while you listen (I’m doing this every morning now); the slowly changing landscape matches the slowly changing music.

Also: the “low Kolmogorov complexity” thing is sort of a joke but also not: several of these pieces can be specified by a page or two of sheet music plus a few additional instructions describing how to repeat and vary the musical phrases.

So without further ado, some recommendations:

I’ll start with Philip Glass, probably the most famous of the “minimalists” as far as the general public is concerned, though by his own admission he hasn’t been a minimalist in the strict sense since 1974, when he completed Music in Twelve Parts (below).

Cluster Ensemble Plays Philip Glass. This includes five early Glass pieces from 1969 and 1970, which build from the extreme simplicity of Two Pages to the longer and more varied Music with Changing Parts.

Philip Glass: Music in Twelve Parts. This piece is from the early 1970s, and builds on the earlier pieces, in particular by introducing vocal lines using solfège (i.e., “do-re-mi” syllables.) This recording is from 1993; Bandcamp also has a more recent recording of Music in Twelve Parts from 2007, but I haven’t listened to it and can’t offer a comparison.

Next is Steve Reich, typically spoken of in the same breath as Glass; they were born only a few months apart, and Reich’s Piano Phase (below) influenced Glass’s turn to minimalism.

Piano Phase (Spotify link). Unfortunately Bandcamp doesn’t have any good recordings of this 1967 Reich piece, which features two identical piano lines going in and out of phase to interesting effect.

Music for 18 Musicians. One of the best-known recordings of this classic 1978 Reich piece, played by the Steve Reich Ensemble. Unfortunately, Bandcamp doesn’t have the version that I think is the very best, the original 1978 recording by the Steve Reich Ensemble (Spotify link).

Terry Riley and La Monte Young complete the list of the best-known minimalist composers, both born a couple of years before Reich and Glass. (And I should pause here to note what a blessing it is that all four are still alive.)

In C. Riley’s most famous piece (composed in 1964), here in a recording by the group Bang on a Can. There are a number of other recordings of this on Bandcamp, but I haven’t listened to them. The piece admits a fair bit of freedom of interpretation and instrumentation, so different versions can sound very different. I therefore encourage you to also check out the other ones.

A Rainbow in Curved Air (Spotify link). Another of Riley’s best-known pieces, here performed by Riley himself.

The Well​-​Tuned Piano in the Magenta Lights. This is a very long, slow, and contemplative piece, over six hours in length. Like Riley, La Monte Young was another notable early minimalist who predated Reich and Glass. Among other things, he’s known for having influenced John Cale of the Velvet Underground.

Now we come to some lesser known minimalist composers, one of whom (Dennis Johnson) has been claimed as the first person to pioneer the style.

An Hour for Piano. Exactly what it says on the tin: R. Andrew Lee’s performance of this 1971 Tom Johnson piece clocks in at 60 minutes to the very second. Bandcamp also has performances of this piece by Nicolas Horvath and Kai Schumacher. My introduction to the piece was the original 1974 recording (not on Bandcamp) by the composer Frederic Rzewski; at less than 55 minutes it runs a bit short but I think benefits from the slightly faster tempo.

November. This very early minimalist piece by Dennis Johnson (no relation to Tom Johnson) was composed in 1959, recorded in partial form in 1962 on cassette tape, then reconstructed over forty years later by the composer Kyle Gann. It is very contemplative and very long: over four hours in total in this recording. As with An Hour for Piano, a recording of November by Nicolas Horvath is also available on Bandcamp; it’s over seven hours in length.

Schlingen-Blängen (Spotify link). To finish off this post I thought I’d give you a break from piano music. This is a 1999 one-hour-plus organ drone piece by Charlemagne Palestine.

If you’re interested in more minimal music available on Bandcamp, see their “Masterpieces of Minimalism” article from last year, which includes several of the releases I mentioned above, and more besides. Enjoy!

Voyage (@Goyavoyage) - 2023-10-20 20:34

As a person who does math stuff that sometimes involves Kolmogorov complexity for a living, I was kind of mindblown - I did not expect to find these words here, just like that. That’s a really good title :’D

Thank you for the recommendations - I only know a little of Philip Glass’ works among all this, I think - but this makes me want to dig into more of these!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-20 21:07

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You see, the thing I love about cohost is that I can title a post like this and be confident that a goodly fraction of the people who follow me will get the reference. But… I could kick myself for not putting it in a tag.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I suppose I should start by confessing to an act of musical blasphemy. As those of a certain age and musical taste will recall, “Our band could be your life” is the famous first line of the song “History Lesson, Part 2” by the punk rock band Minutemen.

The contrast could not be greater with the BanG Dream! project and its MyGO!!!!! subproject: On the one hand the musically and politically uncompromising hardcore group, famous for their low-rent aesthetic (“We jam econo”), unsuccessful in their only attempt at making a more commercially accessible record (“I got it! We’ll have them write hit songs!”). On the other hand a media-mix property comprising manga, anime, live concerts, recordings, and mobile games with micro transactions, altogether yielding tens of billions of yen of annual revenue—the real “Project: Mersh.”

And yet . . .

I don’t watch many seasonal anime, and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! was well off my radar. But as episode after episode aired, the folks in a discord I participate in kept saying good things about it, and I finally decided to take the plunge.

At first glance the show seemed unpromising: yet another variant on “cute girls doing cute things,” this time with a musical twist, starring a CGI cast distinguished mainly by their hair styles and colors, and with an in media res beginning that had me quite confused about what was going on. But I gradually caught on, became invested in the characters and their stories, was surprised to find that episode 10 was one of the best episodes of anime I’ve ever watched, and after completing the show went back and binged all 13 episodes again.

Then I thought to write down my thoughts on the show,¹ and for some reason a band came to mind that I hadn’t listened to or thought about for many years.²

Our band could be your life. It’s a line that admits of multiple interpretations, but the one intended by Mike Watt, bassist for Minutemen, was that it was directed toward younger members of the hardcore scene: that “there’s not a lot of difference between us,” that what Minutemen had done as a band they could do too, and make a life of music just as Watt and his bandmates D. Boon (guitarist) and George Hurley (drummer) had done. It’s a saying that could apply just as much to high school girls in Tokyo as it did to the punk bands of Southern California.

You could also change one of the pronouns: “your band could be your life,” coextensive and coterminous, as was true of Minutemen: the band disbanded after D. Boon’s death in an auto accident at the age of 27. That’s the meaning Tomori echoes in episode 4, as she contemplates joining another band after the implosion of CRYCHIC: “Let’s do it our whole lives.” While Soyo hesitates (“Our whole lives?”) and Anon protests (“Do you know the average lifespan?”), Taki signs on immediately (“If it’s with you, Tomori-chan, . . .”). By the end of the series, even though some members still express lingering doubts, they’ve committed to each other for the long haul: “layering lots and lots of moments like that . . . I think it will become a lifetime.”

Punk rock changed our life. Tomori is the emotional core of both MyGO!!!!! the band and MyGO!!!!! the series. After the end of CRYCHIC she retreats into her room and into her shell, obsessively writing notes to herself, trying to make sense of what her life has become and what it might yet be. Those notes become the lyrics of the songs created by the embryonic band that finally births itself as MyGO!!!!! The music itself isn’t really punk—as one redditor commented, they basically reinvented emo—but the angsty music the band creates is an perfect match for the angsty lives of the teenagers who created it, and the raw lyrics are as punk as they get.³

Tomori becomes the engine that pulls the other members of the band out of the ruts they’ve fallen into: Taki jumps at the chance to play with Tomori again, Anon wins back her self-respect after washing out of school in England, Soyo begins to move past her mourning for CRYCHIC, and Rāna finds people to take her in and provide her a (musical) home. “Changed our life,” indeed.

Me and Mike Watt, we played for years. Mike Watt and D. Boon met when they were both 13, slightly younger than the girls of MyGO!!!!!, and learned to play music together. “I wasn’t even a musician,” recalled Watt, “I just wanted to be with my friend.” They played in several bands together before forming Minutemen.

Someone once wrote that no man ever loved another man more than Mike Watt loved D. Boon. When Boon died he was grief-stricken, by his own admission not even able to listen to Minutemen’s music until many years later, when a filmmaker created a documentary about the band. Now in his sixties and still making music, every recording Watt has released since Boon’s death has been dedicated to his memory.

Those who read, watch, or play girl-centric manga, anime, or games often indulge themselves in shipping the girls together in romantic pairings. Fans of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! are no exception to that. But as someone who’s read a lot of yuri manga and watched a number of yuri and quasi-yuri anime, I detected few if any signs of deliberate “yuri baiting” in MyGO!!!!!: no flirtatious dialogue or gestures, no blushing at touching of hands or indirect kisses, no implied “doki doki.”

It’s clear though that the various members of MyGO!!!!! have closely bonded together, and hold special feelings for each other: Taki’s protectiveness toward Tomori, Tomori’s admiration of Anon, Anon and Soyo’s mutual recognition (and apparent forgiveness) of each other’s lies and scheming. If love is what we should call it (and I think we should), it’s a platonic love that—like that of Mike Watt for D. Boon—does not entail a romantic dimension, but is no less real and meaningful for that.

Real names’d be proof. Another ambiguous line, the second line of the song. The folks at Genius.com think that it means that “Minutemen are real people and not fake rock personas, hence they use their own names.” The girls of MyGO!!!!! do likewise—but not the band that appears in the final episode of the anime, the next entrants in the ongoing BanG Dream! franchise.

The members of Ave Mujica hide behind masks and stage names: “Oblivionis,” “Timoris,” and so on. Dressed in elaborate costumes (a far cry from the hastily thrown together outfits of MyGO!!!!!), the band’s conceit is that they are discarded dolls given brief life for the space of their performance. Off stage, some of the members’ motives are revealed as base and mercenary: restoring lost wealth, gaining new fans and followers.

Could there be a more apt metaphor for what the girls of BanG Dream! really are? Empty shells assembled from millions of polygons, their limbs moved by unseen hands, their lines spoken by unseen voices, their songs written and played by unseen musicians—all in the service of Bushiroad corporate OKRs.

And yet . . .

From seemingly unpromising elements in a thoroughly commercial endeavor, those who created the series BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! created a heartfelt and emotionally affecting work of art. Whether they can capture lightning in a bottle once more is an open question. Perhaps, as the last scene of episode 13 foreshadows, the sequel will simply descend into melodrama or even (as a discord acquaintance speculates) into high camp. But whatever happens, I’ll be there to watch.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. It was in response to another Cohost post by the user @things-to-read.]

Joanne McNeil comments about science fiction that “the prestige and mainstream acceptance arrived over the course of the past two decades . . . but at a cost, these new readers tend to straightjacket what’s interesting about the genre.” One symptom of that mainstream acceptance and respectability is the increasing number of science fiction authors whose work has been published in new editions by the Library of America, an organization self-described as “publishing America’s greatest writing.”

Such editions strive to make science fiction respectable partly by their cover design, which flattens the vast and wild corpus of American literature into a uniform package of restrained visual design. Note the contrast between the garish paperback originals shown above (from my own collection) and the same authors in Library of America livery.¹

Let’s start with Philip K. Dick. Dick has been a Library of America darling, with three separate collections of his novels and short stories, many of which he wrote while hopped up on amphetamines, trying to earn enough money to feed himself and make his alimony payments. As McNeil notes,

[Dick] was a serious weirdo and very frequently hilarious (and, yes, problematic). . . . But to be legible to scholars and critics, they construct a character out of his legacy: a serious man, . . . the sort of person who could show up on NPR and tell us exactly what the world is like and where it’s going.

McNeil continues, “This is happening with Octavia Butler in real time. Her daring and the moral complexity of her characters is swept away in recent assessments to create a coherent legacy—that of an earth mother tote bag caricature-icon.” Have these people even read Butler’s works? There’s some seriously fucked-up shit going on in most if not all of them.

As McNeil notes, Ursula K. Le Guin has also been welcomed into the pantheon of American literary giants; she now has six Library of America books in print (and two more available as ebooks), twice as many as Dick. She went from writing Ace paperback originals to being lauded by uber-critic Harold Bloom and appearing on a US Post Office stamp.

Finally, we now have an upcoming Library of America edition of works by Joanna Russ, another writer who got her start writing Ace paperback originals. This one I’m glad to see, as Russ is one of my favorite writers; I have over two dozen books by her or about her. I recommend checking this one out if you’ve never read any of her work. (A content warning, though: The Female Man, the 1975 feminist novel that’s her most famous work, has a pretty TERF-y scene for which Russ later publicly apologized.)

Now that science fiction has achieved a measure of respectability, McNeil speculates (albeit with little evidence) that the romance genre is a place where one might find the Octavia Butlers and J.G. Ballards of the future: “It is the one genre left that has evaded mainstream acceptance. . . . Romance writers work outside traditional measures of literary prestige.”

Russ herself wrote a romance of sorts, On Strike Against God, one of the works included in the Library of America edition. It’s one of her lesser works, mainly of interest as a semi-autobiographical account of Russ’s coming out as a lesbian, and pretty much of a piece with any of the lesbian romances you might find in the “LGBT” section of your local independent bookstore.²

So, although Russ was a leading light in the science fiction “new wave” of the 1960s and 1970s, I can’t imagine her as part of McNeil’s speculative “romance lit avant-guard [sic].” Which prompts the question: now that science fiction has been (mostly) mainstreamed, is there anyone at all writing in today’s sneered-at-by-literati romance genre whose work exhibits the loopiness of Dick, the bizarreness of Butler, the humanity of Le Guin, or the fierce intelligence of Russ? Enquiring minds want to know.

Following up on some off-the-cuff comments I made on the Okazu discord about Yuri Is My Job, here are some half-baked and incomplete thoughts trying to tie together the various strains of yuri (mainly manga, with some anime mixed in) in a semi-coherent way.

My aim is not to do a TV Tropes/“database animal”-style collection of common yuri tropes, but rather to try to account for the historical evolution of yuri in its various incarnations, and relate them to the Japanese social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which yuri works were created. (I omit discussion of yuri outside of Japan, although it’s very interesting to see how non-Japanese yuri and “GL” content is both influenced by and differs from Japanese yuri.)

That is, it attempts to address why particular forms of yuri arose in particular environments and became popular, how they can be grouped into larger categories (e.g., how magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri like Otherside Picnic can be considered “species” within a higher-level “genus”), and how they underwent “descent with modification” and even occasionally went extinct in response to changing environments (like S literature post WW2).

I think this can help us understand what elements are essential in the evolution of particular forms of yuri and which are “accidental,” as it were. Thus, for example, one can imagine something like S literature without Christian iconography (lilies, crosses, etc.). However I don’t think one can imagine it arising or thriving without the combination of ideals of romantic love, all-girl schools, and universal early arranged marriage.

I think this also leads to interesting questions for further research. Here are two I can think of off the top of my head, to which I have only partial or fuzzy answers:

• What factors in past and present Japanese society account for the historical popularity of tales involving transformation, including transformations involving gender nonconformity?

• What factors in contemporary Japanese society account for the particular forms, plots, themes, etc., of shakaijin yuri?

“Moar reseach needed!” as they say.

Anyway, please consider this an opportunity to poke holes in my arguments and highlight important factors I totally missed. And with that, let’s get to it . . .

The five ages of yuri

I see the historical progression of yuri and its various forms as proceeding roughly as discussed below, with four major creative eras and associated literary forms, and one interregnum after World War 2:

• S literature (1900s—1930s).
• Post-war fallow period, with only isolated proto-yuri works (1950s through 1980s).
• Magical girl yuri and (later) isekai and SF yuri (1990s on).
• Class S yuri and schoolgirl yuri (2000s on), bookended by
  • Class S revival / revision: Maria Watches Over Us (circa 2000);
  • Deconstructed Class S yuri: Yuri Is My Job (2010s–2020s).
• Shakaijin yuri and queer yuri (2010s on).

Note that the three later eras are still ongoing, with works in all three categories continuing to be published.

Also note that I use the term “S literature” to refer to early 20th-century works like Hana monogatari and reserve the term “Class S” for later—and in my opinion entirely different—works like Maria Watches Over Us and its successors.

S literature

The creation of what we can consider to be proto-yuri works.

Timeframe: Early 20th century (late Meiji / Taishō / early Shōwa eras).

Key work: Nobuko Yoshiya’s Hana monogatari (with Yoshiya’s Yaneura no nishojo being a special case, escaping the bounds of typical S literature).

Central theme: Young Japanese women have deep and emotionally rewarding, but time-limited, relationships with (female) partners whom they freely choose, relationships ended by separation due to arranged marriages or death (sometimes by suicide).

Cultural influences: Christian iconography and ideals, Western ideals of romantic love.

Background context:

• Education of girls becoming an explicitly-stated part of Meiji modernization, with young middle-class women educated in mission-run girls’ schools and (later) similar state-run schools.
• Young women being near-universally compelled into arranged marriages at relatively early ages.
• Growth of a publishing industry catering to girls and young women and featuring their submitted contributions.
• Export-driven economic growth of Japan based on mass employment of working-class girls and young women in the textile industry.
• Education of middle-class girls and young women and employment of working-class girls and young women both made possible by relatively low cultural preference for female seclusion (in contrast, for example, to India and the Middle East).

Additional comments: Unlike many later “Class S” works, S literature was rooted in the lived experiences of Japanese schoolgirls, many of whom participated in S relationships at school and some of whom (including Yoshiya) wrote stories about S relationships.

The post-war fallow period

The post-WW2 decline of S literature and the rise of shōjo manga.

Timeframe: 1950s through 1970s and 1980s (mid to late Shōwa era).

Background context:

• Introduction of coeducation and promotion of romantic love by the American occupation authorities.
• Decline of arranged marriage throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
• Increasing popularity of manga and (later) anime.
• A still-entrenched patriarchical system despite occupation-sponsored measures to promote gender equality through legal and other measures.

Additional comments: In the postwar period, S literature was first replaced entirely by shōjo manga, and then shōjo manga were revolutionized by the first generation of mangaka who had grown up reading them. S works featuring relationships between girls and young women were succeeded by BL works, with early proto-BL works (e.g., The Heart of Thomas) featuring similar themes of doomed love within a restricted school environment. Works in this period thought of as yuri or proto-yuri are either similar to S and proto-BL works in their themes of doomed love (e.g., Shiroi Heya no Futari), feature themes of gender nonconformity and transformation that look forward to the next group of works (Rose of Versailles), or both (Dear Brother, Claudine).

Magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri

I treat all these as related due to the similarity of the central themes.

Timeframe: 1990s and beyond (Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

• Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Puella Magi Madoka Magica (magical girl).
• I’m in Love with the Villainess, The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady, The Executioner and Her Way of Life (isekai).
• Otherside Picnic (SF).

Central theme(s): Girls and young women are transformed into new forms (magical girl yuri) or translated into another world/time/dimension (isekai and SF yuri) and thereby gain new powers, form homosocial and sometimes romantic relationships with other girls and young women, and fight various enemies.

Cultural influences: Takarazuka Revue, Princess Knight, Rose of Versailles, shōjo manga in general, tokusatsu series.

Related themes in manga and anime: cross-dressing, genderswapping.

Background context:

• Increased empowerment of girls and women in the cultural sphere but a still-entrenched patriarchal system.
• Rigidity of gender roles both in school (e.g., mandated uniforms) and afterward.

Class S and schoolgirl yuri

I consider these to be related due to the similarity of their central themes, with two sui generis works bookending the beginning of this genre and the present day.

Class S inspiration: Maria Watches Over Us

In the Heisei era new tropes arise that echo (but are only indirectly influenced by) tropes of Meiji/Taishō-era S literature.

Timeframe: Circa 2000 (Heisei era).

Central theme: A young woman-centered age-ordered hierarchy that through love and kindness supports and nurtures disparate personalities and prepares them for life.

Cultural touchstones (not necessarily direct influences): Catholic girls’ schools, S literature, Yoshiya’s comments on relationships between younger and older girls being critical to developing “a beautiful, moral, social, and non-self-centered character.”

Background context:

• Continuation of private Catholic girls’ schools as middle- and upper-class institutions.
• Japan’s “lost decade” of economic stagnation.
• Exposure of the emptiness of the promise of lifetime employment and “corporation as family” for anyone other than a minority of men.
• Increased employment and empowerment of women, but a still-entrenched patriarchal system.

Additional comments: A commenter on the original post claimed that Maria Watches Over Us was not directly influenced by S literature, but rather by the author’s experiences in an all-girl school. However, that school environment arguably was greatly influenced by the environments of the original girls’ mission schools of the Meiji and Taishō eras.

In line with the comment noted above, Maria Watches Over Us is distinguished from S literature by having a different central theme and a setting much more removed from its typical audience than S literature was from its. It is also distinguished from the works it inspired by their ignoring the moral and didactic aspects of relationships between girls and focusing much more on the emotionally affective, entertaining, and (at times) prurient aspects.

Post-Marimite Class S and schoolgirl yuri

The popularity of Maria Watches Over Us leads to the creation of a flood of works reusing and reworking its tropes to various different ends.

Timeframe: 2000s on (Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

• Strawberry Panic, Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, many others (Class S yuri).
• Whispered Words, Girl Friends, Kase-san series, many others (schoolgirl yuri).

Central themes:

• Schoolgirls enter into relationships with each other that can range from “passionate friendship” to actual sexual relations but are not explicitly lesbian (schoolgirl yuri), sometimes in a hermetically-sealed all-girl Catholic-tinged environment from which men are entirely absent and excluded (Class S yuri).

Cultural influences: Maria Watches Over Us, shōjo manga in general.

Background context:

• Increased visibility of lesbians, but primarily considered as objects for entertainment.
• Appeal of moe characters.
• Kawaii aesthetic.
• Rigidity of Japanese gender roles and social limits to accepted male behavior possibly driving male interest in yuri.
• Creation of Comic Yuri Hime and other magazines dedicated to yuri manga and related works, serving an all-genders audience.

Additional comments: I see Sweet Blue Flowers and Bloom Into You as being edge cases here: they both can be considered “schoolgirl yuri” (with Sweet Blue Flowers also reusing Class S tropes), but both prominently feature girls who are explicitly characterized as being obligate lesbians (Fumi and Sayaka respectively) and both feature adult lesbians who serve as role models and advisors to the younger girls.

Deconstructed Class S yuri: Yuri Is My Job

Yuri interrogates itself.

Timeframe: 2010s on (late Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Central theme: Young women explore themselves and their emotional and potentially romantic relationships with other young women via the performance of Class S tropes.

Cultural influences: Maria Watches Over Us, Class S yuri in general, academic and fan works of yuri criticism, maid/butler cafes, cosplay, and related phenomena.

Background context:

• Yuri as a genre mature enough (in both senses) to interrogate itself and its audience.
• Lesbians acknowledged to exist but not fully accepted into society, still excluded from marriage and other socializing institutions.
• Cosplay as identity construction.
• VNs, otome games, maid/butler cafes, etc., as structured training in social interaction for people ill-equipped by nature or experience for unscripted real-life interactions.

Shakaijin and queer yuri

Yuri grows up as an adult medium.

Timeframe: 2010s on (late Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

• I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up, Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, Catch These Hands (shakaijin yuri).
• Even Though We’re Adults, How Do We Relationship (queer yuri).

Central theme(s): Women enter into romantic and (sometimes) sexual relationships with each other at university or in the workplace, often explicitly identifying as lesbian and sometimes entering into marriage-like arrangements (or actual marriages in an imagined alternative/future Japan).

Cultural influences: Western and home-grown LGBTQ+ fiction and activism.

Background context:

• Increased LGBTQ+ visibility and political activism.
• Prefectural initiatives toward marriage equality thwarted by LDP intransigence at the national level.
• Increasing postponement of (heterosexual) marriage, including a substantial fraction of women experiencing “unplanned drifting into singlehood” due to ambivalence about marrying.
• Persistence of gender pay gap, driven by restriction of life-time employment to male workers as an corporate incentive to ensure their continued loyalty and hard work.
• Housing market oriented toward traditional heterosexual couples and their children, with housing for singles often of lower quality, and with some emerging options for alternative living arrangements (e.g., shared houses).
• Aging population, with an increasing number of people who will never marry.

Related themes in manga and anime: nonbinary/X-gender, asexual, transgender, and other GNC identities.

Additional comments: Like S literature, shakaijin yuri and queer yuri often reflect the lived experiences of many of their readers. Relationships sometimes seem to reflect a desire for companionship more than explicit romantic attraction, at least on the part of one of the parties, but it is common for the parties to move into together and enter into marriage-like arrangements.

Sources and further reading

Almost all of the following references are from the bibliography to my book, but I‘ve added a few new ones.

• Bacon, Alice Mabel. Japanese Girls and Women. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. https://​archive​.org​/details​/japanese​girls​wom​00​baco​_2. Status of girls and women in the Meiji era.
• Dollase, Hiromi Tsuchiya. Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. S literature and the emergence of a distinct shōjo culture in the early 20th century.
• Evans, Alice. “How Did East Asia Overtake South Asia?” The Great Gender Divergence (blog). March 13, 2021. https://​www​.draliceevans​.com​/post​/how​-did​-east​-asia​-overtake​-south​-asia. Low preference for female seclusion as driver of Japanese economic growth.
• ———. “Why are Gender Pay Gaps so Large in Japan and South Korea?” The Great Gender Divergence (blog). August 25, 2023. https://​draliceevans​.substack​.com​/p​/why​-are​-gender​-pay​-gaps​-so​-large. Gender pay gaps as a result of corporate incentives to male workers.
• Frederick, Sarah. Translator’s introduction to Yellow Rose, by Nokuko Yoshiya. Background to and discussion of one of Yoshiya’s stories from Hana monogatari.
• Friedman, Erica. By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Manga and Anime. Vista, CA: Journey Press, 2022. General history of yuri.
• Fujimoto, Yukari. “Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism.” Translated by Lucy Frazier. Mechademia 9 (2014), 25-42. https://​doi​.org​/10​.5749​/mech​.9​.2014​.0025. Replacement of S literature by shōjo manga.
• McLelland, Mark. Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Promotion of romantic love and discouragement of arranged marriages by the American occupation authorities.
• Maser, Verena. “Beautiful and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre.” PhD diss., Universität Trier, 2015. https://​ubt​.opus​.hbz​-nrw​.de​/frontdoor​/index​/index​/docId​/695. Academic discussion of yuri and its history and themes.
• National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. “Marriage Process and Fertility of Japanese Married Couples / Attitudes toward Marriage and Family among Japanese Singles: Highlights of the Survey Results on Married Couples/Singles.” Tokyo: National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2017. https://​www​.ipss​.go​.jp​/ps​-doukou​/e​/doukou15​/Nfs15R​_points​_eng​.pdf. Post-war decline of arranged marriage.
• Pflugfelder, Gregory M. “‘S’ Is for Sister: School Girl Intimacy and ‘Same-Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Monoly and Kathleen Uno, 133-90. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1163​/9781684174171​_006. S relationships.
• Raymo, James M., Fumiya Uchikoshi, and Shohei Yoda. “Marriage intentions, desires, and pathways to later and less marriage in Japan.” Demographic Research 44 (January 12, 2021), 67–98. https://​doi​.org​/10​.4054​/demres​.2021​.44​.3. “Unplanned drift into singlehood.”
• Robertson, Jennifer. “The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in the Theater and Beyond.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (August 1992), 419-42. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1525​/ae​.1992​.19​.3​.02a00010. Takarazuka Revue and its influence.
• Ronald, Richard, and Lynne Nakano. “Single women and housing choices in urban Japan.” Gender, Place and Culture 20, no. 4 (2013), 451-469. http://​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0966369X​.2012​.694357. Housing options for single women.
• Shamoon, Deborah. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. S literature and relationships.
• Suzuki, Michiko. Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. S literature and relationships.
• ———. “The Translation of Edward Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, edited by Heike Bauer, 197-215. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Nobuko Yoshiya’s promotion of relationships between older and younger girls.
• Tsurumi, E. Patricia. Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Working-class girls and young women as drivers of Japanese economic growth.
• Welker, James. “From Women’s Liberation to Lesbian Feminism in Japan: Rezubian Feminizumu within and beyond the Ūman Ribu Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.” In Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, edited by Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, 50-67. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. Origins of lesbian activism in Japan.

Thaliarchus (@thaliarchus) - 2023-09-03 10:26

Since it’s mostly implicit I might be wholly barking up the wrong tree here, but I think I’d sum that theory up as what we might call a ’strong social model’ of yuri content and theme, in which currents in Japanese society fundamentally drive what happens in yuri material and what that material thinks it is itself about.

I won’t say whether or not I think this is right, but it strikes me as at least useful, because fans (and not just fans of yuri) so often default to non-social ideas of a lineage of works which might influence each other but lack ties to their different historical moments.

I hesitate over the idea of genre maturity, which doesn’t map comfortably onto my sense of how such things work in some other areas, but I’m not nearly well-read enough to produce (say) S literature counterexamples that might trouble it.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-09-03 10:45

Thanks for stopping by to comment. To be honest, I was using the term “unified theory” very much tongue in cheek, as an ex-physics major it was irresistible. As you note, it’s really more a chronology, or I would argue, a description of yuri’s evolution (since a “chronology” could simply be “one d—-d thing after another”).

You are correct in that what I was really interested in was how the themes and core plots of yuri arise out of both Japanese society and previous works, what you call a “strong social model”. I set this against an account that focuses only on cataloging yuri tropes, or that focuses only on “texts” in isolation.’

And now that I think of it, if I were a biology major I would have called this “notes toward an evolutionary theory of yuri”, since what it really addresses is why particular forms of yuri arose in particular environments and became popular, how they can be grouped into larger categories (e.g., how magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri like Otherside Picnic can be considered species within a higher-level genus), and how they underwent “descent with modification” and even occasionally went extinct in response to changing environments (like S literature post WW2).

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2023-09-10 04:42

MariMite wasn’t inspired by S literature. Konno said in an interview with Eureka that she hadn’t heard of S until after she had created her series. She was inspired by BL LNs and real life.

To me, it’s wrong to use the label “class S” for series that focus on romance, such as StoPani and AnoKiss. While MariMite was very influential, what it mostly inspired was works catering to people who enjoyed the surface features but would have enjoyed it more if Yumi and Sachiko had become lovers. I’d go as far as to say there hasn’t been a series after MariMite that made a genuinely soeur-like relationship its focus. The close thing to the underlying substance of such a relationship is found in A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow.

Shakaijin yuri and also queer yuri was getting made before 2010. I’m not even sure it’s proportionally more common now. Love My Life started in 2000. Octave and Ohana Holoholo were among the earliest yuri manga to reach 6 volumes. Early Yuri-Hime was doing things like Conditions of Paradise and Apple Day Dream.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-09-10 10:01

Thank you for commenting! (I learn so much from these comments.)

“Maritime wasn’t inspired by S literature…” This confirms my theory that S literature went totally extinct post-war, and that the idea of same-gender relationships in a single-gender school setting was instead carried forward by BL. (But certainly S literature was rediscovered post-Marimite, e.g., we see Takako Shimura referencing Yoshiya and Hana monogatari in Aoi hana in the mid 2000s.)

“What [Marimite] mostly inspired …” The way I would put this is that the downstream influence was really from Marimite doujinshi rather than Marimite itself.

Regarding the term “Class S”, that’s a label that (Western) fans seem to apply to pretty much any work that features all-girls schools and lily-style imagery. I agree that it’s overused and misapplied, but I’m not sure the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.

“Shakaijin yuri and also queer yuri was getting made before 2010.” I was thinking of the recent trend of seeing such works get licensed English versions. But you’re absolutely correct that we see such works in the 2000s, really as far back as the 1990s (if I remember correctly).

Thanks again for stopping by!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Today is Bandcamp Friday and, as promised, I got some music from our dear friend, the medic (@listeninggarden on Cohost). I went ahead and got her whole discography, including the just-released as we observed the drifting whitecaps; if I like a musician, why not get everything they’ve recorded?

I thought at the same time I’d highlight some of the other music I’d bought on Bandcamp, in case any of you are looking for ideas on what to buy today. The following are from the last seven other artists I’ve bought music from, in reverse chronological order; I’ve bought pretty much everything these people have on Bandcamp, but for brevity’s sake I’ll only list selected albums and favorite tracks:

• Heavenly, Heavenly vs Satan. Late 1980s/early 1990s indie pop. Favorite tracks: “Shallow,” “Wish Me Gone,” and “Our Love is Heavenly.”
• TRPP, TRPP. Korean shoegaze. Favorite tracks: “Pause,” “Loss.”
• NoSo, “Kaitlin.” Korean-American singer-songwriter. Their previous album is also great.
• DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, Sabrina’s Hits #1. Outsider house. The artist I’ve listened to the most in the past two or three years. Favorite tracks (with great lo-fi YouTube videos): “Dance Now” and “Brave.”
• Rachika Nayar, fragments (expanded). I love albums of short pieces that make a statement then bow out gracefully. Favorite tracks: “parking lots,” “forgiveness,” “august 31st.”
• Tamara Valmar, “Too Many Hours.” Australian singer-songwriter. Note: their Bandcamp page is confusing, since the “Music” page shows only this release; go to their “Community” page for their other releases. (I didn’t notice this until checking links just now, so I didn’t buy anything else when I originally bought “Too Many Hours,” which is a shame because their other tracks are pretty good too. My apologies, Tamara! I’ve now remedied that oversight.) On Cohost as @tamkit.
• Polinski, Telex from MIDI City (Data111). Polinski is one-quarter of the band 65daysofstatic, one of my favorite groups. (“Remember when No Man’s Sky first came out, and it was really buggy and incomplete?” “Yeah, but the soundtrack was great!” Those guys.) On Cohost as @polinski. Favorite track: “Distant Friend I Love You.”

helleano)))r (@listeninggarden) - 2023-08-04 20:32

thank you again for your tremendous generosity and providing a spotlight for my work 💗

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-08-04 22:20

You’re quite welcome, I was happy to do it.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

. . . then Crossplay Love: Otaku x Punk might be right up your alley. If these adorable doofuses ever figure out the truth about each other—or, for that matter, about themselves—their heads might explode, but fortunately for them the mangaka seems to postponing that event indefinitely.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-08-03 18:43

Ooh thanks, ill check this out~

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

[I’m doing something a bit awkward here, reviewing a work by someone whom I follow on Cohost, and who follows me in turn. It’s overall a positive review, but I’ve tried to be objective about places where I think it comes up short.]

Anachronisms in a literary work are often held up as flaws, but they can have their own charm—for example, translations that introduce some modern vocabulary for dramatic effect (Maria Headley turning Beowulf’s initial “Hwæt!” into “Bro!”), ancient tales recast in wholly modern language (Christopher Logue’s reworking of the Iliad in War Music and All Day Permanent Red), or present-day stories that echo ancient ones (Derek Wolcott transplanting the Trojan War and the voyages of Odysseus into the Caribbean in his Omeros).

Or, in the case of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright by @Thaliarchus, stories set in the far future that reuse and evoke elements and works of the distant past.

If you were reading closely, you will have noticed that all the examples I gave were poems, and that is true of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright as well. In the past I was an avid reader of science fiction, and somewhat later became an avid reader of poetry. I would occasionally come across poems in an SF context—whether standalone efforts or embedded within a short story or novel—but I found them to be unsatisfying at best and cringeworthy at worst.¹

What then are we to make of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, described by its author as a “yuri mecha epic poem,” and claimed to be inspired by “[Space Runaway] Ideon, UC Gundam, the Aeneid, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Simoun, and a good steeping in both classic mecha anime and 1300 years of English verse”?

In my case I’ve read the Iliad (multiple translations), the Odyssey, Beowulf, and parts of the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, as well as lots of poetry in English. I’ve also watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, plus a few episodes of the original Gundam series. With that as background, I found Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to be an interesting, fun, and often compulsively readable attempt to tell a mecha story in verse. (I’ll leave the yuri aspect for later discussion.)

Rather than have me blather on about Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright (serious literary criticism not being my forte), it’s best to experience it for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from “Burning Foldspace,” the first section (or “book”, as the author calls it) of the poem, as our protagonist pilots her mecha (“armour”) in the vanguard of her people’s fleet:

She’d risen to the crest of one great wave
of Fold, the strange and undulating sea
between, beneath, beyond all real space,
the stretched elastic membrane of the true,
and with her armour skimming at the ridge,
her naked eye could see behind outspread
the vanguard squadrons in the trough, a-hunt
for subfold ships or other threats. Beyond,
the god was slicing down the facing slope,
advancing to conform with earlier call.

Many authors have compared outer space to an ocean, and many have imagined an alternative dimension as a way to enable faster-than-light travel. This is one of the best examples I‘ve read of combining those in a single striking image. (Incidentally, the “god” here resembles the EVAs of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the God Warriors of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind: an enormous constructed (?) being of fearsome power and otherworldly aspect.)

Some of the lines in this first book also remind me of the demonic images in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno:

A broad, ungainly silhouette up-rose
atop the facing crest, with fighter cloud
attendant: generator vast, below
a set of edges horned and points grotesque,
the weaving gear for tying Fold to space,
with ship constructed round to bear it forth.

Note how putting the story into (competently-executed) verse elevates it from a conventional telling in prose, and the iambic pentameter (claimed as the most natural meter for English) propels the reader along.

Book I is a bravura tale of a battle between Kin-Bright’s people and an attacking fleet, in which Kin-Bright and her co-combatants are rescued by the appearance out of nowhere of a newfound ally, a nomadic group of spacefarers and their queen, fellow mecha pilot Qwerthart. If you read nothing else, read this part. If you then don’t want to read more, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright is simply not for you.

Book II, “The Gods Depart,” I found less satisfying. This is partially because it turns away from the present to tell the backstory of how Kin-Bright’s people came to flee Tar, their native planet, and thus risks turning into an exposition dump. However, my main complaint is that it reuses a plot element that I thought clunky even in the original, made clunkier here because the author has to do extra work to paper over obvious objections and make it even superficially plausible in context.

Things pick up again in Book III, “A View from Cliffs,” which to my mind makes two key improvements over the tale told in the Iliad. First, it describes urban combat, an inherently more interesting setting than the thin strip of sand over which the Greeks and Trojans fought.

Second, the combat itself is more interesting. The dirty secret of the Iliad is that large stretches of it are relatively monotonous, like a video game with an endless series of near-identical mini-boss fights and an impoverished combat system: one warrior will take a spear in the throat, the next in the groin, and there’s not much more variety than that.²

Unlike Homer, Thaliarchus can and does take advantage of the full panoply of possible mecha weaponry, as in these lines in which Kin-Bright describes piloting her mecha “Caprice of Prickthorn” against an opponent:

Caprice descends, by fate or judgement fine,
direct onto her armour—her usual steed,
the Fane Tormenting—and I with scream
Caprice’s drills unleash: a set of four
flexible arms unrolls; they whip and catch
from different points oblique, and when
they land the drill-bits howl and shriek for falling Tar,
and inwards work. Some muffled shock I hear
on open comms before I mute the link.

Now that’s the way to do it!

Book IV, “Family Resemblance,” sees Kin-Bright’s people reach their original home system and attempt to reestablish themselves on one of its planets. Throughout Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright Thaliarchus includes various extended similes, in homage to their use in other epics. Most of these are based on nature (albeit an alien nature, as the author notes and a careful reader can discern); however, the following, one of my favorites, is from the world of technology:

At once the fleet the proffered course pursued,
and thrusters through the gathered ranks out-flared
 in groups, that each and every ship might keep
to station same when fiery burn was done;
as when a power-field that drinks from star
its myriad panels turns to heaven’s view,
when solar farmer knows the cleaning done—
the line of shifting planes as ripple runs
in half a minute’s span before the eye,
each panel straining cells the light to suck,
the energy from falling rays to wring—
just so, the nation-fleet to void-road turned.

(“Void-road” is a nice touch here, incidentally, echoing the use of “whale-road” for the ocean in Beowulf.)

A major theme of Book IV is the “first contact” between Kin-Bright’s people (not to mention Qwerthart’s) and a people living under a form of representative democracy. This is a favorite topic of mine, so I’ll briefly rant:

If we view things objectively, the heroes of epic poems—Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, and their fellows—were basically glorified thugs running a “force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system” (as the economist Brad deLong has characterized it). The same is true of Kin-Bright, as Thaliarchus notes in their afterword (downloadable from the main CWKB page):

Kin-Bright is not presented as a model: she is a terrible warrior-aristocrat who lords over other insiders and kills outsiders. . . . At root, she is someone who exploits the great mass of the Taru population for her own comfort and in order to kill her enemies.

We look past this, however, as we look past the thuggery of Achilles, Odysseus, et al. As Thaliarchus also notes,

Risks would lie in writing about terrible warrior-aristocrats if other ways offered themselves, but I’m not so sure that they do. A story becomes anti-egalitarian as soon as one starts handing out names.

Readers want their protagonists to have real agency, and such agency is hard to come by if the action is primarily driven by nameless bureaucrats and parliamentarians. So in reading Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright we unconsciously come to view things from the perspective of Kin-Bright and Qwerthart, thugs though they may be, and when they feel disrespected and dishonored by the treatment they receive at the hands of this new people’s government, we can’t help but share a bit of their contempt ourselves.

Of course, if Kin-Bright’s people were to act on their feelings and in future wage war on this democracy, then if history is any guide it’s quite likely that, though they might achieve some initial victories, they would ultimately be crushed in the same manner as were the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, and the Third Reich. But no one wants to read an epic poem about the military superiority of an advanced democratic society with mass conscription and a robust industrial base.

On to Book V, “Among the Tents.” In this book Kin-Bright and Qwerthart re-enact an episode from Beowulf, albeit with a happier outcome, and a coup begins to be plotted. Since Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright is still being written, Book V isn’t a conclusion but rather setting the stage for events yet to come.

How many events? The Iliad has 24 books and over 15,000 lines, while Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright in its present state is about a fifth the size in both number of books and number of lines. So depending on the author’s ambition and stamina we could be reading about the adventures of Kin-Bright and Qwerthart for some time to come—a happy prospect.

Thus far I’ve discussed Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright as epic poem and as mecha tale. Unfortunately, I think the third aspect of the work, namely yuri, is not as strong as the other two, for two reasons:

First, there hasn’t been a lot of development in the yuri relationships. Kin-Bright’s first companion is encountered only briefly in retelling the story of the fall of Tar, and unless I missed something in my reading I don’t recall her relationship with Qwerthart advancing that much since Book I. To the extent that there’s a romance embedded within the overall plot, it’s a relatively slow burn. Whether and how that changes in the upcoming books is an open question.

Second, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright poses a puzzle: The society in which Kin-Bright lives appears, like those in many series set in the future (e.g., Dune), to be modeled on past European societies of the “dark” and “middle” ages, with future versions of peasants, clans, minor and major nobility, and monarchs. Given that, it’s difficult to imagine Kin-Bright fighting as a warrior and being (previously) married to a woman. It seems more likely that, lesbian or no, she would have been married off to a man on orders of her family’s patriarch, in order to cement some sort of political alliance. One could claim that Kin-Bright is “special,” as (say) Jeanne D’Arc was special, but that simply provokes the question, “what makes her so?”

One could also claim that this particular society is special, and in fact Thaliarchus does just that in the afterword (linked to above), providing an explanation of sorts regarding how Kin-Bright’s people view gender and sexuality. But to be candid I found it to be a bit hand-wavy, and (more important) I don’t recall that explanation being embedded in or emerging from the poem itself—which is really the only text that matters. I know this is a poem and not a treatise, but I would have liked at least a bit more comprehensive explanation rooted in the history and nature of Kin-Bright’s society.³

(To compare Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to The Witch from Mercury: the latter is set in a society that can be interpreted as a plausible evolution of our own, some centuries in the future. Given the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals in today’s developed countries, it’s easy to believe Miorine when she tells Suletta, “that sort of thing is commonplace here.”)

My final judgment: despite the quibbles I expressed above, overall I found Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to be an entertaining read. It’s well worth trying out if you’re a fan of epic poetry curious about how it might be used to tell a tale of the far future, or a mecha fan open to reading a genre story cast in a different form. If you’re a fan of both, you’re definitely in for a treat. On the other hand, the yuri I consider a bonus but not essential to the experience, like sprinkles on ice cream. If I were rating it on a five-star scale I’d rate it as four stars out of five: not perfect by any means, but well worth reading. I look forward to enjoying future installments.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-07 22:31

This is so awesome, thanks for sharing! VOID-ROAD

thaliarchus (@thaliarchus) - 2023-07-22 11:27

This is a really generous and thoughtful review—thank you!

Thoughtful and thought-provoking: I shall have to see if I can work up some kind of fuller exploration of some of these thoughts. But if I do, it won’t be like a defence or a rebuttal, only a further line of conversation!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-22 12:21

You’re quite welcome. I really liked the poem, so I tried to put some thought into the review.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

While out walking this morning, I decided to stop by and visit an old abandoned cemetery in the midst of my neighborhood. Like much of suburbia, the neighborhood I live in was formerly a farm, and like many farms it had a family cemetery, now gone to ruin. It was apparently vandalized sometime before or during the farm’s redevelopment in the 1950s, according to a note I found online, and I presume that all the bodies were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere. The cemetery has now been cleaned up somewhat, and boasts benches installed by local Boy Scouts.

The tomb pictured is that of Caleb T. Dorsey, one of several Calebs in the Dorsey family, once relatively prominent in the county. (Among other things, they gave their name to Dorsey’s Search Village of the Columbia new town development.) Most of the lettering on the tomb is eroded, including the dates of birth and death, but based on an online source this is probably the Caleb T. Dorsey who died in 1879 at the relatively young age of 41.

The title of this post plays off of the title of several Renaissance paintings and later works of art: Et in Arcadia Ego, or “even in Arcadia, there am I.” In other words, death and the dead can be found even in the midst of bucolic nature—or, in this case, American suburbia.

In an incredible coincidence, after deciding on the title I found out that the name of this particular farm was, in fact, “Arcadia.” Why didn’t the developer use that as the name of the newly-built neighborhood? Perhaps because, like most American suburbs, this is a place from which visible death has been banished, and a developer with a literary background did not want the combination of cemetery and name to serve as a reminder of how it could one day slip back in.

Cohost is a great example of “adding by subtracting”: enhancing the social media experience by stripping out features that are supposedly essential to social media.

• No algorithm. This reduces the serendipity of finding some interesting things published by random people, in order to make room for the serendipity of finding interesting things published or shared by the people one follows. It also limits virality—and virality is almost always bad (as in biology).
• No view counts, public or otherwise. This reduces the rewards of “posting for clout.” It also helps reduce the likelihood of a post being viewed based primarily on the number of other people who’ve already viewed it—the “famous for being famous” phenomenon that drives quasi-power-law distributions of user attention.
• No public “follower” counts. This discourages invidious comparisons of one’s self to other people and (again) reduces the rewards of posting for clout.
• No public “following” lists. This reduces a person’s vulnerability to being criticized or attacked based their following the “wrong people” (for anyone’s definition of “wrong people”).
• No public “followers” list. This also reduces a person’s vulnerability to being criticized or attacked based on their following a particular person.
• No full-text search. This reduces the vulnerability to attacks based on brute-force searches for controversial terms or topics.
• No notification on “unfollows.” This means that a person can follow someone on a whim and then stop doing so without feeling guilty.
• No built-in “direct message” function. This removes a potential channel for harassment, while still allowing a person to advertise ways for others to contact them using a mechanism of the person’s choice.

Now, this all has to do with trying to reduce certain unwanted phenomena, not eliminate them entirely. For example, half a minute’s thought supplies an easy way to bypass the lack of full-text search on Cohost itself, and someone with a “security mindset” could figure out ways to get other information not directly exposed in the Cohost UI.

But the fact that Cohost does not provide these affordances means that someone trying to find out things not found in the Cohost UI is in a sense violating norms around what it’s like to be a good Cohost user. For those inclined to respect norms, this encourages doing so. For those inclined to violate norms (or at least test their limits), this reduces the overall “attack surface” of Cohost and Cohost users.

Allowing sharing of posts and commenting on posts are interesting corner cases where there are trade-offs. Allowing sharing permits one form of virality where posts can be shared and reshared ad infinitum, which can clog timelines and (from a security point of view) allow an attacker to reconstruct parts of the Cohost social graph. But on the flip side it encourages the organic growth of one’s audience based on other people’s genuine interest in what one has to say.

Similarly, allowing comments on a post provides a channel for harassment and more benign forms of abuse (like wasting the time of the original poster and other commenters). On the other hand, it allows for direct personal feedback, among the most gratifying things for a writer (even when the feedback is not totally positive).

Overall I think Cohost @staff have struck a nice balance in terms of the features they’ve implemented. It’s one of the reasons why pretty much all of my writing is done on Cohost nowadays.

PS. I have deliberately omitted my thoughts on other features like muting, blocking, reporting, content warnings, etc., because I don’t use them and have no experience with them. Others can chime in if they’d like.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I’ve previously said my piece that people who want to write, at least in an original manner, should just try doing that instead of trying to get a large language model to do it for them. My opinion applies even more strongly to the idea of prompting LLMs to write poetry, whether that be parlor tricks like “write my VC pitch in rhyming couplets” or more serious attempts to create poems that one might confuse with poetical works of past or present.

Like a dog trained to walk on its hind legs, these attempts may entertain for a moment but offer no lasting pleasure. And as with making a dog play the biped, they’re an insult to the true nature of the entity: LLMs are best at producing an average of human creativity and commentary directed along on a dimension or dimensions of choice. However, the best poetry is singular, not collective, the product of particular moments of a particular life.

But recommending poetry and poets—that’s a different task, one where a smoothed-out average of critical consensus is exactly what one might want. That’s the task I set out for ChatGPT in its GPT-4 mode.

My question was relatively simple; note that in the interest of brevity I’ve here combined two prompts into one, and omitted the response to the first prompt:

Here is a list of my favorite poets, in alphabetical order: Frank Bidart, Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. Please provide a summary of the types of poetry that I would probably like.

The ChatGPT response was as follows:

Based on your preference for poets such as [repeats list], it is apparent that you have an affinity for poetry that encompasses the following characteristics:

Emotional Depth and Intimacy: You seem to appreciate poetry that delves deeply into emotions and presents an intimate, personal voice. This can include confessional poetry and poems that explore psychological states.

Innovative Form and Structure: Your interest in poets like Frank Bidart and Walt Whitman suggests that you value innovation in poetic form, including free verse and experimental structures.

Intellectual and Philosophical Themes: With poets like Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson on your list, it’s evident that you enjoy poems that engage with philosophical questions, explore the nature of reality, and are intellectually stimulating.

Rich Imagery and Language: Poets like Whitman and Stevens are known for their evocative imagery and lush language. It seems you appreciate the poetic craft, where words are meticulously chosen to create vivid mental pictures.

Cultural and Mythological Allusions: Your preference for Louise Glück indicates an appreciation for poems that incorporate classical references and mythology to address contemporary themes.

Social and Political Engagement: With Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser among your favorites, it appears that poetry with social and political themes, especially those related to justice, feminism, and social change, resonate with you.

Exploration of Identity and Human Relationships: Many of the poets on your list explore complexities of identity, gender, and human relationships. It seems you appreciate poetry that delves into these aspects of human experience, including themes of loss and desire.

Historical and Documentary Elements: Your inclusion of Muriel Rukeyser suggests an interest in poetry that incorporates historical events and documents, engaging with history through a poetic lens.

Adaptation of Traditional Stories: Anne Sexton’s use of fairy tales indicates that you might enjoy poetry that reinvents or reimagines traditional stories in new and intriguing ways.

In summary, you likely appreciate poetry that is emotionally resonant, intellectually stimulating, innovative in form, rich in imagery, and engages with social, cultural, and historical themes. It seems that both the aesthetic qualities of the language and the depth of the themes are important to you.

This summary is somewhat generic, but the particular items called out are pretty spot-on: a smoothed-out critical average, but a relatively accurate one.

As a follow-on, my next prompt was to ask for a list of five other contemporary poets whose work I might like. Here’s what ChatGPT came back with:

Based on the types of poetry you appreciate, which include emotional depth, innovative forms, intellectual themes, rich imagery, social engagement, cultural allusions, and exploration of identity, here are five contemporary poets whose work you might enjoy:

Ocean Vuong: Why You Might Like Him: Ocean Vuong’s work often involves emotional depth and intimacy. His language is lush and he explores themes of identity, particularly regarding his Vietnamese-American background. His debut collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” deals with family, the legacy of war, and finding one’s place in the world.

Natalie Diaz: Why You Might Like Her: Natalie Diaz’s poetry is known for its vivid imagery and exploration of cultural identity, particularly her Mojave American and Latinx heritage. Her collection “Postcolonial Love Poem” addresses themes of love, colonialism, and environmental injustice.

Ilya Kaminsky: Why You Might Like Him: Ilya Kaminsky is a Ukrainian-American poet whose work often deals with issues of displacement, social justice, and the human capacity for resilience. His poetry collection “Deaf Republic” is noted for its narrative innovation and poignant social commentary.

Tracy K. Smith: Why You Might Like Her: Tracy K. Smith’s poetry often combines intellectual depth with emotional resonance. Her collection “Life on Mars” tackles themes ranging from science fiction and the universe to human relationships and loss, showcasing a unique blend of the cosmic and the intimate.

Danez Smith: Why You Might Like Them: Danez Smith’s work often engages with social issues such as race, gender, and sexuality. Their poems are both raw and beautifully crafted, offering innovative forms and a powerful voice. Their collection “Don’t Call Us Dead” is a remarkable exploration of what it means to be Black, queer, and HIV-positive in America.

These poets share some thematic and stylistic elements with the poets on your list, and their work encompasses a range of contemporary perspectives.

Now, this being GPT-4, I had to account for the possibility that some of the works—or even some of the poets—were made up. So I looked them all up on the Poetry Foundation website and checked out the various poems included for each of them. Here’s how I would score the recommendations, on a 1-5 star basis, where 5 stars is reserved for a poem that can pass the Emily Dickinson test:

• Ocean Vuong. 3 stars. Overall his work is solid, and he has some great lines, but no individual poems really stood out to me.

• Natalie Diaz. 4 stars. As Adrienne Rich did in a lot of her late poems, Diaz has a tendency to let politics overwhelm the personal, so that one hears not the voice of the poet but the assumed Voice of a People (or in Rich’s case, a movement). But the poems about her brother—“My Brother at 3 A.M.,” “My Brother My Wound,” and “No More Cake Here”—are outstanding.

• Ilya Kaminsky. 3 stars. I admire his ambition in Deaf Republic, but the poems included from it just don’t do it for me. I prefer the personal poems, particularly “Author’s Prayer” and “I Ask That I Do Not Die.”

• Tracy K. Smith. 4 stars. I especially like the SF-tinged poems from Life on Mars. Highlights: “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” which features a guest appearance by Charles Heston, and “Declaration,” which excerpts the Declaration of Independence to devastating effect.

• Danez Smith. 5 stars, because “acknowledgments” aced the test. Other highlights: “alternate names for black boys,” “broke n rice” (a brilliant use of a technique I hadn’t seen before), and “dogs!” (the next time they do an anthology of poetry about dogs, this deserves to be in it).

Overall this was a pretty good exercise, and I might try this exercise again with another list of poets I like. I‘ll definitely be buying a couple books of poetry off of this exercise—print, of course, the only way poetry should be read.

P.S. I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription, because I didn’t see it providing enough value to be worth the money.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

A little while ago I wrote about the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers (now streaming on Netflix), and speculated on its impact on China. It turns out that its more immediate impact was on Taiwan itself, as the ruling Democratic Progressive Party finds itself embroiled in an ongoing scandal that echoes a #MeToo subplot in Wave Makers. (HT to James Turnbull for alerting me to this.)

When the show was originally released, President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP tweeted, “I hope you all enjoy this peek into the workings of Taiwan’s democracy.” I guess she’s not enjoying it as much right now.

From The Information via Platformer:

Two years ago, Dmitry Shapiro and Sean Thielen were so optimistic about the booming creator economy that they pivoted their startup to a new product: a simple tool called Koji that lets influencers more easily link to their online tip jars, merch and other services in their social media bios. Sure, there were already dozens of other startups offering a similar type of product [emphasis added], but that didn’t stop the two men from raising $20 million for their company, GoMeta.

Now Shapiro and Thielen want out of the creator economy.

The link-in-bio business—Koji took a cut of transactions that occur through its product—never amounted to the big market the co-founders once thought it could be. That was in part because the target customers for Koji—the masses of creators with smaller followings than superstars like MrBeast and Emma Chamberlain—just aren’t making enough money for the startup and others like it to thrive, especially amid a downturn in advertising.

So, to recap, they raised (and probably burned through) $20M to find out what I could have told them after spending only $120: almost nobody is making any money in the “creator economy.” (And if no one is making any money, how can it possibly be an “economy”?)

But hope (or, I should say, absurd self-confidence) springs eternal:

Shapiro and Thielen have begun actively looking for a suitor to acquire Koji so they can focus on a new AI product they’re developing called YouAI.

(This started out as a comment on a post by @harphony, but it got to be so long I thought it was better to make it a standalone post.)

How to create something substantial—a work of art, a game, a novel, a nonfiction book—if you’re easily bored or find yourself struggling to complete even small projects? My personal experience is probably not that relevant to anyone else, but . . . I have written two books thus far, both completely self-formatted and self-published. I don’t have (diagnosed) ADHD, but I do get easily distracted at times and find it hard to make grand plans, much less carry them through to completion. I think the secret for me, especially for my second book, was that I (unconsciously) divided the work into multiple phases, with different tasks and motivations for each phase.

In the first phase I was just writing relatively small posts, heavy on personal opinion and light on research, with each post relatively complete in and of itself. For my second book this took the form of farting about on Tumblr, with no thought of doing anything more than that. Each post didn’t take that long to write and didn’t take much mental energy to complete, but I got a small feeling of satisfaction at having finished each one. That motivated me to keep writing more of them.

After doing that for a while, I could no longer muster the energy to keep writing more posts. But . . . I had accumulated enough material that I thought to myself, “it might be fun to make a book out of this.” So I started looking for common themes or arguments that I thought would provide an overall framework for the book, and tried to figure out what I needed to know to support those themes/arguments. The interest and enjoyment for me then became that of puzzle-solving: “why did thing X happen, and how did it influence thing Y?” I spent a lot of time doing reading and research, and much less time writing.

At the same time I started the third phase, turning the material into an actual formatted book suitable for either electronic or print distribution. I did this as a mental break from doing research and further writing: now my interest was in learning how the publishing system worked that I had decided to use, and my satisfaction came in the form of seeing my writing nicely formatted and typeset.

Eventually I was close enough to having something book-like that I was motivated to finish the job. In reading over draft chapters, I thought of additional things I wanted to write about. When I got bored of writing, I occupied myself in some tasks I didn’t need to think a lot about, most notably creating a comprehensive index of the appearances of the characters in the manga I was writing about. (After doing said index, I thought, “gee, I now have everything I need to do an analysis of the social graph of the characters,” so I extended my existing R knowledge to do that as well.) I also had fun learning new things about publishing: how to obtain an ISBN, how to register a copyrighted work, and how to license artwork and create a book cover.

I have a tendency to perfectionism, and that carried me through the remaining work of getting the book ready for publication: checking all the references and creating a complete bibliography, proofreading the text and tweaking the formatting, getting the book cover to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to have people look at it, and validating the PDF and EPUB3 output. Again, I switched frequently between tasks as I got bored with doing one of them.

The final factor was that from the very beginning I worked hard to convince myself that I would never see any external rewards or validation from publishing the book: that no one would buy it, no one would even download it for free, and even if someone happened to read it I’d never get any feedback from them about it, good or bad. That freed me mentally to focus solely on the enjoyment that I myself would get from creating the book, and not persist in doing something I disliked in the (vain) hope of someone compensating me for it, monetarily or otherwise.

All in all, it worked out pretty well: I have something I can put on my bookshelf next to books by other people and think “that’s not too shabby, all things considered.” I sold a few copies, had a few more downloaded, and had one person tell me that they enjoyed reading it. I even had a pleasant surprise, when by a fortuitous circumstance a person came forward to create a Japanese translation—which in turn led to more fun experiences, like learning how to typeset Japanese. (It also improved the English version by having another person find typos.)

So, these are my personal conclusions—which, again, may not be applicable to anyone else—on how to create a substantial work:

• Start small, working in an opportunistic manner on things that interest you, can be done relatively quickly, and are self-contained enough to give you a sense of satisfaction that they exist once completed.
• If you get to a point where at least some of the small things look like they could go together to create something larger and more significant, think about how they might fit together, and what additional pieces might be needed to make the whole work.
• Stave off boredom by switching between different types of project work and trying things you haven’t done before but would like to learn.
• Set your expectations for the work’s reception to be extremely low. Don’t push yourself to work on it if you yourself are not getting any enjoyment from the process.

This is very much not advice for someone who wants to make a full-time living from their work—but in reality very few people will make anything at all from their personal writing, art, or related activities. My advice is rather for those like myself who will never see any significant external rewards from the things they create, but feel compelled to create them nonetheless.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

The Australian Broadcasting Company recently ran a TV episode (AD-enabled) and accompanying news article featuring Mick Curran and Jamie Teh, creators of the NVDA screen-reading software for blind and visually-impaired users of Microsoft Windows.

The “Australian Story” episode tells the human side of the story, but as someone involved with Mick and Jamie at a key point in their journey, I thought it might be of interest to at least a few people to know more of what’s behind it.

Briefly, ever since personal computers became popular there’s been a problem of how to make them accessible to people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired—a problem that became especially acute with the advent of window-based UIs like that of the Apple Macintosh or Microsoft Windows. The primary solution proposed was screen-reading software, which did exactly what its name implies: taking text displayed on the computer screen and reading it to the user in a synthesized voice.

Leaving aside the technical issues with screen-reading software products (which in the early days were essentially hacks that hooked into video driver modules), they had a fatal flaw from an economic perspective: more than most software, they took a lot of work to write and (especially) keep up to date with OS and application changes. However, that development cost had to be amortized over a relatively small target user base.

The result was that commercial screen-reading software was (and is) very expensive—so expensive that its cost is typically subsidized in one way or another. This leaves out the vast majority of people in the world who need such software but who can’t afford it themselves, and don’t have a government or an insurer that will help with the cost.

As we entered the twentieth century, multiple trends impacted the small and somewhat isolated industry creating assistive technologies, including most notably the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web and the increasing population of developers creating free and open source software. After working for a few years as a volunteer in the Mozilla project, in 2005 I went to work for the “new” Mozilla Foundation, after the bulk of the organization was split off to form the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, leaving behind a non-profit rump.¹ One of the first things brought to my attention (by Aaron Leventhal of the accessibility team at IBM) was the opportunity for the Mozilla Foundation to make a significant contribution to the future of accessibility technology, with a focus on open standards and free and open source software.

As a result of conversations with and suggestions from Aaron, the Mozilla Foundation started making some small grants in the area of web accessibility, and went public with that support in March 2006 at one of the premier conferences on assistive technology. That was a pretty successful debut for our efforts, and led to me turning my informal thoughts on what the Mozilla Foundation could do for web accessibility into a more coherent proposal.

Throughout this period we were making some relatively small grants to students and others working on various aspects of web and open source accessibility; for more details, see my reports on Mozilla Foundation grant activities for 2006 and 2007. We also had another successful appearance at the 2007 CSUN accessibility conference.

In the summer of 2007 we made an initial grant to NV Access, the newly formed nonprofit organization created to further develop the NVDA screen reader. We followed up in early 2008 with a larger grant to enable Jamie Teh to work full-time on NVDA.

I can’t remember exactly, but I think that may have been the last major accessibility work funded by the Mozilla Foundation itself. During this time the Mozilla Corporation was putting together its own accessibility team, many of whom were originally funded by the Foundation, and began funding other accessibility work as well. At the end of 2008 Microsoft also made a large grant to NV Access to allow Mick Curran to join Jamie in working on NVDA full-time.

As the last post notes, the Mozilla Foundation can thus best be thought of as providing “seed funding” for NVDA and related accessibility development. It was an investment that paid off handsomely: here we are fifteen years later and NVDA is the number two screenreader in the world, supports a host of different languages, and is used by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom would never have been able to access the Internet or use PC applications had NVDA not been created.²

So, if you have the time, please consider watching the show about Mick’s and Jamie’s lives and work. If you don’t have the time, but do have the money, please consider donating to NV Access. (Note that the suggested amounts are in Australian dollars, which are currently worth about two-thirds of US dollars.) And if you have neither but are still on Twitter, please consider sharing some of their tweets. Thanks!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Before I found Cohost, I posted a fair amount to a pseudonymous 2-follower account on Twitter; a lot of my Cohost posts started out there. Here’s another one of these: some brief thoughts on the final scene in Alice Wu’s film The Half of It, thoughts originally inspired by a thread by lourdeslasala on symbolism in the film.

My bringing it up now was due to seeing a post by @MayaGay mentioning The Half of It in passing, along with Wu’s earlier film Saving Face, which I hadn’t seen. I quickly remedied that lack (Saving Face is streaming on Prime Video), and then watched The Half of It again on Netflix, because I dearly love the film and wanted to write about it again.

NOTE: The following contains spoilers for The Half of It, and assumes that you know the overall plot and who the main characters are.

In the penultimate scene of The Half of It (above), Ellie and Aster face each other, separated by a double yellow line. As lourdeslasala notes, it symbolizes the boundaries between the two, with Ellie staying in her “comfort zone,” but then breaking out of it to cross the line, talk to Aster, and then kiss her.

The final scene is between Ellie and Paul. It starts with another shot with a similar perspective, but a key difference. In the previous scene Ellie and Aster were situated similarly to each other, in positions of relative equality within the shot itself, and also in a wider context: Ellie going off to Grinnell College, and Aster looking to leave Squahamish and go to art school.

But in this shot there’s no such equality. On one side is the train that will take Ellie away to Grinnell. On the other is the town in which Paul will remain, probably for the rest of his life, working in and then presumably inheriting the family business.

We next see Paul and Ellie’s parting conversation. Recall the earlier discussion between Paul and Ellie regarding “the look”: when you know someone wants to be kissed, and you should go ahead and kiss them—as indeed Ellie did to Aster in the previous scene. That was the third kiss in the film, and the only true one, the previous two having been given under false pretenses: Aster looking at Paul thinking that he was the person behind the letters Ellie wrote for him, and Ellie apparently looking at Paul but (it’s implied) looking past him at Aster.

But this scene is different. Here the look is not of two people who want to kiss, but two people who want to—need to—hug and be hugged. So why don’t they?

Because something is blocking them. That obstacle is literally a cooler, containing food prepared for Ellie’s journey. But as a metaphor it’s all the things that might act as barriers to Paul and Ellie’s friendship: interests and intellect, gender and sexuality, or even (as Alice Wu notes in an NPR interview) the jealousy of their partners, who might resent the level of intimacy Ellie and Paul have.

Or, at least, the intimacy they had. Here neither Ellie nor Paul can find the words they seem to want to say, and are blocked from the hugs they might want to give and receive. So, instead, Ellie resorts to sending Paul a text containing (only) emojis. It’s a harbinger of how their relationship may be in future: although they may meet again, they may never again experience the closeness they have right now, their future interactions mediated by distance and differing experiences, as it’s here mediated by technology.

But even in the face of all those barriers to their friendship, Paul can’t help chasing Ellie’s train, echoing a scene from the film Ek Villain that they had watched earlier—a scene that Ellie had scoffed at. Ellie again scoffs at the gesture, but she’s fighting back tears as she does. It’s a platonic parallel to the romantic moment between Ellie and Aster, and to my mind a perfect ending to a beautiful film. Or, as Ellie’s father would say as he pointed to his favorite movie scenes, “Best part.”

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:50

Wonderful analysis!!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-06-09 18:54

Thanks! I really liked Saving Face, but The Half of It holds a special place in my heart. I wish for more Alice Wu films…

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:59

So do I, I think she is such a talent! Here is hoping she is given many more chances to show how much she can do.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed that I’m a major fan of the UK house producer DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. This is a charming video (by PAHC) set to “Charmed Life,” the climactic track of DJ Sabrina’s 3-hour-plus magnum opus, Charmed. Charming all around.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost. Given the ongoing discourse about China and Taiwan, I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site. I’m a total newbie when it comes to China, Taiwan, and international relations, so consider this as published for amusement purposes only.]

A while back I commented on what I thought was a deliberate Taiwan government strategy to build “soft power” by funding films and TV series highlighting LGBTQ stories. Now comes an even more explicitly political TV series out of Taiwan, one that was publicly endorsed by Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen.

Wave Makers is an eight-episode Netflix series focusing on the press and PR team (the “wave makers” of the title) working on a (fictional) Taiwanese presidential campaign. In a way it’s a Taiwanese equivalent of US shows like The West Wing and House of Cards, and like those shows is slanted and unrealistic in various ways both large and small. However, unlike the US, Taiwan faces an existential threat, and that makes Wave Makers more interesting—and more vital—than any US political drama might be. What follows is my (mostly) spoiler-free analysis of the show and its significance.

The players and the game

The story of Wave Makers features multiple generations and diversity in genders. The central character is Weng Wen-fang, a lesbian whose previous run for office ended in failure, and who now serves as the chief spokesperson for the (fictional) Justice Party. Her boss is Chen Chia-ching, whose long hours running the campaign threaten to estrange him from his wife and child.

Weng and Chen work in support of the presidential run of Lin Yueh-chen, who tries to balance her personal convictions with political expediency. Opposing her is the incumbent president of the (also fictional) Democracy and Peace Party, along with her newly-selected running mate Chao Chang-tse, who enlists his wife and daughter to help him present the image of a perfect political family.

Finally, the rising generation is represented by Chang Ya-ching, an aide to Weng whose past and present actions put her at the center of the evolving plot; Chao Jung-chih, the daughter of Chao Chang-tse, who comes to doubt her father’s integrity; and Tsai Yi-an and his fellow Justice Party campaign workers, who struggle to justify to their university friends their turn from student protests to conventional politics.

The series provides an idealized but informative look at what goes into running a political campaign in an always-online society, where even minor events (like a candidate being bitten by a supporter’s dog) require an “all hands on deck” effort by the PR team to keep the narrative from going in a unwanted direction. The Justice Party campaign team tries to find issues that will resonate with voters, criticizing the incumbent administration’s positions on the environment and playing up Lin’s support of new immigrants to Taiwan. However, as often happens in both fiction and real life, other issues get shoved off the stage as sex scandals both imagined and real seize the attention of the media and the general public.

All of that falls away, though, in the second half of the last episode: the campaign heads into its final days in a flurry of rallies and candidate appearances, election day arrives, and the various characters pause to cast their “sacred votes”—an act more significant in a society that only two generations ago was a one-party state under martial law—all ending in the counting of votes, the euphoria of the winners, and the despondency of the losers.

The existential question

For all of the political topics dramatized by Wave Makers, there is one that is not: the relationship between Taiwan and China. Creating a show directly addressing “cross-strait relations” from a Taiwanese perspective would no doubt put the kibosh on any hopes that Netflix might have of being allowed access to China, as well as risk derailing the careers of anyone in the cast or crew whose livelihoods are dependent on access to the Chinese market.

But this omission can also be viewed as a strength. In a review of the series, Chieh-Ting Yeh points out that “[the show] may actually be what the Taiwanese people prefer their politics to look like. . . . Rival politicians can debate immigration and environmental policies, fend off student protesters, and even dig up each others’ scandals without worrying about what anyone in Beijing or Washington says.” From this point of view, Wave Makers is a portrait of what Taiwan could be if it were not perpetually “amid tensions.”

But for those Chinese who are well-connected (in an Internet sense), and thus able to view the series via clandestine means, it can also be thought of as a vision of what China could be if it too were not “amid tensions” driven by the CCP and its leader. Based on reactions that have dribbled out, there are at least a few people in China who would prefer participating in a political system that offers real alternatives for the development of the country and its people, instead of spending their days being drilled on the fine points of “Xi Jinping Thought.”

In his essay “Politics,” Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted the early US politician Fisher Ames as saying that “a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”¹ Wave Makers is a portrait of life on that raft. Political parties may suffer reverses and losses, but (as a character says in one of the final scenes), “There’s always next time.”

On the other hand, in the last years of the twentieth century the Soviet Union struck on a rock and went to the bottom. The rulers of China are haunted by this event, which they ascribe to the growth of factions within the ruling party and the influence of “foreign” ideology. In a document produced for the indoctrination of party cadres, one can almost smell the fear that the ideological influence of “hostile forces” will lead to a “color revolution,” and that China (or, more correctly, the rule of the CCP) “will inevitably disintegrate like a sheet of loose sand.”

To preserve itself, the CCP must suppress not only actual opposition, but any ideas that might inspire such opposition: “Once the defensive line in thought has been breached it is difficult for other defensive lines to hold. In the realm of ideological conflict, we have no way to compromise and no place to retreat to. We must obtain total victory.” Thus the fear of “hot topics on the Internet” and the perceived need for the CCP to “increase the vigor of public opinion control.”

Thus also the importance to the CCP of “reunification”: beyond any historical justifications, expansionist ambitions, or desires to avenge the “century of humiliation,” the very existence of a democratic Taiwan is an existential threat to China’s rulers. Thus the increasing likelihood that China will move against Taiwan—if not through an actual invasion then through a “death by a thousand cuts” in which China incrementally destroys Taiwanese independence by means just short of outright war.

Thus, finally, two possible futures: one in which the ideas represented in Wave Makers inspire “counter-elites” within or without the CCP to exploit new waves of popular discontent and break the party’s monopoly on power, and one in which Wave Makers, like the films of pre-1997 Hong Kong, serves as a cinematic reminder of a democratic society that was, but is no more.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-06-10 12:17

The comments from people in mainland China about that show are very interesting.

Bad governments rely on a constant battle against accountability and epistemology, increasingly resulting in brittleness and information closure that cripples their ability to respond to new situations, leading to self defeat. My impression is that the CCP has a higher degree of ability to respond to new situations with adjustments than, say, the USSR and certainly current Russia, but its difficult to ascertain exactly where they land since their system involves some technocratic and some semidemocratic components. Its easy to see that modern Russia is too brittle and irrational, guaranteeing failure, but one wonders how long governments with less extreme structural flaws can rule.

https://warontherocks.com/2023/05/xi-jinpings-worst-nightmare-a-potemkin-peoples-liberation-army/ Related, good article

maddie (@ninecoffees) - 2024-02-27 13:39

Thank you so much for writing this

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

For some reason (which I now can’t remember) the past two or three weeks I’ve been obsessively (re)listening to the Smiths, in particular to The Smiths: Best playlist on Spotify. It’s an “artist playlist,” which apparently means it was endorsed by the Smiths themselves, or at least some of them, and is not to be confused with the Best: I and Best: II compilation albums. (There’s an almost endless string of repackagings of Smiths songs.)

It struck me that the Smiths recorded a lot of great songs, and a few days ago I started drafting a post listing my favorites. Then today came the sad news (tweeted out by Johnny Marr) of the death of Andy Rourke, bassist for the Smiths, and I felt an increased urgency to post this.

The Smiths recorded over a hundred songs (see Complete, which has 106 songs and is apparently still not actually complete), but I’ll confine myself to the 40 songs on the Best playlist. (As a comparison, the Best: I and Best: II albums had 28 songs in total.)

I divide these roughly into three categories:

• Great songs, period: the cream of the crop
• Great Smiths songs: excellent songs, but more for Smiths fans
• Smiths songs: yeah, the Smiths recorded these

The following are listed in the order they appear on the Best playlist, which in my opinion is not that well sequenced.

Great songs, period

• “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”
• “How Soon Is Now”
• “Bigmouth Strikes Again”
• “Panic”
• “Cemetry Gates”
• “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”
• “Ask”
• “The Queen is Dead”

Great Smiths songs

• “Hand in Glove”
• “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want”
• “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”
• “This Charming Man”
• “Back to the Old House”
• “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”
• “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”
• “What Difference Does It Make?”
• “Still Ill”
• “Girlfriend in a Coma”
• “William, It Was Really Nothing”
• “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”
• “Half a Person”
• “Unloveable”
• “Girl Afraid”
• “Reel Around the Fountain”
• “The Headmaster Ritual”
• “I Want the One I Can’t Have”
• “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”
• “Barbarism Begins at Home”

Smiths songs

• “I Know It’s Over”
• “Well I Wonder”
• “Asleep”
• “Pretty Girls Make Graves”
• “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”
• “I Don’t Owe You Anything”
• “You’ve Got Everything Now”
• “I Won’t Share You”
• “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”
• “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours”
• “Never Had No One Ever”
• “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish”

Other great Smiths songs

I would add the following songs to the middle section of “great Smiths songs.” In my opinion these should have been included on the “Best” playlist in place of various inferior songs from Strangeways, Here We Come (the weakest Smiths album, in my opinion):

• “Sheila Take a Bow”
• “Shoplifters of the World Unite”
• “Rubber Ring”

The essential Smiths experience

If you are new to the Smiths and would prefer a more “organic” introduction, I suggest that you skip any “best of” compilations and instead listen to the following two albums:

• The Queen Is Dead. The Smiths’ best studio album, recorded at the height of their powers.
• Louder Than Bombs. The Smiths’ best compilation album, it’s very well sequenced, especially toward the end. (“Asleep” is merely an OK song on its own, but it’s a great closer.)

If you don’t like the Smiths after that then they’re just not for you.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

A few weeks ago I watched the 2020 film Minari, about the struggles of a Korean-American family that moves to rural Arkansas in the hope (at least, the father’s hope) of starting a farm to grow vegetables for a growing US population of Korean immigrants. The area where I live is home to a large Korean-American population so I had an inherent interest in the film, and it’s also been very well-reviewed.

In short, I saw the film, I really liked the film, and (as I often do) I wanted to read more about the film. The most interesting tidbit I found was that Lee Isaac Chung, the writer and director of Minari, was inspired to make the film by reading the 1918 novel My Ántonia (accent on the first syllable, please) by Willa Cather, a novel with a setting and plot that reminded Chung of his own childhood growing up on a farm in Arkansas.

I’d always meant to read something by Willa Cather, so I decided to remedy my lack by downloading a (public domain) copy of My Ántonia. I’m out of practice reading fiction, but I couldn’t stop reading the novel once I started it; I highly recommend it as well. And, as I also often do, I have thoughts (with minor spoilers for the film and novel) . . . .

The othered

Let’s start with the most notable controversy about Minari, the (universally ridiculed) decision to exclude it from consideration as a Golden Globes “Best Picture” nominee on the grounds that most of the dialogue was in Korean. In an interesting article on the film, subtitled “Why Do We Still See [Minari] As Foreign,” Alyssa Songsiridej claims that we don’t see My Ántonia as an “immigrant story” because “[Cather] writes about European immigrants, who are not othered in American culture.”

With all due respect, I think this is a misplaced criticism. First, if My Ántonia were in fact made into a film (as Chung initially thought of doing), a faithful adaptation would have much of the dialogue be in Czech—the titular Ántonia having migrated as a child from Bohemia, in the modern-day Czech Republic. Since it’s a novel, not a film, we miss the immediate experience of actually hearing the Czech language—or, for that matter, the Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian (or is it Ukrainian?) spoken by other characters in the novel.

Second, European immigrants were very much “othered” by the dominant American culture at the time; this is reflected in the novel, as Songsiridej acknowledges: “My Ántonia is actually considerably more concerned with xenophobia and culture clash than Minari.” “Othering” new immigrants is a consistent theme in American history from before the Revolution. To give but one example, Benjamin Franklin complained about German immigrants, asking “why should the Palatine boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements” and speculating that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”¹

As Songsiridej also notes, in Cather’s novel “[Ántonia] and the other foreign-born ‘hired girls’ are viewed as exotic [and] potentially dangerous.” (To be more specific, the danger is presented as specifically sexual—that the “exotic” immigrant girls would seduce native-born men.) Remember, we’re talking about Swedes and Norwegians here, people who (along with Germans) present-day white supremacists would hail as being of true “Aryan” stock. But, again, Franklin in particular did not include Swedes or Germans—or, for that matter, the French, Spaniards, Italians, or Russians—among “the Number of purely white People in the World.”

Men, women, and children

Another interesting point of comparison between Minari and My Ántonia is in gender roles. Minari is based on Lee Isaac Chung’s memories of his own family, with the character of the young boy David in the film modeled on himself, and David’s father Jacob based on Chung’s father.² In the film, Jacob is portrayed as motivated by a desire to provide for his family and build a better life for them, and Jacob passes this lesson down to David. In contrast David’s sister Anne is relatively undeveloped as a character, as is her relationship with her mother Monica.

In My Ántonia, on the other hand, women are very much at the forefront. The book’s narrator, Jim Burden, a young boy who moves to Nebraska at the age of 9 and meets 12-year-old Ántonia, is clearly a stand-in for Cather.³ Ántonia herself is based on Annie Sadilek, who was three years or so older than Cather, and who immigrated to the US at the same time Cather’s family moved from Virginia to Nebraska. I defy anyone to doubt that Cather was a lesbian after reading My Ántonia: much of the novel reads as a love letter from Jim/Willa to Ántonia/Annie.

The women of My Antonia almost leap from the page in their vitality, in particular Lena Lingard, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who dominates the central section of the book. Some of the women get married, settle down, and have children. Others remain single and independent, making a living in fields as disparate as dressmaking and gold mining.

Politics and patriotism

A third aspect of both Minari and My Ántonia that I find interesting is their political stances—or rather, their apparent lack of them. As noted above, Minari is relatively silent regarding any difficulties caused by discrimination against Korean immigrants; the conflict and drama in the film are instead driven by the difficulty of farming and the growing estrangement between Jacob and Monica. It is similarly silent on the fact that Jacob and Monica would have been prohibited from immigrating to the US less than twenty years before the time of the film, and only briefly alludes to the political situation in South Korea that presumably led them to emigrate.⁴

My Ántonia is set in a time just after the conclusion of the main events of the “Indian Wars” (including the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876), and just before the rise of the populist movement in the Great Plains, which would culminate in the 1896 Presidential campaign of Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan. However, these events go almost totally unremarked in Cather’s novel.

I suspect that this lack of historical and political context is in large part because the primary events of both My Ántonia and Minari are viewed through a child’s eyes, explicitly so in the former and implicitly so in the latter—although My Ántonia extends through the college years of its narrator, and concludes with a final scene of him as an adult. To a child the world consists of their immediate family and environs, and events from afar and from before their birth affect them only if they impact that small world in which they live.

A final aspect of both Minari and My Ántonia is an understated patriotism that runs through both the film and the novel. (The imagery of the American flag in the Minari publicity shot above is not characteristic of the film itself; I suspect it may have been created to help convince audiences that, yes, this is really a movie about Americans.)

That patriotism I would characterize as a “patriotism of the land.” The land of My Ántonia and Minari is the site of past conflict (both between indigenous peoples and between those peoples and the newly-arrived settlers⁵), present beauty (gloriously depicted in the scenes of the film and the descriptions of the novel), and future possibilities.

Ethno-nationalists and white supremacists sneer at the idea of “magic dirt” with the power to convert non-Anglo immigrants into full-fledged Americans after they arrive on US soil. Yet in a way that is exactly what happens in both Minari and My Ántonia: the struggles of families to survive tie them more tightly to the land that they farm and the country of which it is part, a country they see as giving them new opportunities to make a better life for themselves and their children. The novel and the film were created almost a century apart, but in their essence are both very “American” stories, in the best sense of that term.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-05-17 10:43

Its fascinating hearing that remark fron Franklin- i was very aware of various groups like the irish not being considered white, but wasnt aware how narrow the perception of that was a mere 100 years prior. I feel like reactionary bullshit ideas always get more ridiculous and incoherent the further back you go, and their modern versions trotted out by conservatives, fascists, etc are essentially repeatedly cleaned up and rationalized versions of even more insane nonsense from the past, yet paired with posturing about coherent consistent tradition.

Its really cool that the women in Antonia are depicted in such a varied and strong way, for a novel that old. I know feminism was active then, but still.

With the criticism of the Golden Globes, i feel like your counterpoint partially falls flat because theres a difference between “whos othered now” vs “whos othered back then”. The point about medium seems relevant though.

I feel like theres a lot more to that notion about struggles and ties to the land/culture/etc - fundamental psychological and sociological and human things, but not able to articulate those loose notions right now..

Also, Its nice to see you post again!

Lastly, did you happen to read my recent longer posts - one about gnc people and the one about ww2? Would love to hear any thoughts you have on those, including what was the least known part about the former or if a particular mention in the latter struck you.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-05-17 17:30

Thanks for your comment! I always love hearing your thoughts. A couple quick comments in return:

On “othering”, maybe I didn’t express it well, but I guess my point was/is that today we don’t consider the story of My Ántonia to be “foreign” to us, but I’m not sure that would have been the case in 1918. After all, that was a time of very strong anti-immigrant sentiment, directed not only at Asian immigrants but also against those from Eastern Europe. So I was really making the analogy Minari : audience of 2021 :: My Ántonia : audience of 1918 in terms of their respective receptions. (But, really, before commenting further I should go back and see what sort of reception My Ántonia actually had from readers and reviewers in 1918. I may be totally wrong in what I wrote there and here.)

On the GNC post, I thought it was quite interesting, but as a non-GNC person myself I felt uncomfortable commenting on it. But I’ll go back and read both it and the WW2 post again and see if I have anything useful/interesting to add.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-05-17 17:47

Well, the criticism seemed to be about both Minaria and Antonia(and other stories about european immigrants) today, not about each in their release time. Maybe im misunderstanding something about us talking past each other, but perhaps a more relevant phrasing may be “why are stories about asian immigrants still ‘foreign’ while stories about later european immigrants have ceased to be foreign?” The timing analogy is generally useful, but I dont think its a rebuttal to the current-time-focused point in the article about the golden globes.

Im glad the GNC post was quite interesting! I understand feeling uncomfortable commenting on that for that type of reason, although I am curious as to the degree of knowledge/understanding people are at before they read articles like that(and theres nothing wrong or offensive with simply not knowing/understanding of course). When you see a varied series of somewhat infrequent misconceptions and then try to clarify a general set of things to counter that, it can be hard to know what’s actually new information to an average reader, including in various subaudiences of the readership. But if also you dont really have anything to say, thats fine too ofc.~

This to me is the key sentence: “in other words, we don’t simply see a kusoge as a commodity but as an array of humans and their social relations that culminated into this product.” The folks at 65DaysofStatic have said similar things. This to me leads to at least two conclusions.

First, non-mass-appeal art is important to you to the extent that you know the people making it and feel part of a community with them, or at least a kinship with them. I don’t do games, but I do listen to music. I may purchase music by a person X I follow on cohost (or who’s rechosted by people I follow), knowing full well that there may be dozens if not hundred of pieces similar in style and quality available on Bandcamp or wherever. But I don’t know the people who made those, and I do know X and the other people who know X.

Second, we don’t need to de-commodify the entire economy to allow non-mass-appeal art to flourish (bread is still a commodity, as are iPhones), or even the economy of mass-appeal art. But we do need to provide people a way to survive and make a living, at least of sorts, when they’re not making art.

I think of my favorite go-to example here, the people who created American modernist poetry in the early 20th century. They weren’t MFAs or state-sponsored writers, they were bank clerks and insurance executives and physicians and librarians and people who had some money from family or inheritances. But they were also, and more importantly poets, and part of a community of poets, a community whose works ultimately became important to people other than themselves. But their poetry was first and foremost important to them, and if that had not been the case it would not have been important to anyone else.

What then is the role of the critic? I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I think kastelpls has provided a large part of the answer.

Now that I’m spending most of my reading and almost all of my writing time on a site (Cohost, of course) that doesn’t have an algorithmic-driven recommendation system, I tend to forget how omnipresent they are. I’ve been doing some reading up lately on LLM-generated content and social network amplification, and came across this essay on “Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms.” I think it wimps out a bit in its “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” conclusion, but overall it’s one of the more useful explanations I’ve seen regarding how recommendation algorithms work—or don’t work as the case may be. (It also has a good discussion of the sheer randomness in what “goes viral”, and how “shadowbanning” and related practices can inhibit virality.)

Spunney (@Spunney) - 2023-03-22 12:05

I always found it weird when people were talking about the Twitter algorithm in particular as if there isn’t a clearly labeled button at the top of the timeline that disables it. For the longest time I had literally no idea what anyone was talking about when they mentioned the “Twitter algorithm”. I guess what shows up on the trending tab and whatever is algorithm driven but, unless you’re trying to go viral, I don’t see how this effects anyone on a personal level.

But I don’t really know what other social media sites are like, I’ve never used them…

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-23 17:47

Thanks for the comment! My apologies for the delay in acknowledging it.

There have apparently been attempts by Twitter to make the “For You” timeline the default, or to switch back to it every time you came back to Twitter, which pissed off a lot of people. I think now if you set the timeline to “Following” then it will stay that way (at least on the iOS app).

I recently had a Twitter thread go semi-viral (just over 500 retweets), but I don’t know if it was promoted by the algorithm(s) into peoples’ “For you” feeds, or if people found it by searching for the (commonly-used) tags I included. (I don’t subscribe to Twitter Blue, so I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any artificial boosting of the thread.)

If you pay any attention at all to AI-related news, you know that today was the day that OpenAI.com released GPT-4, the newest version of its large language model (LLM), and made it available through the paid version of its ChatGPT web-based chatbot. I had already tried out the free version of ChatGPT (based on the previous GPT-3 LLM) and decided it was worth spending $20 for the paid version (ChatGPT Plus) to find out what all the hype was about.

Here are a few of my hype-free thoughts:

First, a minor comment: I really wish that people demoing LLMs would stop doing things like telling the LLM to make all words in the response start with the same letter, or having it produce the response in rhymed verse—both examples from the GPT-4 developer livestream today. These feel like fancy parlor tricks of minimal relevance for how LLMs might actually be used in real life, like showing off a border collie by having it dance on its hind legs.

Second, the most interesting application of GPT-4 I saw today was the Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer, an app that leverages the new ability of GPT-4 to analyze images and provide a text description of what’s in them. The original Be My Eyes app allowed blind or otherwise visually impaired users to call upon the help of sighted human volunteers: the user would point their smartphone at something and the human volunteer would describe what was shown on camera. The Virtual Volunteer, as its name implies, substitutes GPT-4 for a human.

(Incidentally, this app illustrates an interesting point about how LLM-enabled apps will be tailored to the needs and expectations of users. In the brief demo video of Virtual Volunteer, the audio produced by the app seems very robotic and difficult to understand. This is a feature, not a bug. Experienced users of screen reader software can comprehend computer-generated text-to-speech “spoken” at speeds that would astound the typical sighted person, and in this context having the computer voices sound “natural” is a secondary consideration at best.)

Third, I tried out ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4 for what I would likely use it for, namely helping me write online essays like this one, and gave it a number of example tasks. (I’m skipping including the GPT-4 responses for reasons of length. If there’s real interest I’ll post the entire set of transcripts somewhere.)

In the first task I copied in the entire text of my post “I fought the power law and the power law won” and asked for it to be summarized. The resulting three-paragraph summary was pretty good, hitting all the main points I made. I could definitely see using this feature of GPT-4 as a way to summarize other people’s essays and news stories to see if it’s worth my reading them in full.

In the second task I asked the LLM to explain the meaning of the analogy “AI is to the world of ideas as index funds were to investing,” the topic of another of my posts. Here GPT-4 didn’t do much better than GPT-3 in explaining the analogy at more than a surface level.

I also tried asking about the meaning of a metaphor I was planning to feature in a future post. Here GPT-4 actually produced some useful and interesting meanings, but again not the particular meaning I intended.

As a final task I asked GPT-4 to explain the concept of a “fixation index,” a measure of distance between populations originally used in genetics and then adapted in the study of cultural evolution (a recent interest of mine). Here GPT-4 did very well, producing definitions of the fixation index that made sense in both contexts, and detailed explanations of how the measure might be calculated in both contexts.

But (and there’s often a “but” when it comes to LLMs), I can’t really use the GPT-4 output to help me learn about the concept, because based on others’ experiences with GPT-3 and similar LLMs I can’t trust that the output from GPT-4 is completely correct. I’d have to go back to the original source material and look up definitions and explanations there, and do some work to convince myself that the original source’s explanation matches what GPT-4 produced. But if I’m doing all that, why would I bother with GPT-4?

Some final thoughts:

Given the contempt heaped upon the heads of humanities majors by those promoting the “shape rotators vs. wordcels” meme, I find it amusing that GPT-4 does quite well on various physics and math tests and tests like the bar exam that test a combination of rote knowledge plus deductive ability, but has difficulties with advanced English language and literature tests. One speculation I’ve seen is that current LLMs are not that great at reasoning with abstract and fuzzy concepts, which sounds plausible based on my own experience.

But of course it’s possible that future versions of LLM, be it GPT-5 or others, will overcome this lack, which will only intensify further the confident, even giddy, pronouncements that LLMs will replace humans in most if not all professions involving mental activities. Certainly corporate executives across the business landscape will attempt to do just that—nobody ever got fired for pursuing reductions in labor costs as the primary if not only path to profitability—but how that scenario plays out remains to be seen.

As for me, I’ll pay my $20 a month for at least a little while longer to see how GPT-4 might help improve my own writing and research. But based on my experience thus far I suspect I may end up saving the money and using it either for more specialized LLM-enabled tools, or just buying more volumes of manga.

AndreL (@AndreL) - 2023-03-15 13:29

phind.com has an LLM which cites its sources. The catch is that it also generates plausible nonsense, complete with plausible citations.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Today is the one-year anniversary of my publishing my book That Type of Girl: Notes on Takako Shimura’s Sweet Blue Flowers. As it happened, about a month ago someone who read the book sent me a nice note about it. That prompted me in turn to revisit the book and reread several chapters in it, and in the course of doing that I discovered one typographical error in the English edition and a missing footnote in both the English and Japanese editions. (Hence the title of this post.)

Fortunately I still had about three days left on the license for the software I used to create the print versions, so I was able to make the changes and push the revised versions out to my own web site and to the various online bookstores I used for commercial distribution. I suspect that these will be the final changes I make, and now that it’s been a year since publication I thought it was also a good time to post my final thoughts on the book itself and the process of creating it. Even if you’re not interested in this particular book, if you’ve ever thought of writing and self-publishing a book yourself then this may be of interest.

Why write a book?

Writing a book takes an order of magnitude or more time than writing a blog post, or even a series of blog posts. So anyone thinking about doing it needs to answer the question, “why do I want to do this?” In my case I had already done a series of Tumblr posts about Sweet Blue Flowers, so I had to justify to myself why I should put in the effort to turn it into an actual book.

The first reason is that I wanted to explore in more depth some of the questions that came to my mind while writing my Tumblr posts. Some of these were questions about the historical background of the yuri genre: Why were so-called “S” relationships between schoolgirls, and “S” literature about such relationships, so prevalent in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century? Why did those relationships and that literature almost completely disappear in the second half of the twentieth century? And why did “S” literature seemingly reappear in the early twenty-first century in the form of Maria Watches Over Us and its successors, including Sweet Blue Flowers?

Others were questions about Sweet Blue Flowers itself: Why does it start the way it does? Why do Fumi and Akira act the way they do? What about Yasuko and Kyoko? Is there any special significance to the plays that Shimura features in the various school years and, if so, what is it? And my personal favorite: Why are there so many scenes relating to urination and incontinence?

I was able to come up with plausible (at least to me) answers to almost all of my questions. In some cases, as with questions about the rise and fall of S literature, I rediscovered or recapitulated answers already put forth by academics (including Yukari Fujimoto in particular), but I tried to add some additional context. In other cases, including questions about Sweet Blue Flowers, I haven’t seen my proposed answers echoed anywhere else—which of course could equally mean that I’m clever or a fool. I won’t comment any more here on my proposed answers; you can read the book if you’re curious.

The second reason I decide to write a book was because I wanted to explore the process of creating and publishing a book in more depth. I had previously written and published a book of purely local interest, but only as an ebook. I wanted to create an actual paperback book with better typography and cover art, and go through as many of the steps of “real” publishing that I could, within the constraints of my time and budget.

Note that I did not write the book expecting anyone to read it, much less pay me money for it. I wrote it for myself, and anything beyond that is a bonus.

Researching and writing the book

Prior to writing the book I was generally familiar with the history of the yuri genre and its “S” literature predecessor, but had huge gaps in my knowledge about Japanese history and society relevant to that history. And, of course, I didn’t then and still don’t know Japanese at all.

Fortunately there is a small but fairly active group of academics who have published extensively in English on topics relevant to the book, and I took as much advantage of their expertise as I could. I now have more than twenty books on my bookshelf that I bought in the course of researching my own book, and several more that I bought in Kindle format. Other books had open access copies available, made available either by the authors or the publishers, and a few were available on the Internet Archive for temporary borrowing.

Academic papers were a separate issue. A lot of papers are paywalled and are available from journal publishers only at extortionate rates ($20 per paper or even more). (It’s often cheaper to buy a book that’s an edited collection of papers, even if only a couple of papers are of interest.) Fortunately, as with books, many authors and even some publishers make copies available at no charge. Some judicious Internet searching in various places found the few remaining ones I needed.

When it came to the actual writing of the book I wanted it to adhere as closely as possible to academic conventions, including doing formal citations and a full bibliography. My guide to doing that was the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition), which I highly recommend. It’s available online as a subscription service, but I recommend getting the hardcover book; it’s handier to use if you consult it often, and you can sometimes find it available at 50% off during sales at the publisher’s website.

The good: The Internet and all the services it supports (Google Scholar and general Internet search engines, the Internet Archive, Amazon and Abebooks, etc.) put doing research like this within reach of the typical interested person, especially if you’re willing to spend a little money. The bad: academic publishing is a rip-off, and it’s no wonder that many people (including academics themselves) are turning to pirate sites to get copies of papers.

Formatting and publishing the book

As I noted previously, my first book was published as an ebook only. Because I wanted to learn how ebooks worked at a low level, I actually hand-coded the entire book in (X)HTML. That was not an option for this book, since I also wanted to create a PDF version that I could use to publish a paperback version. But I still wanted to work with a text-based format, so I could put the book under version control in a source repository, as opposed to creating Microsoft Word documents—the typical format used by self-publishers today.

Fortunately I was able to find an almost free solution in the Electric Book software suite, built on a variety of free and open source software products. The only software I had to pay for was the Prince XML software used to create the PDF version, and the image processing software I used for the cover art (see below).

The Electric Book software enabled me to write in Markdown format, which I also use for my blog, while still having fairly tight control over the formatting of the book in both PDF and EPUB3 versions (although for the most part I went with the default look). I was also able to leverage a set of high-quality typefaces available for download at no charge. The only downside is that the software was (and presumably still is) somewhat fragile, being based on an older version of Jekyll and various node.js modules, and requiring me to run an outdated version of Ubuntu.

The cover art proved to be a harder challenge. I had early on decided that I was not going to use any of Takako Shimura’s art either within the book itself or on the cover. I thought it would be difficult to impossible to get official permission to use it, and I didn’t want to risk a copyright dispute if I didn’t have such permission.

As a result I went looking for Creative Commons-licensed or public domain art that I could use for a cover. I went through at least three different cover designs (all featuring blue flowers of one sort or another) before concluding that none of them worked for me. I finally went to a commercial service (iStock, by Getty Images) and found a very nice piece of art that I could license for commercial use at a very reasonable price ($12). (The fact that it was a watercolor illustration was an unexpected bonus, since Shimura herself typically uses watercolor art in her own book covers.)

I used Pixelmator Pro to create the cover art itself, including the back cover, which I needed for the print version. The one major issue I had was with handling the colors for the print copy. My first attempt looked like crap when I had a proof copy printed, so I spent some time reading about CMYK colors (used for printing) vs. RGB colors (for online use), and ended up renting a copy of Adobe Photoshop for a couple of months in order to do the needed color corrections and conversions.

Between the book files themselves (PDF and EPUB3) and the cover art, I had almost everything I needed to publish. I decided to take the extra step of paying for ISBN numbers for myself, so that I could publish the book on platforms other than Amazon. (Amazon will assign you a so-called ASIN, but it’s usable only for Amazon itself.) I used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to publish the Kindle and paperback versions, and the Draft2Digital service to get distribution of the ebook version on all other platforms (Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, etc.)

The good: The PDF version of the book came out looking well in terms of cover art, typography, and general formatting, and the quality of the print-on-demand paperbacks produced by Amazon was pretty high—not a whole lot of difference from a typical trade paperback. The bad: I’d probably do it again just on general principle (to oppose the Amazon monopoly), but realistically there wasn’t much point to publishing on non-Amazon online bookstores; I think I sold maybe one copy on those platforms over the entire year.

The Japanese translation

A truly unexpected bonus of publishing the book under a Creative Commons license was having a pseudonymous blogger, Konsuke (a Japanese scientist working in the US), translate the entire thing into Japanese. A fan of Takako Shimura, he saw a tweet from Shimura mentioning the book (after I sent her a complimentary copy), took advantage of the book’s Creative Commons license, and started publishing translated chapters from the book on his blog.

I should state for the record how amazing and gratifying this was to me. Konsuke’s English was reasonably but not perfectly fluent (though he’s been actively working to improve it), and no one has yet read the translation and given me an opinion on its quality. But even a low-cost commercial translation of a nonfiction book of this size (about eighty thousand words) would have cost several thousand dollars.

In addition, Konsuke also found a number of typographical errors that remained after my own editing, discovered a number of places where the English translation of the manga was debatable or outright incorrect, created a new appendix listing the probable sources of all the chapter titles in the manga, and helped me learn about Japanese typefaces and typesetting practices, all of which improved the final editions in both languages.

The good: I have a complete Japanese translation, available in the same format and from the same sources as the English translation, and a significantly improved English edition as a side effect. The bad: I haven’t gotten any feedback on the quality of the translation from someone truly fluent in both languages.

If you want to write a book

Writing That Type of Girl took a lot of time (two or three years), a lot of work (probably at least a couple of hundred hours total, if not more) and a fair amount of money (probably around a thousand dollars all told). But I’m very glad to have done it: it was a great experience, I learned a lot about Sweet Blue Flowers, Japanese society and history (especially with regard to LGBTQ+ issues), and book production, and I even got a few readers as well.

So if you’re thinking that you have a book in you, I encourage you to let it out. You can save a lot of the money I spent by using only FOSS software (like Bookdown) or using a self-publishing site that is free or low-cost. If you want to make the book available for sale as a paperback or ebook, I recommend sticking to Amazon, monopoly though it may be. And if you want to encourage other people to translate or other build on the book, I suggest that you release the book under a Creative Commons license, and make the underlying text source publicly available. Giving away the book or its source for free will not harm any book sales, which will likely be approximately zero in any case.

A final thought: If you’ve read my book and have thoughts about it, good or bad, please feel free to email me or leave a comment. Positive feedback is always gratifying, and constructive criticism about how the book could be improved is always welcome.

Renkon (@renkotsuban) - 2023-03-15 12:08

This was a super enlightening read on self-publishing, thank you so much for sharing!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-15 12:51

You’re welcome. Thanks for stopping by!

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-03-15 10:59

Thanks for sharing all this! I hadnt thought of using source control for books but thats probably something id want too, heh. Really interesting to hear about Konsuke and also the paperback color issue.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-15 12:55

Yeah, using git for this was invaluable, even if no one else ever uses the repository. Konsuke and I went through a lot of revisions on the translations, where he would send me stuff to change. I’d then file an issue, create a branch, make the change, merge it back, then send him a copy of the diffs to confirm that the change had been made correctly. Since the book was first published I filed almost a hundred issues for stuff like this, both for the Japanese and the English editions.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

Recently @shel promoted the idea of paying attention to your local library board. Her comments can be extended to cover all things local.

There are always exceptions, but to a first approximation every minute you spend reading or (especially) tweeting about national politics is probably a bad use of your time, and every dollar you spend contributing to national political campaigns (or to political campaigns in other states) is probably a bad use of your money. Even if you “live on the Internet,” what happens in your neighborhood, town, city, county, or state affects you, negatively or otherwise—and these days it’s more often negatively than otherwise for many people.

So, what should you do?

You have three alternatives, summed up in the classic Albert Hirschman formulation: exit, voice, and loyalty. If everything is fine and dandy in your neck of the woods then you can ignore local politics and related doings, and by your silence indicate your loyalty to the present dispensation.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you feel actively threatened in the place where you live then I for one won’t think less of you if you decide to get the hell out of Dodge and exit to somewhere else where you believe you can live a safer and more secure life.

My concern here is with people who have ties to the place where they live, don’t want (or need) to leave it, and are looking to voice their concerns in some way as to effect change. Again, you have multiple alternatives.

The first is protests. I haven’t participated in a protest in many many years (for many reasons), so I’ll leave any judgements on their usefulness, etc., to others.

The second is political and charitable donations, for those who have more money than time. Almost all of my political donations for many years now have been to local candidates: for county council, county executive, board of education, or for the state legislature. A donation of even $10 counts a lot more to a local candidate than it does to a candidate in a presidential or congressional race; if you can afford to give as much as $100 a local candidate may even thank you personally. And by donating early to someone you support who’s running their first local race, you may be helping someone who will go on to higher offices, county-wide, city-wide, or even state-wide.

If you have the money to do so and are OK with attending crowded events with lots of strangers present, I also recommending attending at least one of the local fundraising receptions that almost all politicians hold from time to time. It’s good to meet people in person and introduce yourself; you won’t have an opportunity for a deep discussion of the issues that concern you, but you’ll be better positioned to follow up later with an email or letter.

This same local orientation makes sense for contributions to charities and advocacy groups as well. Instead of giving to national organizations, consider giving to their local chapters or affiliates, or to local groups working in the same space: food banks, advocates for affordable housing, LGBTQ+ activists, whatever. They know the local landscape and are typically more able to make effective use of your donations.

If you have more time than money, a third alternative is following local affairs, attending local meetings and (for issues of special concern to you) giving testimony. As a result of the pandemic many jurisdictions (including mine) have Zoom or similar options for attending meetings and giving testimony, so it’s much easier to do so. And if you’re uncomfortable with testifying ”in person” (physically or virtually), you can submit written testimony.

Showing up (even if virtually) and testifying is really important at the local level, because elected officials typically hear from only a small and unrepresentative slice of the local population, basically people who are old, white, relatively affluent, and either retired or with flexible work schedules. Getting better representation is especially important with topics like planning and zoning where the conversation (at least in jurisdictions like mine) is dominated by that particular group, a group that traditionally has been hostile to affordable housing initiatives, measures to house the unhoused, etc.

(I’d add that some jurisdictions are almost literally begging for people to participate more. For example, my county offers free classes for people who want to know more about the planning and zoning process.)

A final option is to directly participate yourself in local affairs, whether it be as a person blogging or tweeting about local issues, researching and reporting news of interest to your community, serving as a volunteer for a local charity or advocacy group, or volunteering for local political campaigns, including (if you’re up for it) doing canvassing on behalf of your favorite candidates or causes. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in how effective canvassing and related activities can actually be, including with regard to anti-trans legislation and voter initiatives, David Broockman’s papers are a good place to start.)

A couple of final thoughts: First, national conservative groups have for many many years pursued a strategy of promoting local candidates and voter initiatives and stoking political controversies at the local level; the news stories about activist groups coordinating regarding anti-trans legislation are just the latest example of this.

While national advocacy groups can help combat this, ultimately these battles will be won or lost at the local level. As I wrote several years ago, ”it will all come down to winning elections,” especially elections for state legislatures, but also for such supposedly nonpartisan bodies like boards of education.

Second, if you want to make a difference in your local community, be prepared to be in it for the long haul. (This is why I recommend doing this only if you’re committed to staying where you are.) Again, this is something conservative groups know well—many of them have been working for generations now to elect local candidates, promote their proposed legislation, and get their voter initiatives on the ballot.

I can speak from personal experience here. For over ten years now I’ve been writing on my local blog promoting the idea of using ranked choice voting in county elections, and also testified to the county council about it. One of the local politicians reading my blog, originally a Board of Education member, wanted to know more, so in the last couple of years I’ve corresponded with him about the issue, talked to him via Zoom, and met him in person. He was recently elected to the state legislature, and with a colleague introduced a bill authorizing the county to use ranked choice voting in Board of Education elections. I gave testimony on the bill at a hearing conducted by our state legislative delegation.

I fully expect his bill to die in committee this session—the fate of most first bills by first-time legislators. But the issue has now been raised at the state level, has the support of at least two members of the local legislative delegation (out of eleven), and with further work and some luck may result in signed legislation sometime down the road. If it does succeed then it will only be after I’ve spent almost a generation talking about it—a good example of the kind of timeframe you should probably expect.

But when it comes to issues that are personally important to you—and certainly there are issues far more critical to the lives of those reading this than ranked choice voting is to mine—I don’t think there’s any alternative. If you’re committed to your local community and want to make a difference in it then you’ll need to put in some work on an ongoing basis. Otherwise you’ll be at the mercy of those who wish you ill and are working every day to make that wish a reality.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Note to stats nerds: I too have read Clauset, et al., and am well aware that many things claimed to follow a power law actually do not. (For example, this appears to be true for Patreon earnings.) But “I fought the log-normal distribution and the log-normal distribution won” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

If you happen to listen to “Discover Weekly” on Spotify (as I do), or regularly check out musicians on Bandcamp (as I also do) then from time to time you may have thought to yourself, “Wow, this is really good! Why haven’t I ever heard of them?” Apparently there are more musicians with real talent than there are popular and successful musicians, and sometimes the most talented are not necessarily the most successful.

This experience is not confined to music, but applies to other areas as well. For example, I suspect that hidden in the lower half of Patreon projects by number of patrons there are writers and artists whose work is as worthy as that of those who occupy the top 100 places.

Why should this be? That’s the key question for today’s post. It’s a very political question, in that proposed answers are often used to justify existing distributions of fame and wealth, or alternately to deny those justifications. I’m still exploring this general topic, so you can consider this just one take on the subject, with others possibly to follow in future posts. (WARNING: This will be a bit long.)

The proposed answer I’m going to present in this post is adapted from Sornette, et al., “The fair reward problem: the illusion of success and how to solve it.” The general idea is that when we look at things like the number of views on YouTube, the number of listens on Spotify, or the distribution of Patreon earnings, we’re seeing the effects of 1) individual talents influenced by lots of little things that add up (and hence result in a normal distribution), which then 2) combine through multiplication to produce a log-normal distribution of overall skill at artistic (or other) endeavors, and are then 3) supplemented by luck to produce a power law distribution (at least at the high end, and possibly at the low end as well).

It all adds up

Let’s start with a specific talent, for example, having a good singing voice. I’m no anatomist or vocal coach, but I can think of lots of little things that might influence this: size, structure, and health of the vocal cords, size and structure of the mouth, throat, nasal passages, and sinuses; size, shape, and motility of the tongue, lung capacity and diaphragm strength; the ability to control one’s voice (e.g., to accurately hit certain pitches); and so on.¹

Some of these things might be determined at conception (genetic heritage), some in utero (by random acts of development), and some after birth (e.g., being able to get a music education and afford voice lessons). The relative importance of these can be and is debated, but my point here is simply that most of these influences act relatively independently of each other, and together they add up to determine the overall quality of a person’s singing voice.

If multiple independent things do add up together to determine vocal quality, the result when we look at voice quality across the population as a whole should be a so-called Gaussian or “normal”² distribution, with a hump in the middle representing people with average singing voices, a tail at the left representing people with below-average singing voices, and a similar tail at the right representing people with above-average singing voices.

Why should this be? Think of having a really excellent singing voice as being the equivalent of flipping a coin and having it come up heads (say) 95 or more times out of 100 times, and having a really bad singing voice as having it come up up tails 95 or more times out of 100 times. There are relatively few ways that you can have a coin flip come up heads (or tails) 95% of the time, but many (many) more ways that you can have a coin flip come up roughly half heads and half tails. So, in practice most people would end up in the middle, not at the tails—thus the central hump.

Go forth and multiply

Suppose a person has an excellent, or at least well above average, singing voice. Does that mean they’ll have success as, say, a singer-songwriter? No, because a singer-songwriter by definition also needs to be able to write songs; more specifically, they need to write both melodies and lyrics. So there are now three things that they should ideally be well above average in, and those things are relatively independent: there are people who can sing well but not write catchy melodies, people who can write catchy melodies but not write good lyrics, and so on.³

To pull some numbers out of the air, let’s say that 20% of the population can sing pretty well, but only 5% can write catchy melodies and only 10% can write reasonably good lyrics. Then out of 100 million people we’d expect 20 million (20% of 100 million) to be able to sing well, 1 million to be able to sing well and write catchy melodies (5% of 20 million), and 100,000 (10% of 1 million) to be able to do all three. So in this example only 1 in 1,000 (100,000 out of 100 million) people have what it takes to be a singer-songwriter.

But it doesn’t end there. A potential singer-songwriter who wants to be successful also has to have the drive and conscientiousness to write and record lots of songs, the energy to tour, the ability to connect with audiences, the savvy to navigate the music business, and so on. Each of these requirements further reduces the potential talent pool, so that it may be that in a population of 100 million people there’s only about one in a million people who have what it takes to be a successful singer-songwriter.⁴

You can apply a similar analysis to any creative endeavor: writing novels, drawing comics, filming movies, making interesting podcasts or entertaining game run-throughs, and so on. In all of these cases many relatively independent factors will multiply together to determine overall skill-based success. The result will be a log-normal distribution: instead of most people clustering around an average level of success, with smaller tails to the left and right (as in a normal distribution), almost all people will have little or no success, and will thus form a very large cluster to the left. There will then be a very long right tail, with only a very few people in the extreme right of the tail having great success.

So, to sum up thus far: individual talents are hypothesized to be due to the additive effects of many independent factors, and thus to be normally distributed. However, having an overall skill set conducive to success in a given field of endeavor is hypothesized to be depend on the multiplicative effects of many different and relatively independent talents, and thus to follow a log-normal distribution.⁵

Luck and pluck

However, having an individual talent or even an overall set of talents is not necessarily sufficient to achieve success; often a fair amount of luck contributes to success, artistic and otherwise. We are used to attributing people’s success to talent and hard work—and of course people who are themselves successful are often the most extreme proponents of this. (After all, who wants to think that their own success is partly—let alone mostly—a matter of chance?)

This habit is so pervasive that we often attribute success wholly to merit even when it’s explicitly made clear that that’s not the case. For example, when people think of the 19th century novels by Horatio Alger, Jr. (when they think of them at all), they think of them as portraying the rewards that come from hard work. But if you actually read some of them (as I did), it’s clear that they are really stories of “pluck” and “luck”, with the latter typically given pride of place.

For example, in Alger’s first two novels, “Ragged Dick”, a homeless shoe-shine boy, is hard-working, honest, and open to new opportunities. But he becomes the successful businessman “Richard Hunter” only through a series of circumstances that combine mundane good fortune with incredibly implausible coincidences.

So, how might the effects of luck be modeled? Sornette, et al., treat it as an random additive component on top of what they call “overall skill.” They assume that overall skill is log-normally distributed (as discussed above) and acts to increase one’s already-achieved success by some percentage during each time period, with the exact percentage depending on the overall skill. Luck then acts to randomly enhance or counteract this effect of overall skill in each time period.

However good or bad luck does not affect everyone equally, but rather depends on a person’s appetite for risk: those who take more risks may benefit more than others from a given event of good luck, or may suffer more than others from an event of bad luck.

We see this, for example, in the Horatio Alger novels discussed above: the luckiest event of Dick’s young life occurs when he rashly leaps from a ferry to save a young boy who’s fallen overboard. The boy turns out to be the son of a business owner, who rewards Dick with a job in his establishment; the boy’s mother subsequently gives Dick a thousand dollars as a token of her own gratitude.⁶ But of course, in real life Dick’s selfless act might have brought no reward at all, or even resulted in his own death.

Modeling the effects of luck

As with overall skill, Sornette, et al., model the degree of risk taking using a log-normal distribution, presumably because, as with skill, it arises from several factors multiplied together: personality, social and economic situation, and so on. Thus some people would have an order of magnitude or more appetite for risk than others, and would be disproportionately rewarded (or punished) for their good (or bad) luck. Based on their simulation exercises they come to two conclusions:

First, they claim that the effects of luck may combine with the effects of overall skill to convert the distribution of overall success from a log-normal distribution to a power law distribution (as shown in the right hand graph above): at the top end would be people who benefited from extraordinary good luck and a taste for risk, beyond what their overall skills might justify, and likewise at the bottom end could be people with relatively high overall skills who have suffered bad luck of various kinds.

Second, they point out that in the short term it may be difficult to impossible to separate the effects of talent vs. luck. Only after a few years or even decades will it likely become apparent who has real staying power based on true talent and whose success was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and little more than that.

Sornette, et al., give the example of success in investing in this context, but we also see this in artistic fields such as music. For example, think of all the acts who had #1 hits in their day but have had no lasting impact whatsoever. Think also of those acts who never achieved success due to bad luck of various kinds—internal conflicts, label troubles, financial problems, ill health or the death of a band member, or simply being out of step with contemporary trends—but who were rediscovered years later and acknowledged as exceptional artists. (Of course, in the meantime they lost out on the cumulative rewards of the success that eluded them.)

Conclusion

Sornette, et al., present one view of the interaction between talent, luck, and the society that rewards them both. As I mentioned above, there are other possible models as well, some putting more stress on the importance of luck, some putting more stress on talent, and others highlighting different factors, like the initial circumstances from which artists emerge.

But the overall picture is fairly clear: almost all would-be artists will be unsuccessful in both relative and absolute terms, and only a few artists will be truly successful. The question then becomes, what, if anything, should society do in terms of changing this picture? In particular, what stance should we take in terms of supporting current artists, or encouraging more people to become artists?

This is an especially pertinent question given the fear (or hope, as some might say) that we will be overwhelmed with a flood of AI-generated art (or “art,” in quotes, as some might say). Should we just accept that this is the way things are, and that it’s pointless to try to change it? I don’t personally believe that, but my thoughts on the matter are not yet fully-formed enough to summarize here. I’ll try to do that in a future post.

Royal Assassin (@RoyalAssassin) - 2023-02-26 16:42

Imagine being lucky enough to be born with a predisposition for having a good work ethic. Alas.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-26 17:58

Yep, there are a lot of predispositions I wish I was born with :-(

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-02-26 16:46

Great post. Im also reminded of the quote by Gould “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.“

Even if you exclude economic factors, the vector of “did they pursue something they had talent for?” is a big factor imo. What are the chances of discovering different talents? Of pursuing those talents over other careers or other ways to spend time? Different cultures reward different talents and highlight different talents. Preexisting industries can be key to cultivate talents, like how voice acting in Japan is a lot more developed than most elsewhere. Audience size and language are also a major intersection- i think Finnish and Romanian are particularly beautiful languages, but they dont have the same audience to provide reverberating support for music and so on as English, Chinese, Spanish, etc.

Ill try to think more later about an idea of how things should be in this regard and maybe share those thoughts.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-26 18:03

Your comments on place and time are very much on point. One of the papers I didn’t highlight was about how succeeding in the contemporary art world (i.e,, the sorts of art featured in, say, ArtForum) is highly influenced by the prestige level of the institutions an artist is associated with very early in their careers: art schools, galleries, etc. A great artist who comes from the middle of nowhere is going to find it difficult to impossible to achieve success.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on “how things should be”. (As I said, my own are still half-baked.)

I finished watching the final episode 12 of GAP: The Series a couple of days ago. Here are some final thoughts on the show. (WARNING: This includes spoilers for episode 12 in particular.)

There are others better placed than me to do a comprehensive review of GAP, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed the show and looked forward to watching it each week. I have to confess though: I see a lot of fans commenting as if GAP were the greatest yuri/GL/lesbian series ever. I don’t normally watch live-action LGBTQ+ series, so I really can’t do an intelligent comparison, but this seems more than a bit overblown. I mean, what are they comparing it to?

In any case, I see GAP as an interesting hybrid: on one level it’s a glossy romantic drama (with some comedy sprinkled in) that bears more than a bit of resemblance to soap operas, telenovelas, Kdramas, and (the Thai equivalent) lakorn. But it was also consciously designed to promote a political message, albeit in a low-key suitable-for-the-mainstream way. See in particular the very interesting comments by Saint and P’Chen of IdolFactory, the production company that created the series, in which Saint claims “Every time I create a series . . . I see it as building/improving the [LGBTQA+] community.”

GAP follows a playbook for promoting LGBTQ+ equality that’s familiar from the US marriage equality campaign, but with a Thai-specific twist. There is the act of coming out, and having pride in oneself and those one loves; as Sam says in episode 9 (after Mon frets about what others might think of a public display of affection), “I just want to hold my lover’s hand.”

There’s also the classic “love is love” message, delivered by Saint himself in the final episode, when as “Sir Phoom” he drops in to pay his regards to Sam’s grandmother after she tells Sam to live her life as she chooses: “Love will always find a way. It transcends gender and sexuality.”¹

And, finally, there is the impact of having someone who was previously in opposition—namely Sam’s grandmother, and to a lesser extent Kirk—change their mind and endorse what they previously condemned. (In a US context, see Barack Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, which people have claimed helped win the Black vote in the 2012 referendum in Maryland, where I live.)

GAP’s political message is adapted to Thai sensibilities. I’ve seen some people online protest that Sam won her freedom only because others permitted it, i.e., through Kirk’s change of heart and his intervention with Sam’s grandmother. Where is the righteous rebellion against heteronormativity and those who enforce it (men like Kirk, but also women like Sam’s grandmother)? Well, that occurred at the end of episode 11, in the form of Neung’s epic rant. But though cathartic for the audience (and perhaps for Sam herself), it was not the key that freed Sam from her fate.

That instead came about because Sam was a dutiful and loving granddaughter and showed her filial piety in the most extreme way possible, choosing to bury forever her chances for happiness in deference to her grandmother’s wishes. Prompted by Kirk’s comments, her grandmother then behaved as an elder should behave in a hierarchical family system (but often does not), taking note not only of her granddaughter’s obedience but also her unhappiness, and deciding to release Sam from her familial obligation in order to promote her ultimate well-being.

The result is to my mind the most dramatic moment of episode 12 (even more dramatic than the wedding), as Sam drops to the floor and kowtows to her grandmother, then hugs her while on her knees before finally standing to face her. Her grandmother then reciprocates by attending Sam’s wedding to Mon, sitting in the front row to bear witness to their vows and—by her presence—publicly endorse their relationship.

Sam and Mon’s story is thus not a story of rebellion against society’s strictures, but of society recognizing the desires of some of its children and evolving its attitudes to acknowledge and accommodate them. This is reinforced by Sir Phoom’s conversation with Sam’s grandmother, in which he seeks to calm the concerns that Sam’s grandmother has, and in particular emphasizes that his own aristocratic parents know about Sam and Mon’s relationship and are happy to see them together.²

Is this the much-sneered-at “respectability politics”? Why, yes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s an approach that Saint and his colleagues presumably thought was most likely to be successful in the context of Thai society: to emphasize the loyalty of LGBTQ+ Thais to that society and its traditional norms of respect and deference, and to ask in turn for themselves to be recognized as full and equal members of society. And from Saint’s public comments it seems that GAP was created in large part to be a means to that end.

This post continues the discussion from part 1, in which I attempt to explain the concept of logarithms to myself, in the guise of explaining it to a novice. As before, this is primarily for my entertainment and edification; other people will either not need the explanation or can find better ones elsewhere.

(You’re still reading this?! OK, I guess I can’t stop you, but don’t say you weren’t warned.)

Notations

So far I’ve discussed orders of magnitude, including negative and fractional orders of magnitude, and defined a logarithm of a number as the (possibly negative and/or fractional) order of magnitude corresponding to that number. Now it’s time to simplify the discussion by introducing some basic mathematical notation.¹

Using mathematical notation tends to freak some people out, because they see it as an entirely separate language which they don’t and can’t understand — like staring at text in Japanese if you don’t know any of the characters. But it’s better thought of as simply a shorthand way to express things that would take longer and be more cumbersome to express in conventional prose. Thus, for example, it’s easier to write 2 + 3 = 5 than it is to write “two plus three equals five,” and easier to write 10×10×10×10 or 10⋅10⋅10⋅10 (my preferred notation) than “ten times ten times ten times ten.”

With that in mind, let’s introduce the following notation: We represent a one order of magnitude increase as being multiplied by 10¹ = 10, a two order of magnitude increase as being multiplied by 10² = 10⋅10 = 100, a three order of magnitude increase as being multiplied by 10³ = 10⋅10⋅10 = 1,000, and so on. By convention we have 10⁰ = 1, i.e., a “zero order of magnitude” change or no change at all, as discussed previously.

Note that this notation makes it simple to see the effects of multiple increases by various orders of magnitude, using the addition rule discussed previously. For example, an increase of two orders of magnitude followed by an increase of three orders of magnitude is represented as multiplying by 10² ⋅10³ = 10²⁺³ = 10⁵ , or an increase by a factor of 10⋅10⋅10⋅10⋅10 = 100,000.

What about a one order of magnitude decrease? We represent that as being multiplied by 10^-1 = 1/10 = 0.1. Similarly, a two order of magnitude decrease is represented as being multiplied by 10^-2 = 1/(10⋅10) = 1/100 = 0.01, a three order of magnitude decrease as being multiplied by 10^-3 = 1/(10⋅10⋅10) = 1/1,000 = 0.001, and so on.

Again the effects of combined increases and decreases by various orders of magnitude can be found using the addition rule discussed previously. For example, an increase of two orders of magnitude followed by an decrease of three orders of magnitude is represented as multiplying by 10² ⋅10^-3 = 10^2-3 = 10^-1 , or an overall decrease by a factor of 10.

As a side note, an increase by, say, two orders of magnitude followed by a decrease by two orders of magnitude is represented as 10² ⋅10^-2 = 10^2-2 = 10⁰ . We previously adopted the convention 10⁰ = 1, and we see now that that makes sense, since in this case there was no overall change.

We also have 10^-2 = 1/100 = 1/(10² ). So a negative value for orders of magnitude (i.e., decreasing by one or more orders of magnitude) converts multiplication into division, as we’ve discussed previously. We also have 1/(10^-2 ) = 1/(1/100) = 100 = 10² , by symmetry.

What about fractional orders of magnitude? We can represent an increase by half an order of magnitude as being multiplied by 10^1/2 = 3.1623 (approximately). Again the addition rule for orders of magnitude can be used: an increase by half an order of magnitude followed by another increase by half an order of magnitude is represented as being multiplied by 10^1/2 ⋅ 10^1/2 = 10^{1/2 + 1/2} = 10¹ = 10, as we would expect from the previous discussion.

Finally, how do we represent the logarithm of a number? We use the word “log,” of course: log(10³ ) = 3, for example. Often the parentheses are omitted: log 10^-1 = -1.

Multiplication by addition

Now let’s talk about something that was very important historically but is almost a curiosity now. Suppose you don’t have access to a computer, a calculator, or even an abacus. How can you do calculations like multiplying larger numbers, like 16 times 126, without resorting to pen and paper?

Let’s go back to the examples of fractional orders of magnitude I used previously, that multiplying by a factor of 16 corresponds to an approximately 1.2 order of magnitude increase, and 126 corresponds to an approximately 2.1 order of magnitude increase. In our new notation we have 16 = 10^1.2 and 126 = 10^2.1 . Alternately, 1.2 = log(16) and 2.1 = log(126), using the notation for logarithms.

Let’s also get better values for the logarithms of 16 and 126. Fortunately, way back in 1624 someone compiled a table of logarithms of numbers from 1 to 20,000 and from 90,001 to 100,000; on page 35 we find that the logarithm of 16 is 1.2041 (to four digits) and on page 36 we find that the logarithm of 126 is 2.1004 (also to four digits).²

Using our new notation we then have 16⋅126 = 10^1.2041 ⋅10^2.1004 . But by our rule of adding orders of magnitude we have 10^1.2041 ⋅10^2.1004 = 10^{1.2041+2.1004} = 10^3.3045 .

So we are looking for a number X = 10^3.3045 ; this is equivalent to writing log(X) = 3.3045. We can look in the same table we used before to find a number whose logarithm is 3.3045, and on page 55 we find that that number is 2016. This is the value we are looking for, the number corresponding to 16 times 126.

Of course, it would be tedious to carry around a large book just to do multiplication. The solution was the slide rule. The following is a gross simplification of how it might work:

We have two straight rules made of wood, plastic, or metal, each with numbers marked on it, increasing left to right from one end to the other. For example, on one rule the number 16 is marked at a distance of 1.2 cm from the left end of the rule, and the number 2016 marked 3.3 cm from the left end. On the second rule the number 126 is marked at a distance 2.1 cm from the left end of that rule. In other words, in all three cases the distances in cm from the left end of the rule are the logarithms of the numbers in question.

If we line up the left end of the second rule with the number 16 on the first rule (i.e., 1.2 cm to the right of the left end of the first rule), on the second rule the number 126 will line up opposite the number 2016 on the first rule (since 1.2 cm + 2.1 cm = 3.3 cm). Thus we’ve found the result of the multiplication 16 times 126.

Of course, for such a rule to be useful it would need to have all numbers marked on it, and at the size mentioned would be too small to be useful. Actual slide rules used for multiplication contain only the numbers from 1 though 10, since any multiplication with larger numbers can be done by fiddling with the decimal places. For example, we have 16⋅126 = (1.6⋅10)⋅(1.26⋅100) = (1.6⋅1.26)⋅(10⋅100) = (1.6⋅1.26)⋅1,000. So we really only need to multiply 1.6 times 1.26, and then multiply the resulting value by 1,000.

This concludes the second post. I may or may not make more posts in this series.

I get nervous when I write about something I don’t totally understand. As a result, I sometimes resort to writing down an explanation of that something to myself, in an effort to understand it better. While writing an upcoming post I realized that I wasn’t doing a good job of explaining what a log-normal distribution was, and in particular needed a better understanding of what a logarithm was.

This post is my attempt to explain the concept of logarithms to myself, which I do in my usual way by writing as if I’m explaining it to someone else with no background in the subject. If you’re already familiar with the concept of logarithms then you can skip this, and if you’re not then you can find better explanations elsewhere. In other words, nobody should read this post except me.

(Is everyone else gone? OK, here goes…)

Orders of magnitude

I think the best place to start to understand logarithms may be with the concept of “orders of magnitude,” a concept people use all the time. For example, consider the statement “there are an order of magnitude more users of Facebook than of Twitter, and two orders of magnitude more users of Twitter than of Mastodon.” Here an “order of magnitude more” means “about 10 times more,” and “two orders of magnitude more” means “about 100 times more.”¹

The first thing to note is that orders of magnitude can add together: If Twitter has two orders of magnitude more users than Mastodon, and Facebook has an order of magnitude more users than Twitter, then Facebook has three orders of magnitude more users than Mastodon (2 + 1 = 3).

Let’s drop the “about” and for this discussion assume that “an order of magnitude more” means “exactly 10 times more.” Then “two orders of magnitude more” would mean (exactly) 100 times more, “three orders of magnitude more” would mean (exactly) 1,000 times more, and so on.

Adding and subtracting orders of magnitude

But we also have 100 = 10 times 10, and 1,000 = 10 times 100 = 10 times 10 times 10. So an order of magnitude increase means the original amount was multiplied by 10, a two orders of magnitude increase means the original amount was multiplied by 10 and then by 10 again (i.e., by 100), and a three orders of magnitude increase means the original amount was multiplied by 10 and then by 10 again and then by 10 once more (i.e., by 1,000).

In other words, the number of orders of magnitude by which the original amount was increased is the number of times you multiply by 10. If you do successive increases first by, say, two orders of magnitude, and then by three orders of magnitude, the resulting amount corresponds to an increase by five orders of magnitude, or 2 + 3.

Now let’s consider the case where something is an order of magnitude less than something else. For example, when we say “Twitter has an order of magnitude fewer users than Facebook,” we typically mean “Twitter has about one tenth the number of users of Facebook,” and when we say “Mastodon has two orders of magnitude fewer users than Twitter,” we typically mean “Mastodon has about one hundredth the number of users of Twitter.”

Again, let’s be exact about this. Then an order of magnitude decrease means the original amount was divided by 10, a two orders of magnitude decrease means the original amount was divided by 10 and then by 10 again (i.e., by 100), a three orders of magnitude increase means the original amount was divided by 10 and then by 10 again and then by 10 once more (i.e., by 1,000). In other words, the number of orders of magnitude by which the original amount was decreased is the number of times you divide by 10.

What about an increase followed by a decrease? Let’s suppose the number of Twitter users increases by five orders of magnitude over a period of years, and then it decreases by two orders of magnitude within a year. That means that the original amount first got multiplied by 10 five times (10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times 10, or 100,000), and then the resulting amount got divided by 10 twice (i.e., by 10 times 10 or 100). The final amount is 1,000 times the initial amount, corresponding to an overall three orders of magnitude increase. We have 3 = 5 - 2, so another way to get the final amount is to add the number of orders of magnitude by which the number of users increased, and then subtract the number of orders of magnitude by which it decreased.

What if something increases by (say) three orders of magnitude and subsequently decreases by three orders of magnitude; in other words it gets multiplied by 10 three times (i.e., by 1,000) and then gets divided by 10 three times (again, by 1,000). The net effect is to return to where it started. But using our rule above, an increase by three orders of magnitude followed by a decrease by three orders of magnitude nets out to an overall increase of 3 - 3 or 0 orders of magnitude. So we can equate “0 orders of magnitude” to mean “no change” or (what’s the same thing) “multiplied by 1.”

Fractional orders of magnitude

Here’s an interesting question: What does it mean (if it means anything at all) to say that something increased by half an order of magnitude? If something increases by half an order of magnitude, and then increases by another half order of magnitude, then overall it’s natural to say that overall there was an increase by one order of magnitude. After all, we’ve been using a rule that you add orders of magnitude when doing a first increase by a certain number of orders of magnitude followed by a second increase by another number of orders of magnitude. And one half plus one half equals one.

Since an increase of one order of magnitude is equivalent to multiplying by 10, an increase of one half an order of magnitude is equivalent to multiplying by some number X, such that multiplying by X and then multiplying by X again is the same as multiplying by 10. In other words, we should have X times X equal to 10.

Does such a number exist and, if so, how could we find it? Well, we know that 3 times 3 is 9, and 4 times 4 is 16, so X should be somewhere between 3 and 4. If we try 3.5 times 3.5, that comes out to 12.25, which is too high. Trying a smaller number, 3.2 times 3.2 is 10.24, which is still too high, but closer. 3.1 times 3.1 is 9.61, which is too low. So X should be somewhere between 3.1 and 3.2. We have 3.15 times 3.15 equal to 9.925, again too low, and 3.17 times 3.17 equal to 10.0489, again too high, but getting very close. If you do this exercise a couple more times on your phone’s calculator app you will find that 3.1623 times 3.1623 is almost exactly equal to 10. So we can say that an increase of half an order of magnitude corresponds to multiplying the original amount by (a number very close to) 3.1623.²

Similarly, we can imagine a third of an order of magnitude increase as corresponding to a number Y such that multiplying an initial amount by Y three times produces an order of magnitude increase. In other words, Y times Y times Y is equal to 10. We have 2 times 2 times 2 equal to 8, and 3 times 3 times 3 equal to 27. So Y must be a number between 2 and 3, and is probably closer to 2. Trying numbers out like was done above, we end up with 2.154 times 2.154 times 2.154 being almost exactly equal to 10.

What about an increase of tenth of an order of magnitude? This would correspond to a number Z such that multiplying an initial amount by Z ten times produces an order of magnitude increase. In other words, Z times Z times Z times Z time Z times Z times Z times Z times Z times Z is equal to 10. A little thought will convince one that Z must be between 1 and 2, and likely closer to 1. Using the same techniques as above, we end up with 1.2589 as a number that when multiplied by itself ten times is (almost exactly) equal to 10.

From orders of magnitude to logarithms

Continuing from the discussion in the previous section, what does it mean to have an increase of, say, 2.3 orders of magnitude? If we follow the rule of adding orders of magnitude, we see that 2.3 is 2 plus 1/10 plus 1/10 plus 1/10, and conclude that an increase of 2.3 orders of magnitude corresponds to first multiplying by 100 (two orders of magnitude), then multiplying by (approximately) 1.2589 (one tenth of an order of magnitude), then multiplying by 1.2589 again, and then multiplying by 1.2589 once more. We have 100 times 1.2589 times 1.2589 times 1.2589 equal to (approximately) 199.5141. So a 2.3 order of magnitude increase corresponds to an increase by a factor of approximately 200.

We can then turn this around and say that multiplying by a factor of 200 corresponds to a 2.3 order of magnitude increase. We can do something similar for other numbers. For example, what order of magnitude increase corresponds to multiplying by a factor of 16? Multiplying by a factor of 10 corresponds to one order of magnitude, and multiplying by a factor of 100 corresponds to two orders of magnitude, so multiplying by 16 must correspond to an order of magnitude between 1 and 2.

Based on the discussion above, a 1.1 order of magnitude increase corresponds to multiplying by 10 (one order of magnitude) and then by 1.2589 (one tenth of an order of magnitude), or 10 times 1.2589, equal to 12.5889. This is less than 16, so the order of magnitude corresponding to multiplying by a factor of 16 is more than 1.1. What about an order of magnitude increase of 1.2? That corresponds to multiplying by 10 times 1.2589 times 1.2589, or 15.8483. This is very close to 16, so the order of magnitude increase corresponding to a factor of 16 is likely just a bit more than 1.2. (The actual number is approximately 1.2041.)

We can do similar calculations for other numbers. For example, multiplying by a factor of 126 corresponds to an approximately 2.1 order of magnitude increase, multiplying by 2,500 corresponds to an approximately 3.4 order of magnitude increase, and so on.

We can now say what a logarithm is: the logarithm of a number is the order of magnitude increase corresponding to multiplying by that number.³ Thus the logarithm of 10 is 1 (one order of magnitude increase), the logarithm of 16 is approximately 1.2 (1.2 orders of magnitude increase), the logarithm of 100 is 2, the logarithm of 126 is approximately 2.1, the logarithm of 1,000 is 3, the logarithm of 2,500 is approximately 3.4, and so on.

Negative (and zero) logarithm values

What about decreases by some orders of magnitude? They correspond to negative values of the logarithm. A decrease by one order of magnitude corresponds to dividing by 10, and an increase of three orders of magnitude followed by a decrease of one order of magnitude amounts to an overall increase by 3 - 1 = 2 orders of magnitude, according to the rule of adding and subtracting orders of magnitude discussed above. Since dividing by 10 is equivalent to multiplying by one tenth or 0.1, the logarithm of 0.1 is -1. Similarly, the logarithm of one hundredth or 0.01 is -2, the logarithm of one thousandth or 0.001 is -3, and so on.

Also, above we concluded that a “0 orders of magnitude” increase means “no change” or “multiplied by 1.” So the logarithm of 1 is 0.

There is no order of magnitude increase corresponding to multiplying by 0, and no order of magnitude decrease corresponding to dividing by 0 (which isn’t even defined). So the logarithm of 0 is undefined.

There is also no order of magnitude increase corresponding to multiplying by a number less than zero (like -1), and no order of magnitude decrease corresponding to dividing by a number less than zero. So the logarithm is also undefined for numbers less than zero (“negative numbers”).⁴

The logarithm as we have defined it is thus defined only for numbers greater than zero (“positive numbers”). For numbers greater than one the logarithm is greater than zero, for numbers between 0 and 1 the logarithm is less than zero, and for the number 1 the logarithm is exactly zero.

This is getting pretty long, so I’ll continue the discussion in part 2.

This is another brief follow-up to my “Life in Patreonia” post, based on this analysis. It can be summed up as follows: there is no significant correlation between the number of patrons of a Patreon project and the earnings per patron, although the earnings per patron does decline very slightly as projects become more popular.

The numbers: across almost 130,000 projects reporting nonzero earnings from monthly charges in December 2022, average earnings per patron was $6.83 and median earnings per patron was $4.50. Fitting a simple linear model predicts that each additional patron is worth $3.98. There’s a fair amount of variability, though: one project earned less than a penny per patron, while another earned over a thousand dollars from just one patron. (As you might have guessed, it was an NFSW project.)

I also looked into the (in)famous Kevin Kelly claim that creators aiming to make a living in the Internet age just need to find “1,000 true fans” willing to pony up $100 or more per year. How’s that working out for Patreon projects?

Only 31 Patreon projects (about 0.02% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings) met the specific criteria of having 1,000 or more patrons and per patron earnings of $100 or more per year (assuming December 2022 earnings were representative). If we use the looser criterion of earning $100,000 or more per year (regardless of the number of patrons), 238 projects met that, about 0.18% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings in December 2022. I think finding 1,000 “true fans” is a lot harder than Kelly thought.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-02-07 19:54

i literally just watched an overall good video that pushed the 1000 true fans thing as a partial solution to the issues of the attention economy, this puts it into a lot of perspective…

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-07 20:56

Thanks for stopping by! Yeah, Kevin Kelly in particular has been dining out on the “1000 true fans” thing for years; it’s still the most popular post on his site. (But to give Kelly his due, his “scenius” post is excellent and I think essentially correct, even though he didn’t invent the term himself.)

tl;dr: Howard County parents and other voters shouldn’t have the ability to elect Board of Education members taken away from them. Instead they deserve a way to vote for the Board of Education that truly reflects their preferences, namely ranked choice voting.

How we got here, Board of Education edition

Prior to 2020 the Howard County Board of Education was elected at large, with three members elected during presidential election years and four members during gubernatorial election years. The primary election was used as a way to winnow down the number of candidates to be voted on in the general election.

2018 was the last election in which the traditional method was used: there were thirteen Board of Education candidates in the primary, of whom voters could vote for four. The top eight candidates advanced to the general election, at which again voters could vote for four. The top four were elected to the board.

For the 2020 election year the system was changed to have five members of the Board of Education to be elected by district (using the Howard County Council districts) and two members elected at-large in alternate election years.

In the 2020 primary election voters could vote for one candidate in their district. The top two candidates in each district advanced to the general election, at which voters again voted for one candidate. The top candidate in each district was elected to the board.

The at-large members were elected in the 2022 election year. In the 2022 primary election voters could vote for up to two at-large candidates in their district. The top four at-large candidates advanced to the general election, at which voters again voted for up to two candidates. The top two candidates were elected to the board.

A threat to stop voters from electing two board members

Now a new proposal is on the table: to take away the ability of Howard County voters to elect two of the seven Board of Education members they previously elected, and have those members appointed by the Howard County Executive from a list drawn up by the Howard County legislative delegation.

Of the remaining five board members that Howard County voters would still be permitted to elect themselves, two of them would be elected at-large in the same manner as today, and the remaining three would be elected from the Howard County portions of the state senate districts wholly or partly contained within Howard County (currently Districts 9, 12, and 13).

I’m not going to speculate on the possible motives of those proposing this new schemes, what problem they think they are trying to solve, or what they hope to accomplish by taking away the ability of Howard County voters to elect these two board members.

However I do want to point out two potential issues with the proposal:

First, as noted above, the two appointed members would have to be selected from a list prepared by the Howard County legislative delegation. But Howard County shares several of its legislative districts with other counties, including Senate Districts 9 (shared with Carroll County) and 12 (shared with Baltimore County), and House of Delegates District 9A (shared with Montgomery County).

Given that, it’s possible that four of the members of the “Howard County” delegation may not even live in Howard County. What business would they have picking candidates for the Howard County Board of Education?

Second, also as noted above, the three districts with elected Board of Education members would be based on the one Senate district wholly within Howard County (currently District 13) and the Howard County portions of the two Senate districts partially within the county (currently Districts 9 and 12).

But here’s the problem: there’s no guarantee that the Howard County portions of the second and third districts will be equal in population to the first district. It’s quite possible that the second and third districts may have only a few thousand—or even only a few hundred—voters in Howard County, yet those voters would have as much influence over the Board of Education as the tens of thousands of voters elsewhere in the county.

(This problem doesn’t exist with the current Board of Education districts because the councilmanic districts are constrained by the county charter to be approximately equal in population.)

The bottom line: besides taking away the ability of Howard County parents and other voters to select two of the Board of Education members, this proposal is complicated and fraught with potential problems that would further reduce the ability of Howard County voters to influence the composition of the board.

Ranked choice voting: a better alternative

Enough of that. Here I present a better proposal, introduced by Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa, that

• preserves the ability of Howard County voters to elect all members of the Board of Education (except for the student member, of course);
• does a better job of reflecting voters’ true preferences;
• can potentially eliminate the need to have Board of Education primary elections, and thus ensure that the maximum number of voters participates in electing the board; and
• is less prone to some of the problems some people might have had with both the traditional method of electing the Board of Education and the method used in 2020, as well as other methods.

That proposal involves so-called “ranked choice voting,” a scheme that allows voters to rank candidates in order of their preference, and that allows their votes to be transferred to another preferred candidate in the event that their most preferred candidate is not elected. Ranked choice voting is being increasingly adopted by jurisdictions around the US and has been popular with voters in elections where it has been used.

Advantages of ranked choice voting

To expand on what I wrote above, ranked choice voting has the following advantages over current ways of electing either a single Board of Education member (i.e., per district) or at-large board members:

Elimination of primary elections. As discussed in more detail in the next section, a ranked choice election can eliminate the need to have primary elections, since there is no need to winnow down the number of candidates for the general election.

Instead all candidates would run in the general election, and voters could indicate their preferences between them. If a voter’s favorite candidate were not elected then the voter’s indicated preferences could help elect another candidate they also favor. The ranked choice method of counting votes works the same whether there’s one seat to be decided (i.e., for a district) or more than one (i.e., for an at-large seat).

Eliminating primaries is especially important for Board of Education races, because the board is supposed to be a nonpartisan body open to anyone interested in improving the school system, not a body made up of professional politicians primarily interested in pursuing their party’s agenda. Having no primary election means that running for the board should be less expensive and thus open to more potential candidates, and holding the election at general election time means that the voter base will include voters beyond just party activists and partisans.

Reducing “wasted” votes. When there are multiple candidates in a race, voters will often not vote for their favored candidates because their chances of winning are uncertain. Ranked choice voting allows voters to give a first preference vote to their favored candidates and second, third, etc., preferences to other candidates. That way, even if their favored candidate loses, their votes can still help elect other candidates that they like.

Preventing a slim majority of voters from dominating other voters. In the tradition Board of Education elections, or in the current election of at-large members, it is possible for a slim majority of voters to elect all their favored candidates: they simply vote as a bloc for their candidates, so that all those candidates have the most number of votes and are thus elected. This leaves other voters without representation of their views. (Incidentally, this is exactly why traditional at-large elections have been outlawed in many jurisdictions, because they were used as a way to enable a white majority to disenfranchise Black voters.)

This bloc voting strategy doesn’t work in a ranked choice election because of the way the ranked choice mechanism works, giving voters representation in rough propertion to the size of their voting bloc. For example, in an election to pick two at-large board members, a 51% majority could elect one at-large member, but would be very unlikely to succeed in electing two. That’s because there would be enough people in the 49% minority giving their preferences for other candidates that one of those candidates would very likely be elected once all voter preferences were accounted for.

Making it more likely that winning candidates will have broad appeal among voters. The key to winning as a candidate in a ranked choice election is not just to have your core group give you their first preference votes. In an election with three, four, five, or more candidates, it’s unlikely that those votes alone will be enough to put you over the line. Winning thus also requires persuading voters outside your base to mark you as their second or even third preference.

Ranked choice elections work against extreme candidates because they typically won’t get second or third preferences from outside their base. (To use the jargon term, they aren’t “transfer-friendly.”)

Electing district and at-large board members using ranked choice voting

There are multiple ways that ranked choice voting might be used to elect Board of Education members. Here I present two possible schemes, one a variant of the method currently used, and one a variant on the traditional way of electing Board of Education members.

In the first scheme we would continue the current practice of electing five Board of Education members by district (using the five Howard County councilmanic districts) and electing two board members at large, but using ranked choice voting in both types of election.

In the 2020 election the maximum number of Board of Education candidates running in the primary election was six (in District 4); other districts had only four candidates (District 5), three (Districts 2 and 3), or two candidates (District 1, where no primary was needed).

As discussed above, with ranked choice voting we could skip the primary election and have all Board of Education district candidates run in the general election. Voters would rank candidates in order of their preference, and then the ranked choice vote counting scheme would go as follows:

1. If any candidate received more than 50% of the first preference votes then they would automatically be elected.
2. If no candidate received more than 50% of the first preference vote, then the candidate with the least number of first preference votes would be eliminated, and their votes transferred to other candidates according to the preferences of the voters who gave the eliminated candidate their first preference.
3. The process of eliminating candidates and transferring their votes would continue until one candidates accumulated enough votes to go over the 50% mark.

Note that when electing a single candidate, ranked choice voting is often referred to as instant-runoff voting: because voters would have already expressed their preferences for their second, third, etc., choices, there would be no need to hold a separate runoff election if one candidate didn’t receive more than 50% of the votes in the first round.

In 2022 eight Board of Education candidates ran in the primary for the two at-large seats. Again, we could dispense with the primary election and just have all candidates run in the general election, with two board members elected using ranked choice voting. The process would be similar to that described above, except that the “quota” would be 33.3%: any candidate receiving more than that number of votes, whether from first preference votes or from votes transferred from others, would be deemed elected.

Electing all board members county-wide with ranked choice voting

In this alternate scheme we would revert to the traditional method of electing three at-large Board of Education members elected during presidential election years and four at-large members during gubernatorial election years. The only difference would be to use ranked choice voting in the elections to select the top candidates, similar to what was described above for using ranked choice voting to elect two at-large members.

Again we could dispense with the primary and just have voters rank all candidates in the general election. In that case the quota for being elected would be 20% plus 1 when electing four board members, and 25% plus 1 when electing three.

Addressing objections to ranked choice voting

There are various objections that might be made to using ranked choice voting for Board of Education elections. In this section I address those objections.

“Ranked choice voting is too complicated for voters.” I don’t see this as an issue at all. Experience with other jurisdictions, including New York City, has indicated that voters understand the process of ranking candidates and are generally satisfied with the results. Howard County has a relatively highly educated population; if voters in New York City can understand ranked choice voting then I’m sure voters here can as well.

“Ranked choice voting is too complicated and expensive for the Howard County Board of Elections.” There would be some added expenses in conducting a ranked choice election, mainly to design the ballots and implement the special process for tabulating results. However, there are plenty of resources available for election officials on how to run ranked choice elections successfully and efficiently, and free and open source ranked choice tabulation software (e.g., RCTab) that has already been certified for use in several jurisdictions. It’s also possible that the Board of Elections could offset some or all of the cost by not conducting Board of Education primary elections, as discussed above.

“Since the ranked choice voting calculations depend on knowing the total number of voters, election results will take a long time to determine if voters can vote by mail.” The short answer here is that traditional elections can also take a long time to be decided when mail ballots arrive late, as happened in the 2022 House of Delegates race for District 9A. That’s a universal trade-off with voting by mail, if voters are allowed to mail ballots up to 8:00 PM on election day.

The longer answer is that since the ranked choice calculations can be easily and quickly done by computer, the Board of Elections could simply release intermediate results, including the effects of voters’ second, third, etc., preferences, as the votes come in. As with other elections, results would not be final until all late ballots were accounted for and any other ballot-related issues were resolved.

“The ranked choice voting computations are a ‘black box,’ and we don’t have confidence in the way the calculations are done.” This issue can be addressed by using open source software (like RCTab, mentioned above) to provide transparency for how the calculations are done, and then releasing data for the final certified results showing all ballots and how they were marked. This would enable other people (like me, or anyone else able to run the software) to double-check the official results.

“Ranked choice voting would unduly disadvantage (or unduly advantage—take your pick) parents’ groups, the Howard County Education Association, the Democratic or Republican parties, or other interest groups.” Interest groups could still make endorsements like they currently do, indicating which candidates should (in their view) receive voter preferences, and which should not. If they strongly favor some preferred candidates over others, they can specify how they think voters should rank them.

The only real caution interest groups would need to take would be to not endorse too many candidates, lest voters split their first preference votes between them and cause none of them to be elected in the first round. As noted above, this is actually an advantage of ranked choice voting: it reduces the ability of a 51% majority to elect all at-large members by bloc voting for a slate of candidates.

“Ranked choice voting is inferior to approval voting.” This is a more esoteric objection, but is worth addressing. Approval voting is a different voting scheme in which voters simply mark which candidates are acceptable to them—and can approve of more than one—and then the candidate with the most “approvals” is elected. Regardless of whether approval voting is superior to ranked choice voting, either in theory or in practice, its greater simplicity is only present in elections where a single candidate is elected.

So-called “multiwinner approval voting” is more complicated, requiring a choice between multiple methods of counting approval ballots. It would be simpler for both voters and election officials to use a standard ranked choice mechanism for both single-winner districts and multi-winner at-large seats.

“Ranked choice voting could produce a result that doesn’t reflect who should actually win.” There are no perfect voting systems that are guaranteed to produce intuitively “correct” results in every possible scenario. Ranked choice voting is no exception.

But ranked choice voting has been successfully used for many elections, not only in the US but also in juridictions like Ireland and Northern Ireland, which have conducted dozens of elections and elected hundreds of officeholders using ranked choice voting. (They just call it something different: “proportional representation with a single transferable vote,” or PR-STV.) There is no reason to think it can’t work just as well in Howard County.

For further exploration

• Proposed legislation relating to election of the Howard County Board of Education:
  • Ho. Co. 10-23. Proposed legislation to make two members of the Board of Education appointed, not elected. Sponsored by the chair of the Howard County delegation.
  • Ho. Co. 16-23. Proposed legislation to allow Howard County to elect the Board of Education using ranked choice voting. Sponsored by Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa.
• Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Includes resources for election administrators, the RCTab tabulation software, and links to ballot data for past ranked choice elections in several jurisdictions.

[I originally published this post on Cohost as a follow-up to a Cohost post by @saralily, but I thought it was worth publishing on its own.]

I’ve read all of the ones @saralily recommends that have been released in English, except for A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow, and agree with her comments. Here are some of my own recommendations, in no particular order:

Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka light novels. This takes a character who was given somewhat short shrift in the main Bloom Into You manga, and tells her story in her own voice. It may be blasphemous of me, but I prefer this to the manga.

Goodbye, My Rose Garden. A story set in the late Victorian era that is realistic about the barriers society placed in the way of lesbian relationships.

Yuri Is My Job! Starts out as an affectionate parody of yuri schoolgirl tropes as exemplified by Maria Watches Over Us, but then gets increasingly serious (and lesbian) in later volumes. (Some people apparently hate this change; I think it’s great.)

How Do We Relationship? This reverses the usual course of yuri stories: the protagonists meet and sleep with each other, then figure out what to do after that.

I Can’t Believe I Slept with You! A dubious (consent) premise redeemed as the story evolves. (And now that I think of it, it also reverses the usual yuri plot sequence.)

She, Her Camera, and Her Seasons. This features a love triangle in which one of the vertices is a high-school boy, and some yuri fans may reject it for that reason. But it’s really well-done, and the way photography is woven into the story and the characters’ lives is quite interesting: it‘s so important to the two main protagonists that they take pictures of each other even in—really, especially in—their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

Otherside Picnic light novels. I’m not generally a fan of horror, but I love these. Like the Regarding Saeki Sayaka light novels, they benefit tremendously from being told in the first-person. It’s worth noting that this is one of several works that trace their heritage back to the Strugatsky Brothers’ SF novel Roadside Picnic, a group that famously includes Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker as well as the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

After Hours. Another adult yuri work, about an interesting subject, namely DJing. (It even has a couple of panels that name-check contemporary Japanese bands and DJs.) Like How Do We Relationship? and I Can’t Believe I Slept with You!, it starts with sex and then moves on to more interesting things.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

(My apologies, I couldn’t think of a clever headline for this.) In a comment on my “Life in Patreonia” post, @tekgo asked whether the number of patrons of Patreon projects was distributed in a similar way to the earnings for Patreon projects.

The short answer is “yes, it is.” The long answer is here. The in-between answer is that in the sample of about 218,000 projects, the number of patrons per project appears to have a log-normal distribution (like earnings), with a median number of 6 patrons per project. The chances of having more than 10 patrons is about 40%, the chances of having more than 100 is less than 10%, and the chances of having more than 1,000 is less than 1%.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

If you’re like me, you probably contribute to a project on Patreon. You may have even started a project on Patreon yourself, or are considering doing so.

Patreon boasts about its success: “8 million+ monthly active patrons … 250,000+ creators on Patreon … $3.5 billion paid out to creators.” Other sites run articles like “How Much Money Can You Make on Patreon?” and “25 Patreon Statistics You Need to Know.” There’s even a Patreon project devoted to collecting and publishing such statistics on an ongoing basis.

Occasionally you’ll find someone injecting a note of caution, as in a relatively in-depth analysis from five years ago. But the one set of statistics I could never find was about exactly how Patreon earnings were distributed across the whole set of projects, including what typical Patreon projects could expect to earn, and whether there was a straightforward way to characterize that distribution of earnings. So I decided to try doing that myself.

If you’re interested in the gory details, see “Distribution of Earnings Among Patreon Projects Charging by the Month.” The document is CC0-licensed, as is the R code used to create it. However the actual dataset I used (from Graphtreon) is not publicly available; if you want to replicate my work you’ll need to pay for the data yourself. (For what it’s worth, I don’t have a problem with Graphtreon charging for this; it took work to collect this data, and it has commercial value.)

One way to think about Patreon is to think of it as its own country (or state, or province), one with a population of over a hundred thousand. More specifically, Patreon had about 220,000 projects that reported their number of patrons as of December 2022, but only about 130,000 of them reported nonzero earnings from monthly charges. (About 80,000 projects didn’t report their earnings publicly at all, a few thousand charge by the podcast or video, not by the month, and a few hundred reported zero earnings.) Those are the projects I looked at in my analysis.

If Patreon were a country (“Patreonia”) then it would be by far the most unequal country on earth. As you can see in the left graph above, project earnings drop off extremely fast once you go past the top-ranked projects. In fact, the drop-off is so extreme that it’s better visualized using a so-called “log-log” plot, like the right graph above. While the top projects on Patreon earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, the median project (half earn more, half earn less) earns $25 a month, or less than a dollar a day.

This level of inequality is greater than in any country in the world; if you’re familiar with Gini coefficients, the coefficient for “Patreonia” is 0.84, while the country with the highest level of inequality is apparently South Africa, with a coefficient of 0.63. (A Gini value of 0 means income is equally shared, while a value of 1 indicates “perfect inequality” — one person gets all the income, everyone else gets nothing.)

I find it helpful to consider “Patreonia” as consisting of four separate groups of projects, each ten times larger than the last; together these four subsets account for almost all of the projects that I had valid data for. You can think of them as communities of different sizes and economic circumstances.

Patreon Heights

The first group, the “0.1%” of “Patreonia,” consists of the top 100 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreon Heights” had almost 3,900 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of almost $25,000, or about $300,000 a year. This corresponds to an especially affluent neighborhood in an especially affluent county in the US, like Loudoun County, Virginia, which has a median household income of around $150,000, the highest of any US county.

Patreon Grove

The second group, the “1%” of “Patreonia,” consists of the next 1,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreon Grove” had almost 800 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $4,200, or about $50,400 a year. This is well under the current median household income in the US, which is about $70,000. A US county with a comparable median household income and population is Crockett County, Texas, a rural county in the western part of the state.

Patreonville

The third group consists of the next 10,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreonville” had just over 100 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $650, or about $7,800 a year. This is well below the US Federal poverty line of $12,880 for a single-person household, and is lower than the median household income for any county in the US, even lower than that for Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, the poorest jurisdiction for which the US Census Bureau has data. (The median household income for Adjuntas is around $12,000 a year.)

The rest of Patreonia

The fourth and final group consists of the next 100,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in the rest of “Patreonia” had 5 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $28, or about $340 a year. This is comparable to incomes in the poorest countries on Earth, places like Somalia, Uzbekistan, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Patreon and the “creator economy”

At this point you might say to me, “Frank, these are really stupid comparisons. You can’t compare someone running a side gig on Patreon to a person eking out a meager living in the world’s poorest countries.” And you’re right, but: Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, and similar services are pitched to “creators” as a way to earn at least a partial living by “monetizing” their “content.”

Not a month goes by without another blog post, news story, or website heralding the “creator economy.” It’s attracting the attention of venture capitalists, who’ve funded a host of startups, all eager to help you realize your dreams as an artist, writer, musician, filmmaker, game designer, or “influencer,” in return for just a few percent off the top.

But the reality? Not so rosy. What I’ve tried to do is to put some more numbers behind that assertion.

P.S. to math-savvy web developers: If you’d like to put together a different kind of “how much money can you make on Patreon?” calculator, it’s pretty easy to calculate the odds of a project earning more than a given amount of money on Patreon. Patreon earnings for the month I analyzed were best fit by a log-normal distribution with μ of 3.33 and σ of 1.84. So to estimate the probability of earning more than x dollars, you can plug x into the formula for the log-normal cumulative distribution function (you’ll need the erf() function for this), and then subtract the result from 1. For example, the probability of earning more than $100 a month is 0.24, or about 1 in 4, while the probability of earning more than $1,000 a month is 0.026, or less than 3 percent.

@Janet (@Janet) - 2023-01-21 11:05

messed up.

but you dont even have to go online. same goes for GEMA in germany. thats the state org handling musical rights, only a few percent of artists (mostly song writers and producers) earn anything at all. if you are a tiny band, there is no way you will ever get money from GEMA, yet any music made will automatically be handled by GEMA, except in case you find another org, but GEMA had a monopoly so you were sool. Some years ago another such org was founded just so you wouldnt have to deal with GEMA anymore… ah but im not really in the know, i only read about it when the new org C3S was founded

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 12:38

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I believe the US has the same system for music, a duopoly between ASCAP and BMI.

june (@junelinked) - 2023-01-22 05:54

a little different; ASCAP/BMI are performance rights only (and do have some small, private, for-profit competitors - notably SESAC) whereas GEMA is an integrated CMO (mechanical + performance), and actually has more restrictive assignment provisions at least in part since ASCAP/BMI are under consent decrees. the market dynamics end up similar though, small writers are lucky to make enough to hit the payout threshold

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 11:52

Thank you for correcting me!

jeroknite (@jeroknite) - 2023-01-21 13:46

… Of course the poorest place in the US is in Puerto Rico :c

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 14:15

Thanks for the comment! I was curious about this, and checked the median household income statistics on Wikipedia. The 40 poorest jurisdictions in the US and its territories are in Puerto Rico, as are 58 of the 60 poorest.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 14:20

is there large variance in the size of patreon projects (≈ number of people involved)? If we account for this by, say, dividing earnings by number of people, do the graphs seriously change?

(My first reaction to the graph was that ”this makes sense; the large projects get the most funding but also have to pay out to more people”. But actually I have no clue what the distribution of project sizes on patreon looks like, nor if size correlates with earnings)

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 14:32

Say we very generously assume that all Patreon Heights projects are run by 100 people, Patreon Grove projects by 10, Patreonville projects by 1, and that the rest of Patreonia consist of abandoned projects that people forgot to unsubscribe from.

Then in Patreon Heights we have median income per person per month of $250; in Patreon Grove we get $420; and in Patreonville we get $650

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 15:53

You can find a list of the highest-earning Patreon projects at https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-earners. You can check them out yourself (I haven’t), I suspect that the highest-earning projects aren’t run by anywhere near 100 people.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:07

Hmm, yeah. Looks like at least the top few are mostly podcasts featuring a handful of people. Presumably they employ editors and publicizers, etc, but I would be shocked if any number was approaching 100

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:19

A four-host podcast making almost $200k a MONTH is absolutely bonkers; holy shit

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 15:49

Thanks for commenting! I cover some of this in the detailed document I linked to, in the section ”How are earnings and the number of patrons related?”; I’m not sure if you’ve had the chance to look at that or not. The short answer is that mean earnings per patron was $6.83 (with a standard deviation of $12.01), and the median earnings per patron was $4.50. Only 15% of projects have earnings per patron over $10, and very few have earnings per patron over $20.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:18

Ah, I had missed that link; sorry! (That is a very nice analysis)

I think I phrased my question poorly. I’m not interested in earnings versus number of patreons, but versus number of creators. Looking at Graphtreon, seems like this data isn’t available? I guess if it’s not something Patreon asks for people to self-report on, then it’s not really possible to generate in bulk.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 00:30

To my knowledge there’s no source of data on the number of people per Patreon project. That’s why I was careful to refer to ”projects” not ”creators”.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-21 21:44

Im not sure how related this is, but this reminds me of an experiment a music site did where they released two beta versions: One where you could see the number of views a song got, and one where you couldnt. The one where you could see the views, completely random songs would get a snowball effect of views and people would be really into them, but those songs were not significant at all on the other.

I feel like that sort of ”attention economy snowballing” is a key part of disproportionate success dynamics like this.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 00:32

A very good comment, thank you for foreshadowing some of what I hope to be able to write about in future.

㋬Zen1th (@zenith391) - 2023-01-23 16:16

That’s very true, and it’s also why I like cohost. You can’t see like counts or follow numbers which brings us closer to the version where ’we can’t see the number of views’. I might be following complete nobodies or the most popular account here, I can’t tell the difference.

Pat (@tekgo) - 2023-01-23 16:29

As you noted in the caveats a number of projects with high patron counts don’t report earnings. Looking at the Graphtreon top projects list only 14 of 50 report their earnings. I’m curious if you graph all the projects by number of patrons(that report that data) does it have a similar distribution to the earnings rank graphs?

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-23 16:59

Thanks for commenting! Yes, the distribution of number of patrons per project has a similar sharp drop-off once you get past the top 100, 1000, etc. I actually did an analysis of this as well, but the analysis document was getting really long and I decided to focus primarily on earnings. I may do a separate document discussing the number of patrons vs. rank in number of patrons. I’m going to guess that it follows a log-normal distribution too.

exodrifter (@exodrifter) - 2023-01-24 02:35

I have a lot of complicated feelings about the ”creator economy” and this is part of it. Many of the people I know that participate only do it on the side for fun and use the extra income to afford a few things relevant to the creative pursuit they are doing for fun. And although we are small, we also like to support each other, but every time money changes hands, the platform takes a cut…

Meanwhile, I would like to work full time on my creative pursuits, but it’s hard to imagine how that would work given the slim odds. I don’t really think I’m trying to say anything in particular here, it’s just difficult for me to think about.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-24 19:28

Thanks for commenting! To repeat what I wrote earlier, I am not trying to discourage people who want to supplement their income via Patreon or similar services. My main target was/is VCs and startups that are pushing services like this as the answer for people who want to support themselves full-time (or nearly so) as artists.

Censa (@censa) - 2023-01-29 23:23

huh this was really interesting. Thank you for sharing your findings!

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

A recent post by @Halceon reinforced a thought I had while writing my post about magic: that the desire to read stories about people who seemingly have personal agency, and are not working as part of a faceless bureaucracy or corporation, is a major factor in the popularity of anime, manga, and light novels about magic, especially those set in pseudo-European, sort-of-medieval settings populated by monarchs and nobles. (As a matter of fact, I just finished reading one of them myself.)

In such works monarchs and nobles are often portrayed as essentially benign overseers of society; even those that purport to comment on the gap between commoners and the nobility will typically feature one or more examples of “good kings” or “parfit gentil knyghts.” We are invited to follow their doings, praise their heroics, sympathize with their troubles, and be entertained by their foibles, as if we were watching a cosplay performance at the local “Renaissance Faire.” But the historical reality was quite different.

The economist Brad DeLong put the case succinctly, writing of the world before the 19th century (including those “medieval times”), in which the logic of Malthus held sway:

In a poor world, with limited technology and upward pressure on the population creating resource scarcity, it was only possible for a few to have enough. Moreover, the way those few could get enough for themselves and their children was for them through force and fraud, to run an exploitation-and-extraction machine against the bulk of humanity. Humanity’s societal energies were thus directed not toward making humanity more productive but, rather, toward making the force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system run more securely …. In such a world, those ideas that were promoted and thus flourished were not those that made humanity capable of doing more things more efficiently and effectively. They were, instead, the ideas that shored-up the force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system.

In other words, it was a world run by thugs, supported by enablers of thugs, and justified by apologists for thugs. (Or, if you prefer Mancur Olson’s terminology, a world run by “stationary bandits,” who found it more profitable to rule a land and exploit its people than to steal from them and run.) Those thugs would beget other thugs to rule in their turn, and were occasionally overthrown by yet more thugs—a whole line of thugs, stretching from deep antiquity to almost the present day.

Who in the present day can equal the kings of yore? Perhaps the best candidate is Kim Jong-Un, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, President of the State Affairs, First Chairman of the National Defense Commission and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, “great successor to the revolutionary cause of Juche,” “outstanding leader of the party, army and people,” third of his line. His lineage is storied (his grandfather’s birth said to have been accompanied by auspicious omens), he is praised by millions, and he wields weapons far more powerful and terrible than any ancient monarch. He even sits proudly astride a white charger. If ever anyone had kingly agency, it is he.

But outside of North Korea there are no literary works retailing the many adventures, and extolling the noble virtues, of “Respected Comrade” Kim, “a great person born of heaven.” Instead he is the subject of scorn, the butt of jokes (as was his father). Why should this be so?

Kim Jong-Un is certainly an unprepossessing sort, with his rotund figure and awkward haircut. Like successful thugs before him, his main talents seem to lie in crushing internal rivals and indulging in various luxuries. But in this he likely resembles most monarchs in history; he certainly cuts a more kingly figure than, say, Charles II of Spain, the product of generations of inbreeding.

Of course, we moderns can see present-day monarchs as they are—unlike the ancients, who rarely if ever saw the faces of those who ruled over them—and implicitly judge them wanting compared to the fit and attractive celebrities who are the true royalty in today’s culture. Kim Jong-Un was bound to lose in this comparison.

But more importantly, we have an alternative. In the past two hundred plus years we have thrown off the yoke of our monarchs, or retain them only as tourist attractions and tabloid fodder. Only a few oddballs and neoreactionaries yearn for them to return in glory to rule us once more.

Still, I’m disappointed that people continue to fixate on tales of kings and queens, magicians and wizards, seeking in them the agency that many of us feel we lack in our own lives. 99% of our ancestors were peasants, chained to the land and oppressed by its rulers. Even the least of us likely has more agency in their life than the average person back then, and we command powers that ancient monarchs could only dream of. Sometimes I wish we had more of their stories, and not yet another tale of whitewashed thuggery.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

OK, OK, I get it—ChatGPT is indeed impressive in what it can do. But I must confess that I’m amused by all the people doing prompt engineering, that is, coming up with ever more elaborate ways to elicit certain types of output from ChatGPT. I can understand this when it comes to DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. After all, one of the main selling points of those systems is that they enable the creation of art (of a sort) by people who are good with words but can’t paint or draw to save their lives.

But if you’re good enough with words to construct extremely complicated prompts for ChatGPT, why not devote some (or even all!) of that mental effort to figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it. The part of writing that both requires the most attention and (in my opinion) is most rewarding is coming up with insightful ideas, apt metaphors and analogies, and stylish turns of phrase.

This post is an example of that. I had no need nor desire to have an AI expand an outline, or write it in the form of an academic paper, or create a limerick out of it. I just made a mental connection between the more elaborate forms of ChatGPT prompt engineering and Dustin Hoffman staying awake for multiple nights to prepare for his performance in the infamous dental torture scene in the movie Marathon Man—an extreme method technique that supposedly prompted his costar Laurence Olivier to ask, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” And the rest followed from that . . . .

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Prompted by a book post by @JhoiraArtificer, I got a copy of the Maria Headley translation of Beowulf, which I greatly enjoyed. In a comment on that post I recommended Christopher Logue’s free translation/adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, contrasting it with more conventional translations. I’ve started reading Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad, one of the more heralded modern translations, and thought it might be fun to present it side by side with Logue’s version, along with a classic translation, that of Alexander Pope.

Im my comment on the book post I noted that there are two ways to translate Homer. To expand on this: The first is to attempt to fully translate the original Greek, replicating all the nuances of word choice in the original. Having done that, then try to make the result read as poetry, and in particular as much like Homeric poetry as possible—keeping in mind that metrical conventions in ancient Greek were not the same as in modern English.

Caroline Alexander’s 2015 translation is a good example of this first choice. In the introduction to her translation, she explains how she went about translating the Iliad:

My approach has been to render a line-by-line translation as far as English grammar allows; my translation, therefore, has the same number of lines as the Greek text and generally accords with the Greek lineation. I have tried to carve the English as close to the bone of the Greek as possible. The translation is in unrhymed verse, with a cadence that attempts to capture the rhythmic flow and pacing, as well as the epic energy, of the Greek, and which like the Greek varies from verse to verse. It is meant to follow unforced rhythms of natural speech.

Here is how her translation starts:

Wrath—sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,
that inflicted woes without number upon the Achaeans,
hurled forth to Hades many strong souls of warriors
and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs, for all birds,
and the will of Zeus was accomplished;
sing from when they two first stood in conflict—
Atreus’ son, lord of men, and godlike Achilles.

This is serviceable enough, but with some clunkiness that was presumably unavoidable given that Alexander wished to keep the word choices and line numbering the same as the Greek original. The appended “for all birds” is especially jarring and unnatural.

The poem then sets up the basic setting and conflict of the first book of the Iliad: the Greeks (“Achaeans”) have been at war many years at Troy, but are still stuck on and near the beach, unable to advance beyond it. Agamemnon (“Atreus’ son”), the paramount king of the Greeks, has taken for himself a girl captured as a slave, Chryseïs, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of the god Apollo. Chryses tries to ransom her, Agamemnon refuses to return her, Chryses prays to Apollo to punish the Greeks, and Apollo sends a plague unto them. Another priest tells Agamemnon that to stop the plague he must return Chryseïs to Chryses, and he agrees to do so, but in recompense he takes Achilles’ favorite captured slave girl, Brieis. This angers Achilles to no end, and after bitching about it to Agamemnon he also complains to his mother, the sea nymph Thetis:

                                                  But Achilles,
weeping, quickly slipping away from his companions, sat
on the shore of the gray salt sea, and looked out to depths as dark as wine;
again and again, stretching forth his hands, he prayed to his beloved mother:
“Mother, since you bore me to be short-lived as I am,
Olympian Zeus who thunders on high ought to
grant me at least honor; but now he honors me not even a little.
For the son of Atreus, wide-ruling Agamemnon
has dishonored me; he keeps my prize, having seized it, he personally taking it.”

This, to me, does not read like poetry; to quote a phrase I read somewhere on Twitter in another context, it is “lineated prose.” The requirement to match the original line for line has forced some lines to be over-long, breaking the flow of the poem.

As I said, it’s a serviceable translation, but I’m wondering how far I’ll be able to get through it. (In fairness, this approach does have its advocates; see for example this enthusiastic review of Alexander’s translation.)

The other way to approach the Iliad is to remember that you’re creating a poem for general readers in your own time, not for ancient Greeks or classicists. The approach here is ignore the letter of the Iliad and to imbue it with spirit—which may not actually be the spirit as perceived by its readers in antiquity, but a spirit that resonates with contemporary readers, whose background and mindset are entirely different.

Thus we turn to Christopher Logue’s partial adaptation of the Iliad, published from 1991 to 2003 and collected in two books, War Music and All Day Permanent Red (a wonderful title, that one). Logue describes his own approach as follows, in the introduction to War Music:

Rather than a translation in the accepted sense of the word, I was writing what I hoped would turn out to be a poem in English dependent on whatever, through reading and through conversation, I could guess about a small part of the Iliad . . . . My reading on the subject of translation had produced at least one important opinion: ‘We must try its effect as an English poem,’ Boswell reports Johnson as saying; ‘that is the way to judge of the merit of a translation.’

Logue assumed that his readers knew the basic plot and characters of the Iliad, and thus he could skip the setup and the introductions. He presumably also knew that lazy reviewers judge the quality of an Iliad translation based on its famous first lines, and often don’t read much further than that. Logue violates that expectation by beginning in media res, as the unnamed Achilles leaves his tent to complain to his (also unnamed) mother:

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
And split by a double-doored gate
Then through the gate a naked man
Whose beauty’s silent power stops your heart
Fast walk, face wet with tears, out past its guard
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each others’ luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and say:

    “Source, hear my voice.
God is your friend. You had me to serve Him.
In turn, He swore: If I, your only child,
Chose to die young, by violence, far from home,
My standing would be first; be best;
The best of bests; here; and in perpetuity
And so I chose. nor have I changed. but now—
By which I mean today, this instant, now—
That Shepherd of the Clouds has seen me trashed
Surely as if He sent a hand to shoo
The army into one, and then, before its eyes,
Painted my body with fresh Trojan excrement.

Logue was not the first poet to “go wild” with Homer. In 1715 the young poet Alexander Pope, after making a name for himself with his first works, kicked off an audacious project to publish a new English translation of the Iliad using his favored poetic form, heroic couplets. (Pope’s was the second translation to English, the first being that of George Chapman over a hundred years before.)

Here are the opening lines; note that Pope uses the Roman names for the gods, not the Greek ones:

The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring
Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!

Contrast Alexander’s “rendered their bodies prey for the dogs, for all birds” with Pope’s “whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore / Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.” Fidelity to the Greek be damned, I can’t imagine anyone preferring Alexander to Pope here.

Again, for contrast, here is the section where Achilles leaves his tent to appeal to Thetis:

    Not so his loss the fierce Achilles bore,
But sad retiring to the sounding shore,
O’er the wild margin of the deep he hung,
That kindred deep from whence his mother sprung;
There, bathed in tears of anger and disdain,
Thus loud lamented to the stormy main:
    “O parent goddess! since in early bloom
Thy son must fall, by too severe a doom;
Sure, to so short a race of glory born,
Great Jove in justice should this span adorn;
Honour and fame at least the Thunderer owed;
And ill he pays the promise of a god,
If yon proud monarch thus thy son defies,
Obscures my glories, and resumes my prize.”

A contemporary of Pope’s remarked, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” I don’t care whether we call it Homer or not, it’s a pretty great poem; I read the whole thing, all thousand-plus pages of it. Pope’s contemporaries agreed with me; the translation netted Pope the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars in today’s currency. Nobody remembers the name of the person who criticized it.

Vince Hancock (@vhhancock) - 2023-01-08 20:31

What a great essay about the problems of translation. Thank you. I’m making my way through Pope’s version now. His footnotes are making it a richer experience.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-09 12:57

Thanks for commenting! I actually think Pope’s version is the one version I was able to read all the way through; at least, it’s the only one I have on my bookshelf, and I don’t recall reading any other versions.

Iro (@Iro) - 2023-01-08 20:35

I’ve been enjoying Super Bunnyhop’s goofy audiobook Iliad project so far. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgdySZU6KUXLVEyoi0IuQN7vlkVFTAKse

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-09 12:59

Thanks for commenting! I checked out the first episode of this. It was a pretty cool undertaking, almost like a Homeric radio drama. I could definitely see listening to this in the car while commuting, if I still actually commuted to work.

stylo (@stylo) - 2023-01-09 14:07

I find that pope translation unbearable, indelibly stamped with the cultural hallmarks of British colonialism of that era. I have the Lattimore on my shelf

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-09 17:47

Thanks for stopping by to comment! The Pope translation is definitely of its time, no question. I don’t have the Larrimore, but I’m going to try a read-through of the Caroline Alexander translation once I finish reading Logue. (There’s something to be said for getting the whole story and not just the highlights.)

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-12 22:23

Thanks for sharing! It can be frustrating how people dont understand that there is no such thing as direct translation for anything sufficiently complicated- flow and nuanced meaning and structure all combined to make 1:1s completely impossible, and poetry is a nice way to convey this impossibility, partially since conveying the impossibility of mapping meaning and impact in prose is more difficult, less obvious.

That’s quite an enormous gap between Caroline Alexander’s translation and Logue/Pope’s translations. It may be illuminating to compare to another as well that is not as “not quite a translation” as Logue/Pope’s but takes fundamentally different tradeoffs compared to Caroline Alexander’s.

http://emilyshauser.weebly.com/news/a-step-by-step-guide-to-the-translations-of-homers-iliad This is nice, and the “Greekness” notion with Robert Fitzgerald’s is intriguign. Also, the book cover translations are fascinating- a photo of D-day for Lombardo’s?! Logue’s struck me similarly.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-13 20:08

As always, thank you for commenting! I confess I haven’t read any of the Iliad translations by Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald, etc., so I can’t comment intelligibly on them. I have however read both Fagles’ and Fitzgerald’s translations of the Odyssey, and recall liking them. The Odyssey is a very different poem than the Iliad, though.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-13 21:28

Re: confess: No worries/surprise, I only read one translation back in university myself and lightly looked at a few others, haha. I bet theres some interesting articles giving a dive into that sort of comparison anyway.

[This post originally appeared as a series of five articles on Cohost. I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site, and have combined the five articles into one.]

Happy New Year! Today’s topic is perhaps my favorite film by perhaps my favorite director, Early Summer, directed by Yasujirō Ozu. (I’ve seen all but one of the over thirty Ozu films that have survived to this day.)

I’m an old straight white cisgender man, so I wouldn’t know about these things, but Early Summer has always struck me as a pretty gosh-darned queer film. I’ve seen other people make remarks to this effect (one of which I’ll address in due time), but have never seen a complete case laid out. This is my own attempt; you may judge for yourself to what extent it is successful.

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for all of Early Summer.

A bit about Ozu: Today he’s a critic’s darling, renowned for the formalist perfection of his films and often spoken of in reverent terms. (Adam Mars-Jones skewers some of the most overly-pretentious examples of such criticism in his book Noriko Smiling,¹ which does for Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring what I’ll attempt in a much smaller way to do for Early Summer.)

But from his own point of view Ozu was not making arthouse films; he was making “home dramas,” movies pitched at the growing post-war Japanese middle class, with an audience composed predominantly of women. His films are about topics of concern to that middle-class audience, for example, families growing apart in an increasingly urbanized Japan (Tokyo Story, 1953), or children rejecting arranged marriages for love marriages (Equinox Flower, 1955).

Early Summer (1951) is yet another home drama. It’s the middle film in Ozu’s “Noriko trilogy”—so called because all three films feature main characters named “Noriko”—and is relatively neglected compared to the other two. Late Spring, which preceded Early Summer, is generally considered the first great work of Ozu’s mature period; it’s ranked number 21 on the latest Sight and Sound critics’ list of the greatest films of all time, and number 62 on the accompanying directors’ list. Tokyo Story, which followed Early Summer, is almost universally regarded as Ozu’s masterpiece, and is ranked at number 4 on both of the Sight and Sound lists.

Early Summer does not appear on either of these lists. However, it’s probably my favorite of all Ozu’s films, in part because its melancholy is accompanied by a humor—and even a measure of optimism—that is largely missing in Late Spring and Tokyo Story, and in part because it’s interesting to look at it through the lens of queerness in cinema—as I hope to do in this series of posts.

On the surface Early Summer tells the story of 28-year-old unmarried Noriko (played by the great Setsuko Hara) and her family’s and her employer’s attempts to arrange a marriage for her.

Going one level down, Early Summer is about the difference between the married and the unmarried, how the married try to persuade or (worse) coerce the unmarried into getting married, and how maybe that isn’t always such a good idea. This theme is explicitly called out more than once in the film.

Early Summer further implies that there may be a good reason why some unmarried people, including Noriko (but not just Noriko), don’t want to marry: they may be “that type of person,” as the young lesbian Fumi described herself in Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana. This subtext rises briefly to the level of text at least once before being ambiguously dismissed.

Both Ozu and Hara remained unmarried until their deaths, and to my knowledge neither were ever credibly reported as having a romantic relationship with anyone. Per Donald Richie’s commentary on the Criterion release (referenced in the next section), Ozu was reported to become angry at any talk of his marrying. Meanwhile Hara, though termed “the eternal virgin” by a film producer for her film image, in real life had close friendships with many women, including a hair and makeup artist whose friendship with Hara began early on and continued after Hara retired into obscurity at the height of her career.

In modern terms we could therefore hypothesize Early Summer as a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor. What exact flavor of “queer” this might be we can leave undefined for now.

Does the film itself support this hypothesis? I’ll discuss this in more detail beginning in the following sections, as I walk through the various scenes and plot points of the film. However it’s generally agreed that very little in an Ozu film is accidental: interiors were constructed to his exact specifications, and actors’ gestures were meticulously rehearsed and multiple takes shot until he was satisfied. If something seems “queer” in Early Summer, there’s a good chance that Ozu intended it thus.

First, a note on sources: Since I don’t speak Japanese, I’m relying almost completely on the subtitles in the two English releases of Early Summer. The first is a Criterion release from 2004, currently available for streaming in the US on the Criterion Channel and Max. There is also a British Film Institute release from 2010, currently available for streaming in the UK on the BFI Player. (Those without access to these are free to try to hunt the film down on other sites devoted to hosting videos or archiving Internet content.)

In general I’ll be quoting the Criterion subtitles; as I discuss later, there are at least a couple of places where the BFI translation is substantially different, and another place where the Criterion subtitles contain a major error.

(Before I get into the film itself, note that the title in Japanese is Bakushū, or “Barley Harvest Time.” This doesn’t directly bear on my thesis, but it’s worth noting for completeness, and as we shall see it ties in with the conclusion of the film.)

Early Summer opens with three establishing shots: first a shot of a dog walking freely on the beach with the ocean in the background, then a shot of a single bird in a cage outside, and then a final shot of birds in cages inside a house. This is the house in the oceanside town of Kamakura in which Noriko (Setsuko Hara’s character) lives, along with her brother Kōichi (Chishū Ryū), his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), Noriko and Koichi’s father (Ichiro Sugai) and mother (Chieko Higashiyama), and Kōichi and Fumiko’s two young boys.

If we wish, we can interpret the first and third shots as showing a strong contrast between freedom in nature on the one hand, and the restrictions imposed by society and the Japanese family system on the other. In this interpretation the second shot represents Noriko, who has a degree of independence that her mother and Fumiko do not have, but is still constrained by the bonds of family and society.

In the following scenes Kōichi takes an early train to his job as a physician, while Noriko goes to the Kita-Kamakura station to catch a later one. There she meets Kenkichi, another physician who works with Kōichi and who (along with his mother) is the family’s next-door neighbor. Kenkichi tells her that he’s been reading a book, implied to have been recommended by Noriko. The Criterion release describes it only as “this book,” but the BFI release names it as Les Thibaults.

Les Thibaults (published in Japanese as Chibō-ka no hitobito, and apparently relatively popular in Japan at the time) is a multi-volume French novel that begins as one of its protagonists is discovered writing passionate messages to a fellow schoolboy—something Ozu himself was apparently falsely accused of—and is then separated from his friend. Later volumes describe their diverging paths in life. Why might have Noriko recommended this particular novel to Kenkichi? Hold that thought.

We then see Noriko at work, as a secretary and executive assistant to the head of a small firm (Shūji Sano). As she talks with her boss regarding café recommendations, her best friend Aya (Chikage Awashima) arrives, there to collect payment for the boss’s spending at the restaurant her mother owns. Noriko’s boss wonders when they’ll both get married, and refers to them as “old maids.”

(Before becoming a movie actress, Chikage Awashima was a musumeyaku top star in the Takarazuka Revue and occasionally played “pants roles,” i.e., as a female character dressing as a man for plot reasons. Osamu Tezuka was a fan of hers, and she supposedly inspired the main character Sapphire, “born . . . with a blue heart of a boy and a pink heart of a girl,” in his manga Princess Knight. Why might this be relevant to Early Summer? Again, hold that thought.)

After work, Noriko meets Kōichi and Fumiko for dinner. While they eat, Kōichi complains about post-war women (“[They’ve] become so forward.”) and Noriko corrects him: “We’ve just taken our natural place.” Kōichi then claims that’s why Noriko can’t get married, and she rebukes him: “It’s not that I can’t. I could in a minute if I wanted to.” (Note: a bit of foreshadowing here.)

Next occur the two key events that set the main plot in motion. First, Noriko’s great-uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) arrives for a visit. He wonders why she isn’t married yet. “Some women don’t want to get married,” he tells her. “Are you one of them?” Noriko laughs and leaves the room, but the seed has been planted in the minds of her family.

Noriko’s boss also thinks it’s time for her to get married, and he has just the man for her: “He’s never been married. Not sure if he’s still a virgin.” Her boss has photographs to show her, and won’t leave her leave without taking them.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya mercilessly tease one of their married friends, and after attending another friend’s wedding have dinner with that friend and another married friend, with a side dish of sexual innuendo. One of the married friends brags about how she spent a rained-out honeymoon playing with a “spinning top”: “My husband is very good at it.” Her friend cautions her: “You shouldn’t flaunt it in front of the single girls.”

However, Aya is not impressed with the implied amazingness of heterosexual intercourse: “Silly! We don’t play with tops, do we?” Noriko enthusiastically agrees with her: “That’s for children, isn’t it?” The debate between the married and the unmarried continues, after which Noriko goes home, where Kōichi and Fumiko are scheming regarding the marital candidate proposed by Noriko’s boss.

Kenkichi’s mother then visits Noriko’s mother, and tells her that a man from a detective agency has been asking about Noriko: “I realized it was about her marriage.” We also learn that Kenkichi’s wife died two years ago (leaving him with a young daughter), and that he’s not interested in remarrying: “All he does since his wife died is read books” (like Les Thibaults). Finally, we learn that Kenkichi’s best friend, Noriko’s brother Shoji, went missing in the war.

We now come to the climax of the first half of the movie. As Noriko’s nephews and their friends play with their model train set downstairs (one nephew asking if their father will buy them more train track), Aya visits Noriko and they talk in her room upstairs. Their married friends have made various excuses for why they couldn’t also visit; Noriko recalls how close they were at school and laments their drifting apart.

Throughout the first half of Early Summer Noriko and Aya are shown as mirroring each other’s gestures and speech. That mirroring continues in this scene (for example, they sit down next to each other at the exact same time and in the exact same manner), and then a very interesting thing happens. Ozu’s typical modus operandi is to continue a shot until someone stops speaking or moving, or even until they leave the room. But here he cuts immediately from Noriko and Aya simultaneously raising their glasses to drink, to Noriko’s father and mother simultaneously bringing food to their lips, as they relax sitting on a street curb in town.

If I were to speculate about what this juxtaposition might mean, if anything, I’d speculate as follows: that Ozu intended to show that, whatever Aya and Noriko might be to each other, they are as close, secure, and happy in their relationship as Noriko’s mother and father are in theirs—as much a couple as any other in the film, but not formally recognized as such.

Noriko’s father tells his wife, “This may be the happiest time for our family,” although he’s sad at the thought of Noriko leaving. They continue their conversation, and then are interrupted by the site of a balloon rising into the sky. “Some child must be crying,” Noriko’s father remarks. “Remember how Kōichi cried when he lost his balloon?” And on that somewhat ominous note the film enters its second half, during which conflicts over Noriko and her proposed marriage will rise to the surface.

We left Noriko and her best friend Aya enjoying a pleasant chat in Noriko’s room (their married friends having begged off with various excuses) and Noriko’s mother and father enjoying a day out without the rest of the family, rejoicing in the happiness they have, albeit a bit sad at the thought of Noriko leaving to marry.

The good times continue as Noriko brings home a cake to eat with her sister-in-law Fumiko, and their neighbor Kenkichi drops in unexpectedly and is invited to share it with them. The scene re-introduces Kenkichi and brings up the subject of his remarrying—something he doesn’t want, but his mother (played by Haruko Sugimura) does.

(I can’t resist adding that, in addition to appearing in all three films of the Noriko trilogy, as well as in several other Ozu films, Haruko Sugimura was a noted stage actress. Among other things, in 1956 she debuted the role of Asako in Yukio Mishima’s Rokumeikan, a play I discuss at great length in my book on Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana / Sweet Blue Flowers.)

The scene also shows the importance of Noriko’s income to the family finances: the price of the cake is JPY 900, equivalent to over JPY 6,000 today, at a time when Japan was a relatively poor country with an economy just emerging from wartime destruction. No wonder Fumiko protests the purchase, and Noriko downplays the expense to Kenkichi.

In the meantime Noriko’s brother Kōichi has been pursuing the idea of a marriage between Noriko and an unseen bachelor first suggested by Noriko’s boss, including asking his friends and associates for more information on the proposed groom. The results are “very promising”: “He’s in the social register, and seems to be a fine businessman.” “How nice,” replies his mother, but, “how old is he?”

The answer—“about 40”—dismays both Kōichi’s mother and his wife. He may think that the age gap is not an issue, but the women do, and you can see their disapproval in their downcast expressions. This marks the beginning of a family conflict as Kōichi—the nearest thing to a villain in Early Summer—tries to exert his patriarchal authority and refuses to give up on the idea of the marriage.

Meanwhile Kōichi’s bratty sons run away after he scolds them (they were mad because he brought home bread instead of more model train tracks), and Noriko recruits Kenkichi to (successfully) help find them. While this is happening, Koichi is away from home, playing Go with a friend—again a contrast between Kōichi as an overbearing would-be patriarch and Kenkichi as a more caring father figure. (In the next scene we also see Kenkichi showing affection to his own child, “my good little girl.”)

We then have another precipitating event: Kenkichi, who (recall) is a doctor in the same facility as Kōichi, gets recommended by Kōichi for a plum position as a department head in a hospital way out in rural Japan, and tells his mother that he wants to accept it. She despairs at the thought of leaving their home, but his enthusiasm carries the day.

Then Noriko’s boss asks a few questions that we’ve been asking ourselves. While Noriko is away from work, Aya stops by, and the boss questions Aya on whether Noriko will go through with the match or not: “I don’t understand her . . . . Is she interested in men?” Aya at first demurs: “What do you think?” Noriko’s boss has seen indications both ways, and presses the question: “Has she always been like that?” Aya responds in the affirmative. The questioning goes on. Aya tells him that Noriko’s apparently never been in love, “but she has an album of . . . Hepburn photos this thick,” holding her thumb and forefinger about 4 centimeters apart.

Here we have the first of two translation issues. Aya actually refers to “Hepburn” without mentioning a given name. The Criterion subtitles—by Donald Richie, who should have known better—make this a reference to Audrey Hepburn, who’d had only small roles by then. It’s almost certain that this is instead a reference to Katherine Hepburn, who was a major star by the time Noriko would have entered middle school. Was the teenaged Noriko besotted by the androgynous beauty of Katharine Hepburn (who would have made a stunning otokoyaku)? It sure looks like it.

The subtext now threatens to become text, as Noriko’s boss learns that “Hepburn” refers to an American actress, and asks the obvious follow-up question about Noriko. In the Criterion subtitles it’s translated as “So she goes for women?” The BFI translation puts it more bluntly: “Is she queer?” What is Noriko’s boss really asking? Japanese speakers can correct me here, but I believe his actual question uses the term “hentai.”

Western fans are used to thinking of “hentai” as referring to pornography. However, my understanding is that at the time of the film “hentai” in colloquial Japanese would have referred specifically to sexual behavior that was considered abnormal. So if Noriko’s boss did use the term, another possible translation might have been “Is she a pervert?” Both the Criterion and BFI translations soften the question; in particular BFI’s “is she queer?”, while defensible, risks projecting our current ideas about “queer” (including its positive connotations) onto a film created in a different time.

In any case, Aya is determined to shut down any discussion of Noriko’s proclivities. “No!” she firmly replies. Noriko’s boss is apparently unconvinced: “You can never know. She’s very strange, in any case.” His prurient instincts aroused, Noriko’s boss then envisions another solution to the problem of Noriko, and queries Aya about it: “Why don’t you teach her?” “About what?” “Everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” He pats her shoulder and admonishes her: “Don’t try to be coy,” as we viewers pause to consider the implications of what he’s asking her to do.

Aya rejects this line of inquiry as well: “Don’t talk to me like that! That was rude!” Noriko’s boss laughs, offers a half-hearted apology, and then (after telling Aya that Noriko won’t be back that day) invites her to lunch and quizzes her on her preferences in sushi: “Tuna” she says. He continues, “How about an open clam?” (which Donald Richie’s commentary helpfully informs us is a euphemism for the vagina). “Sure,” she replies. “And a nice long rice roll?” “No, thank you!” His final words are, “You’re strange too,” and again I think I hear the word “hentai” enter the conversation.

We now switch to a scene featuring Noriko and her next-door neighbor Kenkichi. Recall that Kenkichi decided to accept an offer as a department head in a hospital in Akita, several hundred kilometers north of Tokyo and on the opposite coast. Noriko meets him in a café before her brother Kōichi is to host him at a farewell dinner party, and they talk about Shoji, Noriko’s other brother who went missing in action during the war. Kenkichi recalls how he and Shoji were best friends in school, often eating at this café, indeed at this very table. Kenkichi tells Noriko that he still keeps a letter that Shoji sent him, with a stalk of wheat enclosed (probably indicating that Shoji was deployed in northern China). Noriko asks if she can have the letter, and Kenkichi agrees.

Afterward Noriko visits Kenkichi’s mother, while Kenkichi himself is still at his farewell party. Kenkichi’s mother tells Noriko her secret dream (“please don’t tell Kenkichi”): “I just wish Kenkichi had gotten remarried to someone like you.” She apologizes and asks Noriko not to be angry (“It’s just a wish in my heart”), but Noriko stares at her with an intense expression (her usual smile absent), and asks her, “Do you mean it? . . . Do you really feel that way about me?” Kenkichi’s mother apologizes again, but Noriko presses on: “You wouldn’t mind an old maid like me?” Then before Kenkichi’s mother can respond, Noriko speaks: “Then I accept.”

Kenkichi’s mother is incredulous. She asks Noriko several times to confirm what she’s saying, thanks Noriko effusively and weeps tears of joy at her good fortune, but continues to question Noriko about her decision even as Noriko leaves to go home. (Incidentally, this scene features a bravura performance by Haruko Sugimura.)

After she leaves the house, Noriko encounters Kenkichi, just returned from his farewell party. Noriko exchanges some small talk with him, but says absolutely nothing about what she just told his mother.

Noriko’s decision then plays out across multiple scenes:

At first Kenkichi doesn’t understand what his mother is trying to tell him (“She accepted.” “Accepted what?”). When he finally gets the message (“She agreed to marry you. To become your wife!” “My wife?” “Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”), he looks absolutely gobsmacked. His mother breaks down in tears again telling him how happy she is, and how happy he should be. He tries to play along (glumly echoing, “Yes, I’m happy”), but he looks for all the world like a man who would sooner eat nails than enter into another marriage.

Kenkichi’s mother doesn’t understand why he’s not happy. She concludes, “What an odd boy you are.” The Japanese word here appears to be “hen,” which I understand to be a softer adjective than “hentai,” and not sexual in nature. But note that Kenkichi is now the third person after Noriko and Aya to be referred to as not normal in some way.

Meanwhile Noriko is interrogated about her decision by her family, especially by Kōichi, in a beautifully framed and shot scene—Noriko in white, her head bowed, her brother in black, barking questions like a prosecutor cross-examining a criminal. Noriko is unrepentant: “When his mother talked to me, I didn’t feel a moment’s hesitation. I suddenly felt I’d be happy with him.” Her parents retire upstairs to chew on their disappointment—Noriko walking silently past them on her way to her room—while Kōichi tells Fumiko, “What could we do now? She’s made up her mind. You know how she is.”

The next day, after Kenkichi boards the train to Akita, his mother visits Noriko at her office, and they tiptoe around the question of what others thought: “Did your parents approve?” “Yes.” “And your brother?” “Don’t worry.” and “What did Kenkichi think?” “. . . He’s overjoyed. He didn’t sleep last night.”

The next two shots echo the beginning of the film, a shot of a bird in a cage outside, and then Noriko’s father inside with the other cages, caring for the birds. Noriko’s mother laments that Noriko didn’t make a better match, Fumiko nods in agreement, and Noriko’s father goes for a walk to buy more birdseed, silently contemplating their life going forward, in one of those quiet scenes that Ozu does so well.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya have their last scene together. It starts by echoing and completing the action at the end of their previous scene: then they raised their glasses together to drink, now they lower their glasses in a simultaneous gesture. Aya tells Noriko that she can’t believe Noriko would ever end up like this: she thought Noriko would be a modern woman living “Western-style, with a flower garden, listening to Chopin,” “wearing a white sweater, with a terrier in tow,” and greeting Aya in English—“Hello, how are you?”

Instead Aya now imagines Noriko wearing farmers clothes in rural Japan, speaking the local dialect. She playfully imitates country speech, and Noriko responds in kind: “Ya don’t look it, but ya talk like the locals.” “I figure to live in Akita when me and my man get hitched.” The subtext here I read as follows: Noriko knows how to pretend to be something she is not—a conventional heterosexual woman in a conventional heterosexual marriage—and she will accept doing so in her self-imposed exile from Tokyo, the price she must pay for avoiding what she considered to be a worse fate.

The tone then turns serious. Aya recalls meeting Kenkichi when they were in school, on a hiking trip with Noriko and her brother Shoji, and presses Noriko about her choice: “Did you already love him then?” “No, I had no particular feeling for him. . . . I never imagined myself marrying him.” Noriko evades Aya’s questions about how she came to love Kenkichi, refusing time after time to acknowledge her feelings for him as those of love. Instead she insists, “No, I just feel I could trust him with all my heart and be happy.”

But trust Kenkichi for what? we want to ask Noriko. To respect her for who and what she is? To not want a conventional relationship with her? To not press her for sex or for children (after all, he already has one)? To keep her secrets, as she might keep any secret of his?

After this last meeting with Aya, Noriko comes back to a cold house and a dinner alone. Her parents and Kōichi leave the room to avoid greeting her, and only Fumiko is there to welcome her.

In the next scene she and Fumiko walk to the beach for one last look at the ocean, Ozu showing them walking up a sand dune in a gorgeous crane shot—supposedly the only one he ever used. In the earliest scenes in the film Noriko was dressed in stylish Western clothes, contrasted with Fumiko’s traditional Japanese attire. Now, instead of mirroring Aya, she is a mirror of Fumiko in her plain housewife’s outfit—but still freer and looser in her appearance.

Noriko tries to reassure Fumiko that she’ll be OK: “Are you worried that I’m marrying a man with a child? . . . I love children” (as we’ve seen earlier in the film with both her nephews and Kenkichi’s daughter). “Frankly, I felt I couldn’t trust a man who was still unattached and drifting around at 40. I think a man with a child is more trustworthy.” (Note again Noriko’s emphasis on trust and not love.) After discussing how they’ll be competing to scrimp and save in managing their families’ finances, they take a last walk down the beach by the ocean.

Just as she saw Aya for the last time (at least until/unless Kenkichi can return to Tokyo), Noriko now takes formal leave of her boss. He idly wonders if he himself could have been the right man for her. She does not encourage him in this line of thought.

The family then gathers for one last commemorative photo. Without Noriko’s salary they can no longer afford the house in Kamakura, so they break up: the parents to live with the great-uncle; Noriko to Akita with Kenkichi, his mother, and his daughter; and Kōichi, Fumiko, and their sons to some other less-expensive dwelling (perhaps an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs).

The parents recall when they moved into the house: “It was spring and Noriko had just turned 12.” Kōichi remembers that time as well: “She used to wear a ribbon in her hair, and she was always singing.” But “children grow up so quickly,” her parents remark, and living together forever, “that’s impossible.”

Her usual smile nowhere in evidence, Noriko takes it all upon herself: “I’m sorry, I’ve broken up the family.” Despite reassurances from her father (“It’s not your fault. It was inevitable.”) she flees from the room, goes upstairs to her own room, and cries her heart out, distraught about the turn that her and their lives have taken.

The final scene shows Noriko’s parents at the great-uncle’s house, far from the sea. They glance at a wedding procession walking through the fields (“Look there. A bride is passing by. I wonder what sort of family she’s marrying into?”), think of Noriko, and resign themselves to the family’s fate: “We shouldn’t ask for too much.” “We’ve been really happy.” The film closes with a tracking shot of a field of grain—perhaps the barley of the Japanese title?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, traditionally most mainstream critics writing about Ozu seem to have ignored or downplayed the potentially queer aspects of Early Summer. For example, they go unmentioned in the essays by David Bordwell and Jim Jarmusch included in the Criterion collection release, as well as in Bordwell’s book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. As Yuka Kanno remarks, “The self-regulation of the ‘Ozu criticism’ industry has too long suppressed the possibility of new readings of his films,” preferring to focus on the “existing and limited interpretive frameworks of auteurism or of Ozu as an alternative modernist.”²

One exception is Robin Wood, who specifically references the scene between Noriko’s boss and Aya, and the lesbian implications of Noriko’s idolization of Katherine Hepburn.³ Another is Kanno, who discusses the Hepburn/Noriko connection at greater length.

I also found it interesting how upfront Early Summer is in raising the possibility of Noriko and (especially) Aya not having conventional heterosexual desires; in particular, I can’t imagine any mainstream American film of the time having an exchange like that between Aya and Noriko’s boss. Beyond general cultural differences between Japan and the US regarding discussions of sex, it’s worth noting that after the war Japan saw a reaction against restrictions imposed by the imperial Japanese government (and to a lesser extent by the American occupation authorities) and an explosion of interest in sexual practices, both conventional and less so.

In particular, see the late Mark McLelland’s discussion of the phenomenon of ryōki or “curiosity hunting”: seeking out the bizarre and unusual, including unusual sexual practices, both by reading about them and (for some) experiencing them firsthand.⁴ The more risqué elements of Early Summer—Ozu’s first film after the end of occupation censorship—can perhaps be seen as an attempt to provide a bit of ryōki in a mainstream film suitable for viewing by a middle-class audience.

Finally, what are we to make of Early Summer today, over 70 years after its release?

In my opinion, it’s not worth arguing about exactly how “queer” the film’s characters really are. Is Aya a lesbian? Is Noriko aromantic and asexual? Are Aya and Noriko a couple and, if so, in what sense? Is Kenkichi reluctant to remarry because he harbors no desire toward women, and is mourning a past love for Noriko’s brother Shoji? These are questions that can be debated one way or the other. The more important point is that all three of these characters behave in ways that are—to one degree or another—inconsistent with conventional heterosexual norms.

I suspect that the original audience for Ozu’s “home dramas” would have picked up on this. They likely knew someone, or knew of someone, who refused to marry or remarry—single women approaching their thirties, bachelors in their forties and fifties, widowers content to live alone—and would have had some inkling as to why this was. They would have seen in the fates of the characters in the film the possible fates of some of their friends, co-workers, even family members.

In Early Summer the characters accept their fates with resignation, sighs, and (occasionally) tears. But consider another possible resolution to the plot: Noriko is no longer pestered into marrying by her employer and her family. She continues to work, contribute to the household, and help care for her nephews. The household in Kamakura remains intact and harmonious, even as Noriko and Kōichi’s parents leave to spend their final years with the great-uncle. Aya and Noriko continue to enjoy a close relationship with each other, while Aya takes over the restaurant owned by her mother and remains unmarried and independent. Kenkichi enjoys life with his books, and after his stint in Akita returns with his mother and daughter to once again be a good neighbor and friend to Noriko and her family.

If Ozu intended for Early Summer to have a message, I think it would be this: here is a traditional multi-generational Japanese family broken apart not by modernity, or feminism, or Western culture, or any other of the usual suspects, but by a refusal to think outside the bounds of conventional heterosexual norms. It’s too much, I think, to expect a film made in 1951 for a mainstream audience to propose an alternative to this; highlighting the problem is achievement enough.

What then can I conclude regarding my original hypothesis? Here I can do no better than to “reverse the argument,” shamelessly steal the words with which Adam Mars-Jones ended his book about Ozu’s Late Spring, and adapt them to my own purpose:

If Yasujirō Ozu did decide to make a film about the experience of being queer in postwar Japan, within the limits of what the studio and his audience could accept, what would it look like? Wouldn’t it look like Early Summer? Very much like Early Summer.

As the year ends, I thought about why I like this site and why I’m posting so much on it. Please indulge me while I ramble a bit.

First, Cohost is a good match with my writing style. I’m not the sort of person who can think fast and post snappy one-liners in response to the latest thing. That’s in large part what Twitter rewards, and I don’t see the various Twitter substitutes (Mastodon, Post, Hive, etc.) being any different. I once spent almost a year writing a single blog post because I felt I didn’t know enough about the topic to not embarrass myself. (Here it is, in case you’re curious; math, programming, and design fans might like it.)

Second, I like to have an audience, but I don’t need a big audience. Writing at my “official” site allowed to me to write at length, but I felt like I was shouting into the void—especially since I didn’t provide a way for people to add comments. To remedy that, I tried out Substack for a while. The problem there was that I didn’t feel like joining in the obsession with growing and (especially) monetizing your subscriber list that was promoted by the site’s owners. Here on Cohost I have about 3 dozen followers, which is enough for me to get an occasional like—or even a comment or two—to motivate me to continue writing.

(I also make a point of following everyone who follows me. That to me makes this place feel more like a community—or even someplace that might one day spawn a “scenius,” to use Brian Eno’s term. If you follow me and I don’t show up in your own followers list, and you are OK with me following you, please tell me in a comment—or even just like this post, so I’ll know to check—and I’ll remedy that oversight.)

Third, I like the Cohost interface, which is simple and straightforward, and the use of Markdown, which I also use for my official blog. I tried Tumblr for a while, and maybe it was just my age showing, but I could never get how Tumblr was supposed to work.

Finally, I like supporting (relatively) small-scale endeavors run by folks who believe in what they’re doing and are not looking to ride exponential growth curves to fame and fortune. One of the great things about the present day is that the combination of low-cost computing and free and open source software makes it possible for sites to be created with a minimal investment.

But, they still need some financial support in order to continue running, and the existence of (nearly) global payment networks makes it possible for us to provide that support. So, if you can afford it and haven’t done so yet, please go to your Settings page and sign up for Cohost Plus!

That’s all for this year. Tomorrow I’ll celebrate the new year with a mega-post (split into 5 posts for readability) on one of my favorite films. In the meantime, Happy New Year to you all!

Noel B (@NoelBWrites) - 2022-12-31 13:55

I feel the exact same way about the audience bit

I want people to see what I write so they can comment on it! If I write about something it’s because it matters to me, and if it matters to me, I want to talk about it with people.

But I am not interested in “growing” an audience to the point that other platforms seem to encourage in order to “monetize” it. At a certain size, your audience is no longer people and it’s just an abstract number, if that makes sense. And with a large enough audience, comments and stuff stop being for you and start being for other people in the audience.

It’s like if there’s nobody to read your stuff you’re talking to an empty room. But if there’s too many people reading your stuff, you’re screaming from a pulpit and then hiding backstage. Either way feels lonely.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-31 14:41

Your point about “comments and stuff stop being for you” is well-taken, and is definitely something I don’t like about Twitter: people replying to tweets (especially to tweets by people with a high follower count) as a way to show off how clever they are to other people following the original tweeter, hoping they can gain followers themselves.

exodrifter (@exodrifter) - 2024-12-31 14:16

I have pretty similar feelings to you and agree with almost everything you said about cohost. I never really got how Tumblr works despite being in its age demo and Twitter is much too short for my liking and I’ve resigned to use Twitter mostly as a way to push the equivalent of an RSS feed to whoever uses it. I really like how cohost somehow manages to land in the middle of high-effort and low-effort posting.

As for audience size, that’s something I’m struggling with in a different way. I want to grow, but my idea of growth is typically different from the platform’s idea of growth. For example: On Twitch they want you to gain more followers and subscribers, but I mostly just want more active chatters and fans so I can have an easier time sharing and marketing my completed games. Of course, making more money is great and that’s one of my goals too, but I think for me it is more important to have a healthy and active community even if it’s a smaller size.

It certainly doesn’t help that platforms use their own ideas of growth and what something “good” is in their recommendation engines to decide who gets seen more, and I’m very happy that cohost doesn’t really have anything like that.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-31 00:09

“it is more important to have a healthy and active community even if it’s a smaller size.” Yes, exactly. Thanks for the comment!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I try to resist the siren call of “someone is wrong on the Internet,” and also try not to comment on topics where I have no personal knowledge or haven’t done much research. I’m going to break those two rules a bit today.

In reading about the Russo-Ukraine war, I’ve noticed a strain of commentary to the effect that everything would have been fine if NATO had not expanded eastward (or, alternatively, been invited to expand eastward) in the 1990s and 2000s. Counterfactuals are always tricky, and I don’t have any special knowledge that would make my opinion an informed one, so I’ll make no comment on that claim.

Another comment I’ve seen (and I’m kicking myself because I can’t find the source now) is that it is in the natural order of things, and a foreordained matter of geography, that Germany and Russia between themselves will control and exercise influence over the lands between Europe and Asia.

Is it possible that this will be the case in the future? Of course. Is it probable that this will be the case? I don’t know enough to judge this. Is it an absolute certainty that this will be the case? Almost certainly not, because within the last few hundred years there was an existence proof to the contrary, namely the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

I must confess that until recently I had never heard of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—an indication that the education of Americans like me neglected the history of Eastern Europe relative to that of Western Europe. (It’s not even a question of “Eurocentrism”; I recall my history classes having much more material on, say, China, India, and Japan than they did on Eastern Europe.)

You can read the Wikipedia article for yourself, but the basic idea is that up until the time of the American and French revolutions there was a polity (technically, a union of two polities) that at its maximum extent encompassed all or significant portions of the current nations of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and even Russia. (See the left map above.)

The Commonwealth at its height had a territory of almost 1 million square kilometers and a population of about 12 million. (As a comparison, the population of England and then the United Kingdom did not exceed 10 million people until around 1800.) It had a relatively modern political system for its time, in which monarchs were elected by the aristocracy, with a legislature—also controlled by the aristocracy—that served as a check on the monarch. (Again, compare this to the political structure of England at the same time.)

Over time the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth dwindled in power, until in the late 18th century its territory was partitioned between the Kingdom of Prussia (the core of what eventually became Germany), the Russian Empire (precursor to the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation), and the Hapsburg Empire (which gave rise to present-day Austria and Hungary). (See the right map above.)

But before that there was a time when the people and lands between Europe and Asia were not under the sway of Germany and Russia, but pursued their own course. Could this be the case again in future? Again, I have no special expertise to bring to this question, but there are two suggestive factors.

The first is the extensive military and other support provided to Ukraine by Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia; together these comprise all of the countries whose territories made up the former Commonwealth, except for Belarus and (of course) Russia. Commentators have spoken of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states, along with the Scandanavian countries of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, as potentially forming a new center of gravity within Europe, comparable to the historical grouping of France, Germany, and their Western European neighbors.

The second factor is more speculative. The ecologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin has claimed that the dynamics of the historical evolution of societies favor the creation of new empires on what he calls “metaethnic frontiers” or “metaethnic fault lines”: “A small group near such a boundary will be confronted by very different others, dwarfing in their ‘otherness’ neighboring groups that are on the same side of the metaethnic line.”¹ Turchin’s hypothesis is that conflicts are more likely at such boundaries, especially if they also coincide with political boundaries, and that such conflicts will cause co-ethnics to band together (or be forced together), intensify their common identification and cooperation with each other, and eventually found new and dominant polities.

Traditionally metaethnic formations were determined by such factors as common descent, common languages, and common religions. However one can also conceive of such formations as based on commonly-held political, economic, and cultural beliefs and tendencies—hence the idea that there is a “Europe” characterized by liberal democracy as the preferred form of government (however imperfectly implemented it may be at times), the free market system plus social insurance as the preferred form of the economy, and a fair degree of cultural toleration and even experimentation.

Today’s hypothesized metaethnic frontier would then consist of those countries that exist in the frontier zone between “Europe” in this sense and “not-Europe,” i.e., the countries that are not characterized by the beliefs and tendencies listed above. If Turchin’s theory is correct, one would expect to see the rise in power and influence of those countries over time if and as conflicts across that metaethnic boundary persist—the current war being one such.

Will the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rise again from the ashes like a phoenix? Almost certainly not, at least in that form. But might we see new alignments arise that remind us of it? It‘s certainly a possibility, and I suspect more of a possibility than the geopolitical realities of 19th and 20th century Europe persisting through the 21st.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-30 23:42

It’s definitely true that Russia and Germany are not simply going to assert control over their inter-region. I think that’s very much a loose extrapolation from a narrow period of history. Russia has only had about 300 years of being particularly strong, which is significant and doesnt go away quickly, but pales in comparison to the geopolitical endurance of China, or (to a lesser extent) France and Iran. And new eras totally change the game of “What allows a country to be dominant?” Gunpowder nullifies nomadic armies, economic growth replaces the zero-sum focus on war, and the emphasis on ideological-moral-cultural axes make ~1920 onward fundamentally different.

I think it is very easy for people to forget that patterns from the last 30, 50, 100, 200 years are often temporary, contextual blips. There are so many things we take for granted- for example, ~200 years ago, the Russian language was very underdeveloped. Their literary culture had few forms and was incredibly awkward and limited, leading to educated Russians relying on French. Western European cultures were all in a similar situation 100-400 years prior. It is very difficult for people right now to imagine what it is like to have a vastly less developed language and literary culture, and the effects on the rest of culture, politics, etc etc are immense. Besides that being an interesting point, I think it also demonstrates how much and how rapidly things change in ways we have no real perspective for.

Taking any sort of “well, in realpolitik terms, obviously Russia is going to try to dominate this area, you just gotta accept it” approach is not only historically blind extrapolation but also morally questionable. Realism is good, but realism does not mean giving up action and acting like something is ossified.

Poland-Lithuania is definitely fascinating. I’ve wondered if it survived, or if Austria reformed into a democratic “Danubian United States” like Franz Ferdinand was considering, if that may’ve prevented a lot of the horrors of 20th century Europe due to Germany and Russia. If Prussia or the Ottomans hadn’t risen, the history of the area from the Balkans to the Baltic could’ve been very fundamentally different.

Europe east of Germany and Italy is definitely neglected in history classes, which is part of why I’ve always had a particular interest in central and eastern europe. I only learned about Poland-Lithuania relatively early(in high school) because I was a voracious history nerd with “contrarian” interests.

A more loosely adopted version of Turchin’s hypothesis like you mentioned is pretty fascinating. I do think it is pretty difficult to actually holistically analyze though. I can think of some massive cross-region conflicts- nomadic vs sedentary, religion vs religion, fascist vs nonfascist, democratic vs authoritarian, capitalist vs communist, but a lot of those are dominated by preexisting large powers rather than bands of smaller polities, so there’s not much ability to actually evaluate that supposed tendency on its own terms rather than on a “great power harnessing a sphere of influence” framework.

Also, this is verging off topic, but heres a random underdeveloped personal pet theory regarding spheres of power/motion: While things like economic power and what i will call “accountability and proficiency” are major vectors for power in the future, I suspect that another major one is communicative. I suspect a very large advantage that US culture has had is that English is spoken in the USA and the Commonwealth countries, allowing for a large base of easier cultural creation and exchange. The convenient talent pool is larger, the audience is larger, and thus the opportunities for cultural creation of all size is larger, allowing for more capacity to create media and ideas that are strong enough to sizably jump to other languages and affect other cultures. China is another example of another country that has a large ’base’ for this that could end up very potent. Japan is an example of something that punches above its language population in this regard- I suspect that part of this is due to distinctive visual culture’s ability to cross barriers.

Here is a video you may find fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk0IZsshET0 I think people are generally unaware of how unstable the situation in central/eastern europe was for several years after WW1, and the video demonstrates some interesting aspecst during the nascent stages of Ukrainian nationalism.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-31 00:09

Thank you for your comment, and for the video link!

Incidentally, if you are interested in Turchin’s theories, he did treatments of them in War and Peace and War and Ultrasociety for general audiences. (Historical Dynamics is much more technical, with a fair amount of math and lots of computer simulations.) It’s all part of what he and others call “cliodynamics,” i.e., bringing extensive data collection and mathematical modeling to questions about the historical evolution of societies. There’s an open-access journal you might find interesting: Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-31 00:26

Interesting, thanks! I will check that out.

Everyone does it, and I will too: Some quick year-end thoughts on things I read, watched, or listened to this year, and liked well enough to write about them here. Where appropriate I’ve included links to the official source material. (I avoid scanlation sites because as a practical matter I want to encourage publishers to translate more works into English and distribute them as widely as possible.)

I don’t do rank ordering or numerical scores, these are just in semi-random order, starting with my top 5 yuri manga:

• Yuri Is My Job! (10 volumes in English, ongoing). This started out as a parody of class S tropes as filtered through Maria Watches Over Us, but has become deeper and more interesting over time, both as a story and as metatextual commentary on the yuri genre. It will be interesting to see whether the upcoming anime adaptation does it justice.
• How Do We Relationship? (7 volumes, ongoing). Unlike many yuri works, this manga doesn’t end when the main couple gets together; in fact that’s just the starting point, and now the main couple isn’t even a couple any more.
• Even Though We’re Adults (5 volumes, ongoing). The most adult yuri manga around, not in the “adult video” sense, but in the “adults having problems only adults have, and working through them as adults” sense. This is Takako Shimura’s best work published in English thus far.
• I Can’t Believe I Slept with You (3 volumes, complete). Another work which considerably transcends its (somewhat dubious) premise.
• She, Her Camera, and Her Seasons (5 volumes, complete). One of the better depictions of a love triangle around, and one which avoids a pat resolution. It also deftly uses photography as a running theme: taking photos is so central to two of the main characters’ lives that they do it even in—really, especially in—their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

Other non-manga yuri works worthy of note:

• Otherside Picnic light novel (7 volumes, ongoing). What really sells this work is the narration by and interior monologue of Sorawo, one of the two protagonists. I watched one episode of the anime, which was unexceptional, and am skipping the manga.
• Yurizen! Salon—Shirayuri’s Comforting Food Therapy super-light novel (23 volumes, complete). This is another entry in the genre of yuri works involving food, here made more interesting by featuring traditional Chinese medicinal recipes.
• GAP: The Series live-action TV series (6 episodes, ongoing). This Thai production features a rather clichéd trope—romance between an overbearing and emotionally cold boss and her younger naïve but spunky subordinate—but it’s more than redeemed by the incredible chemistry between the two co-stars. I wrote about this one as an example of the growing creation of yuri/GL works outside Japan. (There are several more upcoming yuri live-action series from Thailand, although Thai GL works are still far outnumbered by Thai BL works.)
• She Makes My Heart Flutter live-action web series (5 episodes, complete). This Korean work is a sweet “love comes late” story, featuring two generations of lesbians and their different perspectives.

Finally, some other things I enjoyed this year:

• Anime: I watched all episodes of well over a dozen series this year. These were my top 5, in no particular order: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, Akiba Maid War, Birdie Wing, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, and My Dress-Up Darling.
• Film: Everything Everywhere All At Once. Unlike some, I didn’t think this was a masterpiece, but I enjoyed it well enough, and it’s good to see Michelle Yeoh get more recognition.
• Music: This was the year of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. According to Spotify I listened to over 125 hours of DJ Sabrina tracks (including over 80 replays of “Lose Myself”), and I probably listened to that much or more on the Apple Music app after I bought all her albums on Bandcamp.
• Books: Almost all of my reading was done as research for my book. Other than that I don’t think I read an entire book “for fun” all year, which is rather unusual for me. However I’ve started reading poetry in earnest again; right now I’m halfway through H.D.’s Selected Poems.

Finally, while (unlike some) I won’t do a “worst of 2022” list, I did want to mention two works that I found disappointing, and for which my opinion is somewhat of a minority one:

• I’m in Love with the Villainess light novel. If this series had ended with volume 3, I would have been perfectly happy (well, except for the stupid and unnecessary incest subplot). The last two volumes felt like the author was writing to satisfy the expectations of fans and the publisher for more material. I thought the conclusion of volume 5 in particular was an ass-pull that for me at least strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
• Spy x Family anime. There’s nothing inherently bad about this series, but I found myself continually putting off watching the latest episode, until finally I dropped it.

Thanks for reading, and here’s wishing you a Happy New Year!

[This post originally appeared on Cohost.]

Recently I stumbled across a blog post by Julian Gough. His post is both long and heartfelt, but the bare facts are follows:

Upon being solicited by Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson, Gough agreed to write a text—the End Poem—to be displayed to players who beat the game in survival mode. After much back and forth, Persson’s company Mojang paid Gough GBP 20,000 for his work, but never got a formal copyright assignment, Gough having rejected the proposed contract as being too one-sided and not respecting his role as the writer.

Before the acquisition of Mojang by Microsoft was announced, Mojang executives again approached Gough to try to get him to sign a formal contract, but he again refused. Eventually after much agonizing—and some resentment of the financial rewards realized by Persson and others at Mojang—Gough decided to waive any rights he had with respect to the End Poem and dedicate it to the public domain.

There is much in this saga that touches on the topic of art vs. business; at its core it is a story of someone who thought he was an artist creating art trying—and failing—to communicate with people who thought they were businesspeople creating a product. But that topic is too big for me to discuss right now; instead I’ll focus on the reaction to Gough’s story, and then on the poem itself.

I’ll start with the commenters at Hacker News. I’ve been on the Internet a long time (back to the Usenet era), and am quite aware of the negativity that can be found there; however, I was taken aback at the intensity of the contempt directed at Gough. The various reactions can be paraphrased as follows:

“Gough is a nobody, he had nothing to do with the success of Minecraft.” “Gough got his money, then got greedy for more.” “I am not a lawyer, but here is my confidently-expressed argument that Gough didn’t have a legal leg to stand on.” “Gough probably didn’t spend more than a couple of hours writing that, it wasn’t worth 20,000 pounds.” “Gough wasn’t Notch’s friend, he was just a contractor.”

I find these last two classes of comments particularly interesting and ironic. The first is essentially an expression of the labor theory of value: that the economic value of an item should depend on the amount of work that went into producing it—hence the claim that Gough was grossly overpaid for (supposedly) a few hours work. But this claim applies with much greater force to Persson, who realized USD 1.5 billion in financial rewards for just a few years of work. Even if he worked 100 or more hours a week, that still equates to an hourly wage of about USD 50,000, an order of magnitude or two greater than what we’d expect to pay even a top-rank programmer.

Similarly, one of the commenters claimed that Gough had a “parasocial relationship” with Persson, thinking Persson was a friend when he was instead an entrepreneur looking for a hired hand. But it seems to me that many of the Hacker News commenters themselves have a parasocial relationship with the founders, VCs, and rockstar developers who form the elite of the technology industry.

They eagerly consume their idols’ blog posts and tweets, vociferously defend them from criticisms both large and small, and think themselves knowledgeable about the startup world and everything connected to it, so that if they were ever handed a term sheet they would be able to negotiate a Series A round as deftly as those whom they idolize. But I suspect that if the actual founders, VCs, and other power players were ever to come into contact with most Hacker News commenters, they would dismiss them as “Internet randos.”

Enough of Hacker News. If we turn to Gough’s blog post, we find an entirely different set of commenters, almost all expressing gratitude to Gough for both writing the End Poem and setting it free, with many telling him that the End Poem changed their lives. So it behooves us to look at the End Poem itself, a copy of which Gough appended to his post (and the beginning of which is shown above).

Strictly speaking, the End Poem is a prose poem: part story, part poem. It has enough poetic aspects that I will consider it—and judge it—as I would a poem. I’ve read much more poetry than the average person, have concentrated my reading among those considered “major poets” in the literary canon, and as a consequence have pretty high standards for what I consider a good poem (or prose poem).

So one might expect me to unfavorably compare the End Poem—an appendage to a “mere” video game—to “real” poems (such as one might find in the New Yorker or Poetry magazines). Or, if I were to acknowledge any excellence at all about it, to dismiss it with a variant of Noel Coward’s comment about the potency of “cheap music.”

But I’m not going to do that. As poetry the End Poem is as suited to its context, and to its audience, as are the poems that appear in the New Yorker or Poetry, and it seems to have meant far more to at least some of those who played Minecraft than the typical New Yorker or Poetry poem does to its readers. Why is that?

The End Poem does two things, and does them both very well. Recall its original context: it was shown only to players who had successfully completed the game. Those players would likely have spent dozens of hours attempting this, during which they would risk becoming estranged from the outside world, including their family and their friends. Some might have started playing Minecraft because they were already estranged from their family or others, and sought refuge from that estrangement in the game.

To those people, the End Poem first says: You have not wasted your time playing this game. This game—this “world that was flat, and infinite [where] the sun was a square of white”—is no less real—and no less worthy of your and our attention—than anything in the supposedly “real” world.

But it also says that likewise this other world—“on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock”—is no less real than the world of the game, and that the player who is about to leave the game can achieve their goals in this world just as they have in that world:

and the universe said I love you and the universe said you have played the game well and the universe said everything you need is within you and the universe said you are stronger than you know

The length of the End Poem, and the nine minutes or so it takes to display, serve as a decompression chamber for players, to prepare them before they leave the world of the game to reenter the other world. That process culminates in the most famous affirmation in the End Poem:

and the universe said I love you because you are love

William Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” That line in the End Poem teeters on the edge between enough and more than enough, and even goes a bit over the edge (as Gough himself acknowledges), but I understand why Gough left it in, and why it meant so much to so many people.

As I see it, it says to the player: you can love, and you can be loved. The love you put into playing this game is a mirror of the love you can put into living your life and being with others, and if you do that then that love can and will be returned to you.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. . . .

You are the player.

Wake up.

And now, thanks to Gough, the End Poem is now part of our common heritage from which future artists can create more works of art. And Gough himself has seen his act of generosity been repaid by people subscribing to his newsletter and potentially buying his next book.

But what about all the other artists, the ones whose work languishes in obscurity or was sold for a mess of pottage in work-for-hire arrangements? Gough touches on their plight in his post, and has things to say about it. And so will I.

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a tweet by the opinion columnist and investment manager Conor Sen: “AI is potentially to the world of ideas what low-cost index funds were to investing.” (This was in turn in response to another tweet by Derek Thompson: “an AI that spits out the synthetic average of everything it’s been exposed to is an interesting metaphor for a lot of stuff ppl say, write, and think.”)

I found this to be a very interesting and potentially rich analogy, and thought it would be fun to explore it a bit.

But, first, here’s what an AI system itself (the AI-powered Lex online word processor) generated when asked to continue a text starting with that sentence; note that this is a representative example culled from a number of trials:

It has the potential to offer answers to questions and solutions to problems that may have previously been considered impossible to resolve. AI can help individuals and organizations alike to quickly analyze data in real-time, make predictions, and accurately identify patterns in a way that was not previously possible. AI may also be able to help us better understand the world’s most complex systems, from climate change to world markets. Ultimately, AI has the potential to create unprecedented solutions and insights that could revolutionize the way we view and interact with the world.

This is perfectly competent prose, but it totally misses the point of the analogy. So please allow me, a mere human, to take a shot at explaining what it means:

How index funds conquered the world

Prior to index funds, the accepted way to succeed at investing was to do a lot of work to analyze companies whose stocks are traded on public markets, and based on that analysis decide which companies’ stock prices would be likely to increase, and which would be likely to decrease—the point of course being to buy the former and sell the latter. Those investors not willing or able to do this work themselves would outsource it to an investment manager, who would charge a fee for the service (typically a small percentage of the total amount invested by the client). Rather than picking stocks, the job of the investor was then simply to pick a good investment manager.

With index funds the recommended strategy is not to try to pick stocks, or have someone pick them for you, but simply to invest in an overall collection of stocks of a certain type—for example, the S&P 500 (for the stocks of large companies), the Russell 2000 (for small companies), or a very broad collection of all stocks in the US or worldwide.

Index funds subverted the “active management” paradigm in multiple ways. First, they removed the need for human judgement and replaced it with a mechanical rule. This enabled companies like Vanguard offering index funds to charge significantly lower fees and thus enabled investors to retain a higher percentage of stock market gains. (This was especially significant since such gains would compound over time.)

Second, they lowered the risk for investors: the returns from an index fund were comparable to the returns achieved by an average active manager, and better than an average active manager after subtracting their higher fees. An investor would therefore be better off investing in an index fund than with a typical active manager. They wouldn’t get the extraordinary returns achieved by the very best active managers, but they also wouldn’t get the poor returns achieved by the worst.

Conversely, index funds made the job of an active manager harder, since they had to work more to try to get better returns than an index fund. Then, given that a typical active manager would not be able to beat the returns from an index fund, they had to justify why that work deserved a higher fee than one would pay for an index fund.

The horn of plenty and the worm Ouroboros

Now consider AI, in particular the type of AI exemplified by systems like GPT-3. The systems have so-called large language models (LLMs) trained on lots of human-generated text, and based on that text can perform what seems like magic: given a string of text, to predict a suitable string of text that would continue on from that point (as in the example today), or (as in the recent ChatGPT) given a question, to generate a plausible response.

Based on the analogy to index funds, we can imagine several responses by both readers and writers to the growing capabilities of LLMs. Readers may simply accept AI-generated texts as a “good enough” product for most purposes; this is very similar to how we use index funds or (closer to home) consult Wikipedia as a “good enough” substitute for trying to seek out other sources of information on a topic with which we’re unfamiliar. This approach leaves little or nothing for (human) writers to do, except to provide uncompensated “grist for the mill,” as their writings past or present get fed into the maw of the LLMs, then used to produce an almost inexhaustible stream of new writing. But under this scenario, who (but an AI) would bother to write?

And if no one (human) decides to write, where would the writing come from to feed LLMs in future? For example, one team has predicted that in the next five years the size of training sets used as input to LLMs will exceed the amount of “high-quality” data available (e.g., books, news articles, scientific papers), leaving them to be trained on lower-quality data (e.g., YouTube comments). We can imagine one possible future in which the input to LLMs (or their successors) will primarily consist of text previously generated by other AIs.

This resembles the scenario warned of by some opponents of index funds (for example, as cited in The Atlantic): that a stock market dominated by index funds will no longer perform its supposed function of efficiently allocating investor capital. Instead the price of a firm’s stock may simply rise and fall based on whether it is included in major indexes (like the S&P 500). Similarly, the popularity of certain ideas may in future depend on their reinforcement by various AIs, and not on the number of humans who actually believe in or espouse them.

Writing after the end of writing

So, what’s a writer to do in a world where AIs can generate more text than we humans could ever create?

A writer might commit wholeheartedly to the use of AI as an aid to writing, in the hopes that it might provide some sort of exploitable edge—perhaps a way to write faster, to surface previously obscure source material, to serve as inspiration, to come up with a striking turn of phrase, and so on—anything that might help them stand out from the crowd and reward them monetarily or otherwise. This is analogous to the “quants” in investing, who throw ever more elaborate mathematical models (and now machine learning) and ever-increasing amounts of compute power at the problem of finding exploitable trading opportunities.

Alternatively, a writer might scale back their ambitions to achieve widespread success, and focus intensively on either a particular group of readers or a particular niche topic. The former approach is analogous to that of local financial advisors, who may not provide any better returns than an index fund or any better advice than a robot, but have the advantage of knowing a particular set of local investors and providing a personal touch.

The latter approach is similar to that of investment advisors who specialize in particular areas (e.g., biotech, or energy) and don’t attempt to provide advice on well-covered areas like consumer Internet services. But there is a danger here: as AIs extend their reach to encompass more and more of human knowledge and writing, the territory untouched by them may become smaller and smaller, until writers on niche topics ultimately are writing about things of interest only to themselves.

Then there is another more speculative approach: In tweets adjacent to those above, the legal entrepreneur Scott Stevenson muses that we should stop thinking in words, as businesses and investment funds strive to become illegible and no longer use stories to explain their world, a world that “can only be understood as a matrix of numbers”.

Of course, producing words is what a writer does, and stories are the natural way we structure the world, whether they end in “happily every after” or “quod erat demonstrandum.” But there is a type of writing that relies much less on stories, especially in its most compressed and compact form. Perhaps writing about ideas should aspire to the condition of poetry, stringing concept after concept together for our appreciation and (ideally) elucidation, like a linear combination of vectors in a very high-dimensional space, pointing the reader to a destination previously unknown to them.

But writing good poetry is truly hard—as Randall Jarrell put it, like spending a lifetime standing in thunderstorms, waiting for lightning to strike. (The ratio for Sturgeon’s law in poetry is much closer to 0.99, or even 0.999, than 0.9.) And the audience for such “nonfiction poetry” would perhaps be small, since to truly appreciate it one would need to be familiar with all the concepts touched on and pointed to but not explained at length—like classical Japanese or Chinese poetry, where each individual poem seems banal unless you know the host of older poems that went into its making.

I myself am no poet, and so will take on a much less ambitious task: posting to my small group of cohost followers, about topics of peculiar interest to me, and surviving on the occasional like or share, or the very occasional comment.

[This post and its associated comments originally appeared on Cohost.]

When I wrote my self-published book about the yuri manga Sweet Blue Flowers, I not only included some chapters about the history of yuri and its predecessor genre, “S” literature, I also wrote an entire chapter about the fate of the “factory girls” who worked in the textile mills of Meiji and Taishō era Japan. If I were writing a real book with a real publisher, the very first thing my real editor would tell me to do would be to remove that chapter: it’s overly-long and almost totally disconnected from the rest of the book, including the chapters that precede and follow it. So why did I leave it in?

First, because I was tired of yuri works that featured rich girls attending expensive private schools. Where are the less fortunate girls, I thought, those who lived and live in poverty—what about their lives and their loves? I wondered where if anywhere I could find their stories, and I went looking for them.

Why did I focus on the factory girls specifically? Because they play a special role in the history of the yuri genre and the world in which it arose. We can better appreciate Sweet Blue Flowers if we know something about Maria Watches Over Us, the work whose tropes Sweet Blue Flowers both echoes and interrogates. We can in turn better appreciate Maria Watches Over Us if we know something about the girls’ literature of early 20th century Japan and its focus on “S” relationships between schoolgirls.

Why did that literature appear at that particular time, and in that particular form? Because in the Meiji era, Japan for the first time had a critical mass of middle-class girls and young women. They were educated to be literate in Japanese, able to afford subscriptions to magazines targeted at them, and provided the freedom to leave the family home, to go to school, and there—in the brief time before they were coerced into arranged marriages—to enter in relations of “passionate friendship” (and sometimes more than friendship) with other girls.

That growing middle class was made possible by the national wealth produced by Japan’s rapid industrialization, and that industrialization in turn depended on another equally-large but less-heralded group of girls and young women, those who toiled day and night in the many factories producing silk and cotton thread for export.

I strongly felt that the story I was telling in my book would not be complete without also telling the story of the factory girls: without them, no girls’ magazines and S stories, no Nobuko Yoshiya, no postwar Japanese “economic miracle,” no shōjo manga, no Maria Watches Over Us, and no Sweet Blue Flowers.

When I wrote that chapter, I was also making a larger point about our own lives, lives built upon the bones of the millions of human beings, and in particular girls and young women, without whose work—and whose suffering—our present-day world would not exist.

Why textile workers in particular? Those of us who are American are also aware (or should be aware) of other historic injustices that occurred in the creation and expansion of the United States, most notably the enslavement of millions of Africans and the wars against Native Americans. Their suffering far outweighs that of the factory girls, the vast majority of whom lived to leave the mills and return to their families.

However, slavery and genocide are nothing new in human history. The oppression of African Americans and the extermination of Native Americans loom large in our imagination because they were relatively recent in historical terms. But the conquest of one population by another, and the subsequent enslavement or killing of the conquered, is a constant theme over the thousands of years since complex societies and states first arose.

On the other hand, the plight of the factory girls is relatively recent, a key episode in the industrial revolution that kicked off the subsequent scientific and technological revolutions that have improved the lives of billions of people worldwide since the late 19th century. Textile workers are the shock troops of the industrial revolution: thread, cloth, and clothing are easy to export to international markets, textile production is supercharged by introducing machinery to the process of spinning thread and weaving cloth, and those machines need to be tended and fed by an army of workers newly arrived from the farm to the factory. They are typically predominantly young and predominantly women, like those shown in the pictures above.

This process has repeated—and is still repeating—in every country transitioning from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing and (later) services economy. The wealth it produces supports a growing middle class, whose spending and leisure time in turn give rise to a thriving cultural scene. Behind Nobuko Yoshiya were the girls who crossed Nomugi pass to work in the silk mills of Okaya. The comfortable life of Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, was made possible in part by the labor of the “mill girls” of Lowell. And the England of Jane Austen and the Brönte sisters was also the England of the cotton mills of Manchester.

Charlotte Brönte herself wrote a novel, Shirley, about the early stages of the English industrial revolution and the Luddite uprisings; it languishes in obscurity compared to Jane Eyre or even Villette. Similarly, we tend to forget the existence of the factory girls except in times of exceptional tragedy: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or the collapse of Rana Plaza.

The lesser injuries—the overwork, dangerous conditions, wage theft, abuse and sexual harassment, and so on—pass beneath our notice. We simply take for granted our ability to go into a mall, or surf to a online store, and buy a wide range of relatively cheap and fashionable clothes—a situation impossible to imagine before the industrial revolution, when the typical person had only a few items of clothing, purchased dearly and patched until no longer wearable.

As I did the research for my book I came across the term “factory girls” and wondered who they were and how they lived. The result of my reading was an intense desire to tell their story, even in an out-of-place chapter in a book destined to be little-read. To quote from the final lines of that chapter, “in writing about the Class S stories of yesteryear and the yuri manga of today and tomorrow, I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to honor the memory of the girls and women whose work helped make that literature possible, but who rarely if ever grace its pages”—or, indeed, many pages at all.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-07 22:31

Thanks for sharing this. Playing Victoria 3 made me think about this sort of of thing—the game simulates 1836-1936, and it really makes you pay close attention to the intersection of economics, industrialization, political demographics, technology, and standard of living.

Often a player’s goal in the game is to increase the standard of living of their populace, so one of the main things youll do early on is move people from subsistence farming into various jobs like sewing, iron mines, etc. And thats a big bump up for them and for the economy—but its still really shitty. And even if you had a more even wealth distribution, you simply cannot make things decent for people without first developing more technology to enable more sophisticaed methods of production, and without first gradually developing more advanced chains of industry. When youre in like 1830-1880, it really just puts it in your face that you cannot secure prosperity for this generation of people in your country.

a similar note, certain strategies in victoria 1/2/3 revolve around like, “OK, now tax people a ton for the first decade so you can accelerate your economic growth a ton.” I always shudder at doing that, because I’m actively making peoples lives much shittier for years in order to accelerate the next generations. In a longterm utilitarian sense it is the greatest good, but the notion still gives me pause because of aspects like “They never gave me their consent in this project.”

I also think humans have similar dynamics with regards to ideas. It feels like our understandings of things like morality, the perils of different forms of government, etc only advance slowly through witnessing fuck ups repeatedly and slowly affecting our commonly mentioned notions. Something may be relatively easy to deduce and prove, but it takes time for it to really sink in culturally.

I’m also reminded of watching Pachinko, which is a good show based on a book about several generations of a Korean family from like 1920-1990, living in Korea, Japan, and the USA. Really interesting show/book—it has a lot of intercultural aspects(such as the son who spent 15 years in japan, then 15 years in USA, then is back in japan, but is korean, and so is very in between cultures). But it also is a pretty striking depiction of the enormous economic jumps between like 1920s korea, 1940s japan, and 1980s japan/usa/korea. The grandmother got to witness that enormous shift, she lived in multiple fundamentally different world separated primarily by time.

Stuff like that reminds me that so many people alive today were deeply affected by the enormous differences of past eras. The 1920s were 100 years ago, but that’s really not that long—especially considering that the people who grew up in, say, the 1960s were deeply affected by the people who grew up in the 1920s. I think that illustrates part of why cultural change struggles to keep up with the last 200 years of economic growth.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-08 01:45

Thank you for your thoughtful comments!

“And thats a big bump up for them and for the economy—but its still really shitty.” Yes, exactly—and the thing is, people have pointed out that employers ability to drive profit by repressing their employees in various ways—wage theft, overwork, suppression of strikes, etc—arguably accelerated their countries’ transition from agricultural to manufacturing economies. (I mention this in my book.) So making our ancestors’ lives more shitty arguably made our lives less so.

“I think that illustrates part of why cultural change struggles to keep up with the last 200 years of economic growth.” And political change too, Brad DeLong discusses this in his book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. I’ll probably do a review of it once I have time to read it.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

For various reasons I recently decided to get a new laptop. Rather than continuing my habit of buying Apple hardware, I bought it from Framework, a relatively new company whose “unique selling proposition” is building a laptop that is easily repairable, customizable, and upgradeable.

This is not a “recommendation blog” (no affiliate links here), but at least so far I’m pretty happy with the purchase. The laptop runs both Windows 11 (off the main drive) and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (dual-booted from an expansion card); the Linux experience in particular is pretty good, with no hardware incompatibilities or other major glitches detected to date. (Well, I did have to customize the touchpad settings to make it work like I’m used to.)

But this post isn’t a product review—more a note about the wider implications of this thing I just bought.

First, there’s a “doing good” aspect to the purchase, one that Framework is quite happy to acknowledge in their marketing: Making products easier to repair and upgrade extends their lifetime and can help reduce electronic waste.

It also subtly changes buying patterns: traditionally I’ve been inclined to buy relatively high-end configurations for laptops, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to upgrade memory, disk, etc., after buying it. However in this case I chose a mid-range configuration because I knew that I could always upgrade the memory, storage, and even CPU later if I ever needed to. So the Framework approach also reduces wasteful spending as well.

But the main point I want to make is about everything it took to make a product like this come together and have everything work. With a Framework laptop this question comes to mind more than with (say) a MacBook Air, where Apple strives to present an integrated and seamless experience.

We can see and touch the material components of the Framework laptop, and explore how they are manufactured around the world, come together in a single place (in this case Taiwan) to be assembled together, and from there are shipped to customers in the US and elsewhere. This is the perspective people often take when they talk about “global trade” and “global supply chains.”

But there are other levels as well: First, the interface specifications by which you can plug component A into component B or substitute component C for component D, promulgated by a host of standards committees. Next the operating system software and applications, which for Linux in particular are produced with the participation of volunteers or quasi-volunteers (working on open source projects with the blessing of their employers) and (often) with the support of and governance by nonprofit organizations. Then the dense web of legal contracts and financial arrangements that enable component producer X to be a supplier to manufacturer Y and to be reasonably sure they’ll be compensated for it. And, finally, the governments that enforce the contracts, backstop the financial system, and provide laws and regulations under which trade proceeds, and their militaries (principally that of the US) that keep malicious actors from disrupting the shipping lanes and airways of global commerce.

All of these systems are interdependent, mutually reinforcing, and mostly invisible to the people like me who order a laptop online one day and wake up to find it on my doorstop a few days later. This “world machine” is not without its flaws, and many the unfortunate or unwary person has been crushed between its gears. (I’ll have more to say about this in future posts.) But for better or worse it underpins the world we live in, it is the machine that (to varying degrees) supports and sustains us.

beneficence (@bubblingbeebles) - 2022-12-06 13:35

i also got one of these recently! i appreciate your thoughts.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-06 22:48

You’re welcome!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

The genre we call “yuri” originated in Japan, but some of its most interesting manifestations are in other nations in East and Southeast Asia, where it is typically marketed as “GL.” One recent example is the live-action Thai television drama GAP, also known as GAP: The Series (to distinguish it from the novel on which it is based), Pink Theory, and other names.

GAP is currently being broadcast weekly on Thai TV Channel 3, and then afterward being made available on YouTube with English subtitles, starting with episode 1, part 1. It’s an example of what’s sometimes called “shakaijin yuri”: yuri stories featuring adults doing adult things. In the series, one of the two main characters, Mon, starts her first job at a small media company run by the other main character, Sam, an older woman whom Mon has idolized ever since she was a child. However, Sam does not remember ever meeting Mon (or at least doesn’t admit to it), and their relationship gets off to a rocky start before love starts to blossom.

It’s a pretty good series overall, and well worth watching if you’re a yuri fan. I’m not going to attempt a review; Erica Friedman already posted one on the Okazu blog, and I basically agree with her assessment. Instead I wanted to comment on some other aspects of the series and how it came to be. (Warning: This will contain some minor spoilers for the first two episodes.)

First, while for some time now Thailand has been cranking out live-action BL series, GAP is apparently the first yuri/GL series produced in the country. It was created by a relatively new production company, Idol Factory, headed by 24-year-old Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana (nicknamed “Saint”). Saint became famous starring in the 2018 Thai BL series Love by Chance, produced by GMMTV (the 800-pound gorilla of Thai BL production companies), and then went off on his own to found Idol Factory.

Idol Factory’s first production was the popular BL series Secret Crush on You. That series, set in a high school, featured a side couple played by Sarocha Chankimha (“Freen”) and Rebecca Patricia Armstrong (“Becky”). GAP features the two in the lead roles, with Freen playing Sam and Becky playing Mon, with other actors in the Idol Factory stable playing various supporting roles.

It’s a credit to Saint and Idol Factory that they followed up their first BL series by taking a chance with a yuri series. That bet has apparently paid off, at least with international viewers: the first two GAP episodes have each racked up between one and two million views on YouTube, comparable to the two to three million views for each of the episodes of Secret Crush on You (which has been out at least seven months now).

Second, it’s interesting to see the mix of yuri tropes and social commentary in the series. The setup is reminiscent of Maria Watches Over Us, albeit translated to an office setting: a younger and relatively naïve but spunky young woman (our Yumi equivalent) meets an elegant and seemingly emotionally cold older woman from a very wealthy family (species designation tsunderensis sachiko). Meanwhile the older woman’s family disregards her own desires and expects her to enter into an arranged marriage with a man who presumably will take over her firm.

In GAP the main antagonist is Sam’s grandmother, who has given Sam a deadline of one year to make her business successful or quit it in favor of marriage. The grandmother has already interfered with the lives of Sam’s two older sisters.

Sam’s fiance Kirk appears to be another antagonist. He is a co-owner of Sam’s firm, but does nothing except drop by occasionally to hand out snacks to the employees and curry their favor. He seems to be positioning himself to take over full control of Sam’s firm, but is going about it in a low-key way that suggests that this is just the natural order of things. (See also the scene in the second episode where Sam offers to drive Mon home, and Kirk ends up taking the wheel of Sam’s Porsche Carrera, relegating Sam to be a passenger in her own car.)

A side character worth noting is one of Sam’s friends, someone whom in the West we’d characterize as a butch lesbian. But I presume that in Thai terms she’s actually a “tom” (for “tomboy”); I mean, her nickname is even “Tee.” The relationship between toms and their partners (“dees,” for “lady”/“ladies”) doesn’t necessarily conform to the Western butch/femme stereotype; for a fascinating discussion of the differences, see the paper “The Romance of the Queer: The Sexual and Gender Norms of Tom and Dee in Thailand,” by Megan Sinnott, included in the book AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities.

The final thing worthy of note about GAP is how it applies to yuri/GL live-action series a common marketing strategy used in Thai BL productions, that of the khu jin, or “imagined couple.” The basic idea is that instead of fans shipping idols on their own initiative (with production companies then possibly responding to that), Thai production companies (in a strategy pioneered by GMMTV) create idol couples already “pre-shipped.” In other words, production companies encourage fans to think of the idols as couples on-screen and off- from the time that they debut. For a good introduction to this phenomenon see Thomas Baudinette’s talk “Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture” and his forthcoming book of the same title.

In the case of GAP the khu jin is Freen and Becky. They have very good chemistry on-screen and off-screen as well—although the point here is that there is no such thing as “off-screen,” since even seemingly unrehearsed interactions (many of which can be seen on YouTube by searching for “freenbecky”) have to be seen in the context of an Idol Factory marketing strategy to promote them as the company’s star GL couple. If GAP is successful (and it appears to be so far) then we can expect to see a lot more of Freen and Becky in future Idol Factory series.

Other Thai production companies are dipping their feet in the yuri ocean as well: GMMTV has a schoolgirl yuri series 23.5 debuting in 2023, starring Pansa Vosbein (”Milk”) and Pattranite Limpatiyakorn (”Love”); like Freen and Becky, they previously appeared as a side couple in BL productions before getting their own GL series. (You can find them on YouTube by searching for “milklove”).

There are other Thai GL series announced and on the way as well. It remains to be seen whether Thai production companies can create a “GL machine” to match the current “BL machine” (as Thomas Baudinette refers to it), but it will certainly be fun to watch them try.

Mightfo ([@Mightfo][]) - 2022-12-02 12:15

Fascinating! Also, I had no idea that Thailand made a lot of BL and yuri! Thanks for sharing this.

Frank Hecker ([@hecker][]) - 2022-12-02 12:19

You’re welcome! Thailand is actually the biggest producer of BL live-action series in all of East and Southeast Asia; Thomas Baudinette notes in his talk that in 2022 there were over a hundred Thai BL series produced, and that Thai BL series have now achieved widespread popularity in Japan, the country where BL was born.

Yesterday I ran across a post (chost?) talking about the indie pop band Wild Pink. They sounded intriguing, so I tried out one of their albums on Bandcamp (Yolk in the Fur), loved it, and bought it. And then I went to recall who posted about Wild Pink, so I could thank them for the recommendation, and for the live of me could not remember who it was. I even looked back through all the posts appearing on my feed in an attempt to track it down, with no luck. Tried searching the “Wild Pink’ on the site, again no luck—apparently whoever posted the reference didn’t include a tag.

A few comments:

First, if you are reading this and are the person who posted about Wild Pink, thank you! You helped me find a new band that I enjoy listening to.

Second, it would be great if the cohost search function searched for words inside posts. In the meantime, cohost peeps, please be generous in your tagging practices! It’s the best way for other people to discover what you write.

Finally, this reinforces once more the reality that the number of talented artists out there greatly exceeds the number of artists that receive significant recognition. Wild Pink isn’t exactly obscure (Pitchfork has reviewed several of their albums), but I’m a reasonably eclectic listener and I had never previously heard of them.

I have more thoughts about that, but they will have to wait for a future post.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. It has been slightly revised from the original.]

This post—and some future ones as well—was prompted by a book I once read about the prospects for creating a new university, as well as by general comments I’ve read about admissions policies at elite universities. Since I am decidedly not an expert on issues of higher education, I decided to approach this from the other direction: as a naïve observer doing a “spherical cow” analysis (as physicists like to call it), abstracting away all the complexity and seeing what results from analyzing a problem in as simple terms as possible.

Canadian higher education expert Alex Usher once referred to elite universities as the “apex predators” of the academic world, based on their continued appearances at the top of world rankings. With that in mind, let’s look at Harvard in particular, one of the best known and most elite universities, and consider it as we would a biological organism. What are its main characteristics, and how does it survive?

Harvard lives despite things that could kill it

First, considered as an organism the most notable characteristic of Harvard is how long-lived it is: nearly four hundred years old at this point. (And it is still relatively young in comparison to others of its species; Oxford and Cambridge are both almost a thousand years old.)

From this fact we can conclude that the first and foremost priority of Harvard is to ensure its own survival. If this were not the case then Harvard would likely have ceased to exist by now, as pursuing other priorities would have endangered its quest to survive.

What are the most important threats to Harvard’s survival? They are arguably financial reverses, political reverses, and cultural reverses:

Financial reverses, either local to itself or in the broader economy, could cause Harvard to go bankrupt and force its closure. Consistent with its long lifetime, Harvard must plan for possible financial reversals of a scale that might occur only once every couple of hundred years.

What about political reverses? These are potential government actions that would threaten Harvard as an institution. This might include, for example, taxing Harvard’s endowment or otherwise financially penalizing the university, forcing it to modify its admissions policies (see below), or otherwise interfering with the relative independence Harvard enjoys as a private university that is (mostly) privately funded.

Finally cultural reverses would threaten Harvard’s status as “Harvard”, its reputation as a world-leading university that others might seek to emulate in their own countries or regions (“the Harvard of X”) but can never equal, much less surpass. Harvard is vulnerable to such reverses because in some ways it is like Kim Kardashian and similar celebrities: to a nontrivial degree it is “famous for being famous”.

Harvard’s defenses

How does Harvard protect itself against such reverses? We can analyze this by again looking at Harvard as if it were an organism. To survive an organism takes in food, creates protein products and other structures to build and maintain the body it needs to survive in a hostile environment, and excretes whatever is excess to that function.

From that point of view, Harvard’s “food” is the very large group of people (over sixty thousand per year) striving to be admitted to Harvard. It uses that “food” to create the visible structures that people think of when they think of Harvard (the buildings and faculty), to create a store of “fat” for times of potential starvation (its endowment), and to build an “extended phenotype” consisting of the Harvard alumni network, the much smaller group of people (less than two thousand per year) who go out into the world with “admitted into Harvard” stamped on their foreheads. (I write “admitted into Harvard” instead of “graduated from Harvard” because, as examples like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg illustrate, arguably the important thing is getting into Harvard, not graduating from it.)

(Under this analogy, research results can be considered as Harvard’s excreta: the things it throws off as it survives as an institution down the years, and that have fertilized many fields.)

For purposes of this analysis I focus on the Harvard alumni network. How does it help Harvard address the threat of the various possible reverses discussed above?

The threat of financial reverses can be addressed by having Harvard alumni whose financial success can translate into donations to help Harvard maintain and grow its endowment. That endowment is currently over USD 50 billion; it provides about 36% of Harvard’s annual revenue, or over USD 2 billion a year.

USD 50 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it is; it’s the largest endowment of any US university. But that endowment needs to be so large because it needs to cover very rare “black swan” financial disasters. I’m sure that the folks who run Harvard would be happy to see it be two or three times its current size, if not larger.

The threat of political reverses can be addressed by having a large contingent of Harvard alumni in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government who are sympathetic to Harvard and who can be relied upon to block or water down any government actions that might disadvantage it.

Finally, the threat of cultural reverses can be addressed in a similar way, by having a large contingent of Harvard alumni in key cultural institutions – leading newspapers, magazines, publishers, and so on – that have the power to confer cachet upon Harvard and those associated with it.

Explaining the Harvard admissions process

Now, the above is nothing more than a cute and overly clever analogy unless it has some degree of explanatory power. So, given the above, what can we conclude about Harvard, and in particular about its key function, that of creating a select set of Harvard alumni?

First, to counter potential financial reverses Harvard needs to build an alumni population that is willing and able to financially support it in a major way, so that its endowment can grow ever larger. This can be done by preferentially taking in applicants who are wealthy already, or likely to be wealthy in future.

Harvard has at least three strategies available by which to do this: it has a “farm system” of exclusive (and expensive) prep schools whose staff have deep and enduring relationships with the Harvard admissions department, it gives preferential treatment to the children of Harvard alumni (“legacies”), and it can also of course just admit the children of major donors. The overall result is to build a pool of alumni who have benefited from special treatment in admissions, who are inclined to “give back” to Harvard in return, and who will have the financial means to do so.

Second, to counter potential political reverses Harvard needs to build a supportive network of legislators, judges, and executive branch senior leaders. Since most such figures are lawyers (by definition true for judges, and almost as true for legislators), it’s obviously key for Harvard to have a strong law school. But perhaps equally if not more important, Harvard needs to have a feel for which groups within American society have political power (or at least political influence) and then ensure that it admits students from such groups in proper proportion to such power and influence.

To put it in a more negative way: if (to pick a fictional example) Graustarkian-Americans have relatively little power or influence in the US political system, then Harvard has less incentive to admit them as students, even if they otherwise form a relatively large percentage of qualified applicants. Harvard would likely instead preferentially admit students from other groups with more political clout.

Finally, to counter potential cultural reverses Harvard needs a similar supportive network of journalists, public intellectuals, and other media figures at major cultural institutions. The presumed mechanism here is to put much more emphasis on admitting students who are verbally skilled and culturally fluent at the expense of students who are more STEM-focused.

To put it more bluntly, Harvard is not CalTech, and does not want to be; its place in American culture as the ultimate university experience is exemplified by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, not by Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. (It’s worth noting here that the original novel Legally Blonde is set at Stanford; presumably the people who made the movie felt that using Harvard as the setting would resonate more with the typical viewer.)

Harvard forever

Given the above, what predictions can we make about Harvard’s future, particularly with respect to its admission policies?

First, I predict that Harvard will not follow the urgings of those who advocate it doubling or even tripling the number of students it enrolls (presumably in order to give more students the “Harvard experience”.

Part of the reason is by analogy to long-lived organisms (like the Greenland shark pictured above), which have long lives in large part because their metabolism is very slow. Even a very low rate of growth in enrollment would cause Harvard to balloon to an enormous size when extended over a few hundred years. Another reason is that increased enrollment would put more pressure on the endowment, should it become necessary to draw it down during hard financial times.

But I think the most important reason is that the pool of suitable positions for Harvard alumni is limited, and will remain so: There are only 535 Senate and House seats, less than a thousand Federal judgeships, only so many jobs at presitigious investment banks and private equity firms, and similarly only so many positions at leading newspapers, magazines, and related cultural institutions. Given that, increasing the number of Harvard alumni (a form of “elite overproduction”) would only increase the already intense competition for those positions, with little or no benefit to Harvard itself and its ability to survive as an elite university.

Second, I predict that Harvard will not change its admissions policies in any major way (for example, by instituting a lottery for admittance), and will not be forced to do so by US courts or legislatures. (As, for example, is at stake in a case currently before the US Supreme Court.) As I argue above, Harvard’s long-term survival depends on its having the freedom to tailor its student body to address potential financial, political, and cultural threats. I believe that its political and legal support network is strong and motivated enough to ensure that it retains that freedom.

Finally, if Harvard by some chance is forced to modify its admissions policies, I predict that it will attempt to accomplish its previous goals by different means. For example, it would likely further de-emphasize criteria such as test scores, grades, and student background (race, ethnicity, class, etc.), and put even more emphasis on student personality, ability to fit into the Harvard environment, recommendations from alumni, general “promise”, and other intangible aspects used to assess an applicant’s suitability to be a “Harvard person”. (In other words, Harvard’s admissions process would become even more opaque than it already is.)

Harvard has survived nearly four hundred years by doggedly pursuing its own interests and acting to neutralize potential threats to its survival. I would not bet against its ability to survive four hundred more.

This will take a bit of explanation: Jorie Graham is a well-known American poet (well, at least among people who read poetry) who has a refined and sophisticated image ("… raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools … studied philosophy at the Sorbonne …"). So I was surprised today to find that she’s on Twitter and tweets a lot, primarily about political stuff.

(Her Twitter profile doesn’t even mention that she’s a poet; in fact it has no biographical information about her at all. But if you look at her past tweets and who she follows, you’ll know that she’s “our” Jorie Graham.)

I found it quite amusing to think of “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation” retired (she’s 72) and sitting at home sipping a glass of wine, obsessively watching MSNBC and tweeting about the mid-terms and how to get the most impact out of your political donations.

PS to any Anifam discord folks reading this: I’ll be featuring Graham in a future Sunday night poetry post.

[I wrote this as a pseudonymous Twitter thread back in 2020 and then published it as a Cohost post in 2022. Given the ongoing discourse about China and Taiwan, I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site. I’m a total newbie when it comes to China, Taiwan, and international relations, so consider this as published for amusement purposes only.]

A while back I watched various films and dramas on the Taiwanese LGBTQ streaming service GagaooLala. If I were an academic and actually knew something about this topic, I’d write a paper “The Geopolitical Uses of Lesbian Romcoms: Zero Chou’s Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project as Taiwanese Soft Power Projection.” But I’m not, so this post will have to do.

As of 2020 when I originally wrote this, Zero Chou’s project consisted of two films and two TV series featuring ethnic Chinese across East Asia: We Are Gamily (“Gamily” presumably from “Gay Family”) (2017, filmed in Chengdu in Sichuan), The Substitute (2017, Beijing), Handsome Stewardess (2019, Singapore), and Wrath of Desire (2020, Hong Kong). I watched the first three of these on GagaooLala.

These films were “advised by” the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, and I believe partially funded directly or indirectly by the Ministry of Culture as well, along with a wider Taiwanese LGBTQ media ecosystem (headed by entrepreneur Jay Lin) that includes GOL Studios, the GagaTai and LalaTai websites, and GagaooLala itself. Why would the Taiwanese government do this?

The answer presumably lies in geopolitics, and specifically in Taiwan’s fraught relations with China. Some claim that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party envision not only an expanded China restored to greatness, but a world remade to China’s liking. In this vision, Western powers like the US and the EU would be sidelined, and other powers would acknowledge the superiority of (and seek to emulate) China and the CCP (which would be seen as one and the same).

This goal would be accomplished via political, military, economic, and cultural means: ensuring internal order within China, following up the absorption of Hong Kong by annexing Taiwan, alternately overawing and subsidizing China’s Asian neighbors, winning the cooperation of Western businesses in exchange for access to the Chinese market, and attempting to influence Western culture and politics through various means.

Presumably the CCP wishes that the ascendance of China and the identification of China with the CCP be seen as desirable by as many people and powers as possible. But if that is not always possible, the CCP presumably wishes the rise of China to be seen as inevitable: that there is and can only be “one China,” with the CCP seen as the only true and correct ruler of China and the Chinese people, wherever they might live.

Because of its much smaller population and economy, Taiwan cannot match the People’s Republic in most spheres. However, in its sponsorship of GagaooLala and similar ventures, the Taiwanese government can be seen as pursuing an asymmetric strategy to “queer” the (for now, metaphorical) battlefield: promoting an alternative that is culturally Chinese but open to other cultures and ethnicities, and that respects and even celebrates differences.

For example: in We Are Gamily a Chinese lesbian in a marriage of convenience with a gay friend works under a CCP member who repeats bland slogans about social harmony. The young lesbian has internalized these slogans, but after falling in love with her husband’s sister she opts for truth to oneself over “harmony.”

Taiwan is not mentioned in We Are Gamily. The only non-PRC influence is in the form of her husband’s white South African lover, who discusses same-sex marriage in his home country. However the Chengdu setting may be a tell: not only is Chengdu supposedly a relatively friendly city for LGBTQ people, the city was the last redoubt of the Chinese Nationalist Party before fleeing to Taiwan in 1949.

Handsome Stewardess goes to one-party-ruled Singapore, as a Taiwanese lesbian joins an airline based in the city-state and proceeds to agitate against harassment and company policies. Her girlfriend claims that Singapore’s rules promote “stability,” but at the conclusion of the series ends up siding with her Taiwanese partner.

Both these series foreground family: In We Are Gamily the LGBTQ siblings’ desire to live true to themselves is ultimately accepted by their mother, while in Handsome Stewardess the titular character’s parents encourage her to find a nice girl and marry, now that Taiwan law permits it. (However, her mother does have to remind her that the current law permits such marriages only if both individuals are citizens of jurisdictions with marriage equality.)

Finally, The Substitute features cross-strait relations, as a Beijing judo star is bested and seduced by a Taiwanese exchange student, is set to double for her in an action film, then becomes a star herself upon the other girl’s disappearance. The finale sees them reconciled in Taiwan.

In sum, the “Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project” presents a vision of “liberal democracy with Taiwanese characteristics,” one that is rooted in and respectful of tradition (see also Chou’s earlier film Splendid Float). This vision is compatible with “family values,” but also allows for individual freedom and differences.

The presumed goals are multiple: First, to heighten the perceived differences between Taiwan and the PRC, and position Taiwan as a potential model for young Chinese people to emulate. If even 2% of China’s 1.4 billion people are LGBTQ, they would outnumber the entire population of Taiwan; presumably they are a key audience for Taiwanese cultural outreach. There is also a large population of young people in China who are fans of LGBTQ-related (or at least LGBTQ-adjacent) content, like danmei novels.

Second, to promote a positive image of Taiwan among young people (Chinese or otherwise) living in countries in Southeast Asia that are potential allies of Taiwan. Again, we can see this effort as in part targeted to the large BL and (to a lesser extent) yuri fan communities in countries like Thailand and the Philippines.

And finally (aided by GagaooLala’s global expansion), to give Westerners more knowledge of Taiwan and reasons to care about its fate (as, for example, many in the West—and in Taiwan itself—now care about the fate of Ukraine).

We now come to Stalin’s famous question: How many divisions does GagaooLala have? If the CCP decides that force is the only way to “unify” China, will the people of Taiwan be able and willing to do the things necessary to defend their country, including reorganizing the Taiwanese armed forces to be more effective? Certainly some have questioned this.

But political will follows popular will. If Taiwan’s autonomy is to be defended, its people—and its young people in particular—must see it as worth defending. And if Taiwan’s army is disadvantaged by being seen as the past enabler of authoritarian rule, then it must evolve to become an institution seen as the guarantor of Taiwanese democracy and freedom—including the freedoms celebrated in Chou’s films and TV series.

Taiwan may never be truly sovereign and independent, but a combination of cultural change, military reform, and support from the US and other nations may enable it to survive as a country unto itself, and not as a mere province of an expanded China. As Adam Chen-Dedman asks, “Might Taiwan’s embrace of democracy and respect for human rights—as a radical people-centered form of ‘warm’ power—offer a way to decolonize its own ‘inevitable’ extinction at the hands of its neo-imperial neighbor?” The answer remains unclear, but the question is a critical one for the future of Taiwan, Asia, and the world.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I‘ve been around long enough to notice that stories involving magic seem to be more popular now than they used to be, and I’ve often wondered why that might be. I was reminded of that once again while reading one of the most delightful and charming stories about magic, Kamome Shirahama’s manga series Witch Hat Atelier. In the manga the young girl Coco is initiated into the world of witches—a world she thought had been closed to her from birth, but which she discovers is open to anyone who can learn to draw the intricate designs by which spells are cast.

The world of Witch Hat Atelier is of course fictional, and its magic likewise. But here in the real world we can also perform magic by making drawings, like so-called Feynman diagrams (see above), and manipulating symbols in other ways. These manipulations have a deep connection to physical reality, and enable us to divine the secrets of the universe and shape matter and energy to our will. They are “magic that actually works.”

So why don’t people pay more attention to real magic than fake magic? Of course, fake magic is embedded in stories that are more entertaining than real life. But beyond that, I think there are two key reasons:

First, real magic is hard. Not as hard as people think—it’s possible to grasp the basics of something like quantum computing or even quantum mechanics with no more mathematics than what is taught in high school (algebra, complex numbers, and matrix multiplication). But it is indeed true that applying that knowledge to real physical systems calls for much more knowledge and expertise.

More important, I think, is that though our diagrams and calculations may capture the universe precisely, in and of themselves they are powerless to change it. To do that requires advanced engineering and precision manufacturing, using techniques refined over multiple generations by thousands of people. No one person can totally comprehend everything that goes in making, say, a modern smartphone; even mundane products like LED light bulbs and your cat’s laser pointer are incredibly sophisticated at their core. Unable to understand how these devices work and what goes into making them, we simply take them for granted.

Once upon a time technology was simpler to understand. I think one of the attractions of the steampunk genre is that it harks back to the last time technology was truly legible, all puffing steam engines and rotating gears. Even electric motors and generators are not incomprehensible, although they mark the transition from the intuitive physics of Michael Faraday (famed for giving lectures and demonstrations to enthusiastic crowds of Londoners) to the mathematical physics of James Clerk Maxwell and his equations of electromagnetism.

Maxwell published his key papers in the 1860s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, 1870 is when the economist Brad DeLong sees everything changing: “In 1870 industrial research labs, modern corporations, globalization, and the market economy . . . proved keys to the lock that had kept humanity in its desperately poor iron cage . . . . And previously unimaginable economic growth revolutionized human life over and over, generation by generation.”

Those developments brought advanced technology to millions and ultimately billions, but they also killed its magic, as the heroic lone inventor in their workshop (another steampunk staple) gave way to the corporate R&D department and globalized supply chains. So we seek the magic we crave in novels, comics, and films and TV—the latter themselves benefiting from the use of computer graphics to create increasingly fantastical special effects.

Now we can be (fake) magicians ourselves, thanks to software and its ability to create virtual worlds in which our actions can be translated instantly into effects, whether that be digging a hole in Minecraft or casting an elaborate spell in a fantasy MMO. I could be snobbish and dismiss all this as inauthentic wish fulfillment (for example, comparing “survival mode” in Minecraft to a true survival experience in a wilderness), but I think that’s a fundamental mistake: we have always created new environments for us to live in, and (for example) an urban street with quaint shops and comfy apartments is just as much an artificial creation as the latest AAA title. There is no virtue in elevating the former over the latter.

And just as science drives technology, so technology drives science in a feedback loop, for example from the early microscopes that discovered bacteria to the scanning tunneling microscopes that can visualize and manipulate individual atoms. It’s possible that software worlds and the tools used to create them will in turn enable new ways to do science and engineering, so that in the future the diagrams drawn by a real-life Coco can create real-life magic.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-11-19 20:31

Nice thoughts! Theres a lot of interesting things to talk about here, but one aspect that comes to mind is the way that this relates to the role of agency in fiction.

For example, why are medieval fantasy themes popular? I suspect that part of this is because they are useful for both the writer and the reader in terms of providing a setting that allows for more flexible agency.

If you compare a medieval fantasy setting to a realistic modern setting, I think you’ll find differences such as:

• The state is less powerful(except at the author’s whims) and has less ability to distribute its power effectively. This means several things—such as that the interactions between friends and foes is less cordoned off, and the onus of fixing a problem can be relocated more to individuals.

• Warfare can conceivably make individual skill/effort a lot more relevant, especially when you introduce magic and unrealistic strength etc, which gives characters more agency and room for expression of their efforts

• There is more nature to act against and with- even without the fantasy element, nature is wild and untamed, back to when it was more of a threat to humans.

• There’s more unknowns, because of less state/more nature/less information/less ability to completely overwhelm individuals with modern structures and technologies, even prior to magic.

And there’s probably more that I’m just not remembering from the last time I thought about this, haha.

Because of these, the writer has more avenues to create and unfold conflicts dynamically to create drama, back and forth, themes, gravitas, specific ways things play out, etc without having to fight constantly to create plausibility. I guess the “Wild West” setting has a lot of similarities to it, now that I think about it.

Fictional magic, similarly, is an individual-scale avenue for potential/unknowns/agency that the writers can get more freedom with and readers can be connected to particular things they enjoy seeing expressed(again, agency of individuals).

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-11-20 00:54

Thank you for the comment! I think you are correct about historical/fantasy settings providing more agency to the characters. I’m guessing that a part of this is also that rule was/is personalized, being centered in the persons of the monarch and their courtiers/vassals/etc., as opposed to being exercised via a more impersonal bureaucracy.

squircular reasoning (@spiders) - 2023-07-24 23:19

i think an aspect of “real magic”, as you put (sub)atomic sciences, that makes it disinteresting to a large number of people (including myself) is how divorced from everyday sensory reality it is.

i say this as somepony who is intensely interested in earth sciences; geology, botany, paleontology, zoology, even microbiology and some aspects of astronomy, to a certain degree, are all fairly accessible, and influence ones life in very visible ways. i may not be able to see tectonic plates moving but i can feel earthquakes, and i can see rock structures that are only possible because of uplift. i don’t have a microscope, but if i wanted one, i could get one, and suddenly the cellular structures of the organisms around me would be open to me

even molecular biology, to a certain degree, is somewhat accessible. like, PCR is revolutionary not just because it is a powerful tool for multiplying and sequencing dna but also because it is such a wildly simple technique that you can literally do it over a fucking campfire, and someone has. the barrier to entry for dna sequencing as an amateur biologist is mostly the cost of the chemical components—you don’t need a college degree to understand and carry out the process.

quantum physics, and to a strong degree also much of astrophysics, by contrast, is not something that can readily be understood if you didn’t specialize in it. people can sell you analogies in pop sci books but my trust of such books has been basically irrevocably damaged after i’ve been burned too many times finding out that i’ve been fed a false explanation of how something worked and that the true explanation is just way over my head completely incomprehensible. and if i did manage to understand it, it would feel about as real to me as fictional magic.

i feel like i couldn’t go applying the things i learned in any real way, not the way that knowing about the genetic history of plant families makes you understand what your senses are experiencing better.

the closest i ever came to feeling like i got that kind of everyday application of quantum mechanics to my life was reading QED by richard feynman and him adding up arrows to explain why light bent on a hot road. which is pretty interesting, if a bit abstract! (and there’s that thing again, the real magic doesn’t actually feel particularly real or connected to reality) but meanwhile, i have never actually been able to “understand” quantum computing. ppl make videos trying to explain it and i’ve watched many of them, i’ve tried to even write qasm, but the conclusion i came to is that you can’t actually understand it unless you go into heavy maths and write code, and you can’t write code that actually does anything discernable on a quantum computer unless you have a lot of money reply

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:00

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You’re right about quantum phenomena being hard to see and visualize, though people do try: here’s an article about seeing single photons with the naked eye, and another one about replicating the famous double-slit experiment with a cheap laser pointer. You’re also right about Feynmann’s QED: it’s an interesting and fun book.

rose (@rosieposie) - 2023-07-25 03:05

for me the closest thing to ’fictional magic’ is ’cooking’. you follow a recipe passed down by the sages of old, you improvise a little every once in a while to make it better, and voila, you turned things that people don’t like so much into a magical substance that enamors everyone at the party and has them begging for you to do that trick again next month. and you can just do it in real life any time you want to.

and really if you think about it, the only difference between chemistry and cooking is that cooking is that cooking is limited (mostly) to human-safe substances. and has significantly less extreme effects, like your product probably won’t kill most people. also something something potion brewing. reply

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:01

Thanks for commenting! You’re right, cooking can be pretty magic at times, especially in the hands of a master chef.

ArBe (@arbe) - 2023-07-25 05:46

I’ve thought about these comparisons(often from slightly different angles, but definitely in the same vein, and often also inspired by fiction like WHA) many times, especially the frustrating disparity between [ the ability to understand the fascinating systems underlying everything ] and [ the ridiculously disproportional amount of time and effort required to actually utilise that knowledge practically, especially as an individual ].

This post really nicely expands on those thoughts in ways I never would’ve thought of, and introduces some entirely new threads of thought that feel really enjoyable to explore, like the point about artificial environments. Great post!

brackets added for readability, maybe I wouldn’t need this crutch if my punctuation were better. Sorry

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:02

Thanks for your comment! I’m glad you found the post interesting.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-07-25 12:00

this feels like a very wise and true analysis

i’ll add that programming is one field where you can still be a rag-tag do-it-yourself-magician. the stuff you produce will not have the production value and polish of a megacorporation, but it still just might be functional

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 12:53

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I apologize for being so late to follow-up. Yes, you’re absolutely right, software is the one place a sole creator can make a difference, especially given all the (mostly) free tools at their disposal nowadays.

このペ⁠ージには日本語訳を用意したので、必要の際はこちらの日本語版ペ⁠ージをご参照いただきたい。

That Type of Girl is an in-depth exploration of the characters, plot, and themes of Takako Shimura’s manga Sweet Blue Flowers, a landmark work in the yuri genre that portrays the slowly blooming love between Fumi, a young lesbian, and her childhood friend Akira. That Type of Girl situates the manga within the context of contemporary Japanese society and yuri’s century-long history; it also includes a comprehensive index of characters and their appearances in the manga, pointers to online reviews, and an extensive list of suggestions for further reading. It’s a must-read for fans of Sweet Blue Flowers and for fans interested in the broader yuri genre.

That Type of Girl can be purchased on Amazon in Kindle or paperback form and as an e-book at other online bookstores. It’s also available as a free download in PDF format or in DRM-free EPUB3 format for use with other e-book readers, and can be read on the web as well.

UPDATE 2022-08-06: The Japanese translation of the book, 『そ⁠っち系のひと：志村貴子「青い花」に関する考察』 (Sotchi-kei no hito: Shimura Takako Aoi hana ni kansuru kousatsu), can now be purchased on Amazon in Kindle or paperback form and as an e-book at other online bookstores. It’s also available as a free download in PDF format or in DRM-free EPUB3 format for use with other e-book readers.

Finally, I’ve made the complete “source code” for the book available in a public repository on the GitLab service. (“Source code” here refers to the original Markdown files from which the book was generated, along with instructions and scripts to recreate the various versions of the book from those files.)

Answers to questions nobody asked

Even though this book is a small-scale hobby affair, I thought it would be fun to pretend I was on a book tour and doing interviews. I also enjoy writing FAQs, even though these particular Qs are anything but FA. So, without further ado:

Q. Why did you write a book?

A. Why not? Anyone who writes, whether as a profession or as a hobby, should try writing a book at least once in their life.

Unlike blog posts or other online articles, which are dependent on the underlying website or social media service for their continued availability, a book can be transmitted to the future as a whole entity, whether in physical or electronic form. It’s no accident that the book format has endured through the centuries, and will no doubt do so for centuries to come.

Writing a book also forces you to write according to an overall theme or narrative, and to devote some thought to what you want to say. It’s the very opposite of trying to come up with bon mots on Twitter or haunting the comments section on Facebook, and I think much more satisfying and fulfilling than either.

Q. Why the interest in yuri manga?

A. For a long time I’ve been a reader of comics and graphic novels, but not of the superhero variety—my tastes ran toward so-called “alternative” or “independent” comics. At some point, I also started to read Japanese comics, or manga, and found them interesting in terms of the variety of subject matter (not just heroic action) and as a glimpse into another culture that was relatable but also subtly at a slant from my own.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve also become less interested in works driven by action and more interested in works that center emotional relationships. The genre most known for emotional relationships is romance. So I inevitably gravitated toward manga that featured romantic relationships, including manga in the yuri genre that feature romantic relationships between women.

Overall I found yuri manga to be more congenial than either traditional boy-girl romances targeted at teenaged girls (the shōjo demographic), or “BL” (“boys love”) manga featuring relationships between men—although I enjoy many of those as well. Among other things, the relationships in both shōjo and BL manga often have elements that are toxic to various degrees or otherwise distasteful. Those elements are typically less present in yuri manga.

(There are also some good romance manga targeted at the josei demographic of older women, but we don’t get a lot of those in the West.)

Q. Why write about Sweet Blue Flowers specifically?

A. Sweet Blue Flowers (originally published in Japanese as Aoi hana, or “Blue flower[s]”) is an interesting case. It’s reasonably well-known among manga fans, though not as well-known as Wandering Son, another of Takako Shimura’s manga. It’s also reasonably well thought of as a yuri manga, though there are other yuri works that people rate more highly. (That’s especially true as the genre has become more popular in the past few years and more and more yuri works have appeared in English translation.)

But Sweet Blue Flowers has at least three aspects that intrigued me. First, it’s seemingly more complicated than it needs to be. Just as you might look at a piece of machinery and wonder what a particular part of it does, I look at some of the elements in Sweet Blue Flowers and wonder exactly why Shimura included them.

Related to that, there are parts of Sweet Blue Flowers that seem to be at least obliquely commenting on Japanese society. That sort of thing is catnip to me—I always enjoy exploring the social, cultural, and political ideas and assumptions behind things I read.

Finally, Sweet Blue Flowers came out at a transition point in the history of the yuri genre: “Schoolgirl yuri” stories still formed the overwhelming majority of works in the genre. However, yuri works were beginning to appear that dealt with relationships between adult women and/or at least nodded toward the idea that LGBTQ people exist. In Sweet Blue Flowers, Takako Shimura combines elements of both “schoolgirl yuri” and “LGBTQ yuri”—not always successfully, but the fact that she tried to do so is interesting in and of itself.

The result was that starting in the fall of 2017, when a new and complete edition of Sweet Blue Flowers began publication in English, I soon found myself goofing off on Tumblr posting an article every day or so about various things that struck me when reading it. I am not a person who can write and post something every day, so after a while I gave that up. I also came to realize that I was breathtakingly ignorant of certain things I needed to know in order to make better sense of the story.

I’ve spent the last four years trying to become less ignorant. At the beginning of 2020, I decided to publish my musings as a full-fledged book, and committed the first incomplete draft to a private repository. I’ve worked since then to get it polished enough that the thought of someone else reading it wouldn’t embarrass me too much.

But make no mistake: no matter how much I might dress it up with literature references and source citations, at its heart That Type of Girl is just a Tumblr with pretensions of grandeur.

Q. Do you expect anyone to read this book?

A. To a first approximation, no. The fun was in writing it and publishing it. I have very minimal expectations regarding anyone actually reading it.

I happen to work in a sales group, so I’m familiar with the idea of a “sales funnel” as people go from being casually interested in a product through to actually buying it. Here’s how I think things will go:

There are probably no more than three hundred or so people worldwide who might be interested in a book like this (the so-called “total addressable market”). Possibly a hundred people or so of those people might hear about the book one way or another, and of those perhaps thirty of them will visit this page to read more about it. Of those, possibly ten people will bother to download the book (here or elsewhere), maybe three people will go on to read at least part of it, and (if I’m lucky) there might be one person who finds it to be at least intermittently interesting.

Anything beyond that and I’d be both surprised and pleased.

UPDATE 2022-08-06: As it turns out, I was overly pessimistic. I was lucky enough to get a retweet from James Welker, one of the academics I quoted in the book, and even more lucky to get a tweet from Takako Shimura herself, after I sent her a copy of the book. Thanks to their promotion, since the book was released:

• The book’s English and Japanese web pages have been visited about 2,200 times.
• There have been about 460 downloads of the PDF and EPUB3 versions of the original English edition.
• There have been about 120 downloads of the PDF and EPUB3 versions of the Japanese edition.
• About 18 people have bought an e-book or paperback copy of the English or Japanese edition.

So, the book is very very far from being a best-seller but it’s somewhat more popular than I assumed it would be.

Q. Why are you making PDF and EPUB3 versions of the book freely downloadable?

Again, why not? I didn’t write the book to make money, so I have no problem with distributing copies at no charge. Also, given how limited the potential audience is for the book, I wanted to ensure that anyone who wanted to read it would have easy access to it. PDF files are almost universally readable on all devices, and are not tied to a particular online service. Similarly, a standard EPUB3 file without DRM can be read on any generic e-book reader, including reader software supporting special accessibility features.

Q. Why are you also selling the book through Amazon and other online services?

Some people like the convenience of reading e-books on devices like Kindle e-readers that are tied to particular services, and I don’t have a problem with having them pay a reasonable amount for that convenience. I’ve set the price for the e-book versions to be consistent with that of typical self-published works.

Other people prefer reading books in print form, so I’m also offering a paperback version of the book through Amazon. Again, I’ve set the price to be in line with that of other self-published books.

Q. Why did you make the source text files for the book publicly available?

A. Why not? I wrote the various chapters of the book like I do my blog posts, using regular text files and the Markdown formatting language. Again, just as with my blog posts, I use a version control system to keep track of the various revisions I made to the book, using the same “git” software used by many software developers. It was technically easy for me to release the book content in its “raw” form, and I thought it might be helpful for someone, somewhere, someday, if I did just that.

In particular, I wanted to promote the Electric Book software that I used to format the various editions of the book. That software is itself available for download at no charge. I thought it might be useful to other would-be authors for me to provide a real-life example of how they could use the Electric Book software to produce their own books.

(Those who can’t or don’t want to do everything themselves can still take advantage of the Electric Books system by engaging the services of the fine folks at Electric Book Works. They were nice enough to make their software available to people like me, and in return I’m happy to refer potential customers to them.)

Q. Why are you releasing the book under the CC BY-SA license?

A. The CC BY-SA license, more formally known as the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, allows anyone to freely redistribute the book’s text, including the underlying Markdown files, with or without changes. The major restriction is that they must distribute such derivative works under the same CC BY-SA license (or a compatible license, like the GNU GPL 3.0).

The CC BY-SA license is also used for Wikipedia’s articles. Its effect in practice is that it’s easy to create and distribute derivative works, and as works get thus modified and redistributed for use in other contexts, the total amount of written material that is freely distributable expands as well.

Thus, for example, if someone were ever interested in translating That Type of Girl into another language, they wouldn’t need special permission from me, as long as they followed the license terms. Their translation could then be further revised and potentially improved upon by others, again without needing special permission.

I doubt very much that anyone will ever bother to make such a translation. However, if anyone does, I don’t want them to have to jump through hoops in order to get the necessary permissions, especially if I’m no longer around to grant them.

UPDATE 2022-08-06: To my surprise, the pseudonymous blogger Konsuke translated the entire book into Japanese. (See above for the purchase and download links.) Konsuke originally published the translated chapters on his blog at con-cats.hatenablog.com, where you can read chapters from the book, his own comments about the book, and correspondence between him and me about various translation-related issues. You can also follow him on Twitter at @hitus_concats.

There is also an English version of this web page.

『そ⁠っち系のひと』（That Type of Girl）は、志村貴子による漫画『青い花』のキャラクタ⁠ー、プロット、およびテ⁠ーマを徹底的に掘り下げた一冊である。『青い花』は、レズビアンの少女ふみと、その幼馴染であるあきらとの間にゆ⁠っくりと芽生える愛情を描いた、百合漫画の金字塔といえる。本書では、この名作漫画を、現代日本社会および世紀にわたる百合の歴史の中に位置付けて語⁠っている。さらに、各キャラクタ⁠ーの全登場シ⁠ーンまで含めた総合索引、オンラインレビュ⁠ーのまとめ、そしてより深く読み込んでいくための様々な参考文献の提示なども含まれている。百合というジャンルに興味がある人はもちろん、『青い花』のファンにと⁠っても必読の書である。

『そ⁠っち系のひと』は、アマゾンにてKindle版およびペ⁠ーパ⁠ーバック版が、またその他のオンライン書店にて電子書籍版が、それぞれ購入可能とな⁠っている。また、PDF形式もしくはその他の電子書籍リ⁠ーダ⁠ーで使えるDRMフリ⁠ーのEPUB3形式での無料ダウンロ⁠ードも可能である。

（原典である『That Type of Girl』に関しても、上記同様、英語版での各形式が用意されている。アマゾンではKindle版およびペ⁠ーパ⁠ーバック版が、その他のオンライン書店では電子書籍版が購入可能であり、PDF形式またはその他の電子書籍リ⁠ーダ⁠ーで使えるDRMフリ⁠ーのEPUB3形式での無料ダウンロ⁠ードも可能とな⁠っている。）

最後に、この本の完全な「ソ⁠ースコ⁠ード」も、GitLabサ⁠ービス上の公開リポジトリで公開している。（ここでの「ソ⁠ースコ⁠ード」とは、この本が組版されたオリジナルのMarkdownファイルと、それらからこの本の別バ⁠ージョンを再作製するための指針やスクリプトのことを指している）。

誰にも聞かれてない質問への回答

この本はちょ⁠っとした趣味の範疇の産物ではあるが、ブックツア⁠ーに参加したつもりでインタビュ⁠ーに応じたら楽しいだろうなと思い立⁠ってしま⁠った。FAQを書くのも楽しいことだといえる。もちろん、この質問は、単なる「Q」であ⁠って、「FA（よく聞かれる）」というわけではないのだが。前置きはこのくらいにして…

Q. なぜ本を書いたのか？

A. むしろ、なぜ書かないのか？職業としてであれ、趣味としてであれ、文章を書く人なら誰でも、一生に一度は本を書いてみるのが良いのではないかと思う。

ブログ記事やその他オンライン記事は、そのサ⁠ービス元となるウェブサイトやSNSなどの継続性に依存しているが、書籍というものはそれらとは違い、物理的な形であれ電子的な形であれ、そこにある物質として未来に発信することができるのである。本という形式が何世紀にもわた⁠って存続してきたのは偶然ではないし、これからもず⁠っとそうであることは間違いないと思えてやまない。

また、本を書くということは、全体的なテ⁠ーマや物語に沿⁠って書き、自分が何を言いたいのか熟考することを強いられる。ツイッタ⁠ーで上手いつぶやきをしたりフェイスブックのコメント欄に足しげく通⁠ったりするのとは異なるもので、それ以上の満足感や充実感が得られるように思う。

Q. なぜ百合漫画に興味を持⁠ったのか？

A. 私は長い間アメコミやグラフィックノベルの読者だ⁠ったが、ス⁠ーパ⁠ーヒ⁠ーロ⁠ー系には興味がなか⁠った―いわゆる「オルタナティブ」「インディ⁠ーズ」系のコミックが自分の好みに合⁠っていたといえる。ある時期から日本のコミック、つまり漫画も読むようにな⁠った。日本の漫画には様々な題材があり（ヒ⁠ーロ⁠ーアクションだけではなく）、似てはいるが微妙に自分とは異なる文化を垣間見ることができるという、大いなる面白さを見つけ出したのである。

年齢を重ねるにつれ、アクションを中心とした作品には興味がなくなり、より感情的（エモ⁠ーショナル）な関係を中心とした作品に興味を持つようにな⁠った。エモな関係といえば、最もよく知られているジャンルは恋愛であろう。つまり、必然的に恋愛をテ⁠ーマにした漫画、その中でも特に女性同士の恋愛をテ⁠ーマにした百合ジャンルの漫画に惹かれるようにな⁠ってい⁠ったのである。

ティ⁠ーンの少女をタ⁠ーゲットにした伝統的な少年少女ロマンス（いわゆる少女漫画）や、男性同士の恋愛を描いた「BL」（「ボ⁠ーイズラブ」）漫画よりも、百合漫画は全体的に和やかなのである―もちろん、私は少女漫画もBLも沢山楽しんでいるのだが。しかし、少女漫画やBL漫画には様々なレベルの毒があ⁠ったり、それ以外にも嫌な思いをしたりすることが多いのである。百合漫画には、概して、そうい⁠った要素が少ない。

（年配の女性をタ⁠ーゲットにしたレディコミにも良い恋愛漫画はあるのだが、残念ながら欧米ではあまり見かけない。）

Q. なぜ『青い花』について具体的に書いたのか？

A. 『Sweet Blue Flowers』（日本語原題は『青い花』）は興味深いケ⁠ースなのである。この作品は、志村貴子のもう一つの代表作『放浪息子』ほどではないが、漫画ファンの間ではそれなりによく知られている。また、百合漫画としてもそれなりに評価されているものの、世間ではも⁠っと評価されている百合作品が他にあることはある。（ここ数年、このジャンルが人気を博し、英訳される百合作品が多くな⁠っているため、特にそう思う）。

しかし、『青い花』には、少なくとも三つの点で興味をそそられる所があ⁠った。まず、この作品は必要以上に複雑にな⁠っているように思えたということ。機械を見て、この部品は何なのだろうと思うように、『青い花』のいくつかの要素を見て、志村はなぜこの要素を入れたのだろうと不思議に思⁠ったのである。

それに関連して、『青い花』には、少なくとも日本社会に対して遠回しに物申しているような部分があるように思う。そういうものは、私にと⁠ってネコジャラシみたいなものなのだ―私はいつも、自分が読むものの背後にある社会的、文化的、政治的な考えや前提を探求することを楽しんでいる。

最後に、『青い花』は、百合というジャンルの歴史の転換期に生まれた作品なのだ：「学生百合」は、当時まだ、このジャンルの圧倒的に多いパタ⁠ーンであ⁠った。しかし、百合作品は徐々に、大人の女性同士の恋愛を描いたり、LGBTQの存在を匂わせたりする作品が出始めていた。志村は『青い花』で、「学生百合」と「LGBTQ百合」の両方の要素を融合したのである―これは必ずしも上手くいくことではないが、志村がその中に、またそれ自身として、それらを取り入れようとしたこと自体が面白いことだと思う。

その結果、『青い花』の英語版・新装完全版が刊行された2017年秋から、私はすぐに、気付いたらいつの間にか、読んでいて気にな⁠った様々なことを、ほぼ毎日ぐらいTumblrにグチグチと投稿してしま⁠っていた。私は毎日何かを書いて投稿できるような人間ではないので、しばらくしたらやめてしま⁠ったが、それでも、この物語をより深く理解するために知⁠っておくべき事柄について、自分でも驚くほど、信じられないぐらいに無知であ⁠ったことに気が付いたのである。

この4年間、無知でなくなるための努力を続けてきた私は、2020年の初め、ついにこれまで沈思黙考してきた事柄を本格的な書籍として出版することを決め、最初の不完全な原稿を個人のリポジトリに投稿した。それ以来、誰かに読まれても恥ずかしくないような洗練されたものにするために努力してきたのである。

だが、誤解しないでいただきたい：私がいくら文献を参照し、出典を引用して格好をつけても、『That Type of Girl』の核心は、壮大さを気取⁠っただけの、単なるTumblrの投稿に過ぎないのである。

Q. この本を読んでくれる人がいると思うか？

A. 簡単な見積もりとしては、ノ⁠ーといえる。そもそも書くこと、そして出版することが楽しか⁠ったのだ。だから実際に読んでくれる人については、ほとんど期待していない。

私はたまたま営業班に所属しているので、人々が商品に何気なく興味を持ち、実際に購入するまでの「セ⁠ールスファネル」の考え方には精通している。大体このような流れになると思う：

このような本に興味を持つ人は、おそらく世界中に300人程度しかいない（いわゆる「TAM；最大市場規模」）。その内の100人くらいがこの本のことをたまたま何らかの形で知り、その内の30人くらいがこのペ⁠ージを訪れて、この本についても⁠っと読みたいと思うかもしれない。そしてその内10人くらいがわざわざ本をダウンロ⁠ードし（このペ⁠ージまたは別の所で）、3人くらいが少なくとも一部を読み、（運が良ければ）1人くらいはこの本を僅かながらでも面白いと思⁠ってくれるかもしれない。

それ以上であれば、私は驚くと同時に、とても嬉しいと思う。

2022年8月6日更新：結論からいうと、私は悲観的になりすぎていたようだ。幸いなことに、本の中で引用した学者の一人であるジェ⁠ームズ・ウェルカ⁠ーからリツイ⁠ートをもらい、さらに幸運なことに、志村貴子本人に本書を送⁠ったところ、彼女自身からツイ⁠ートをもらうことができたのだ。彼らのプロモ⁠ーションのおかげで、本を公開してから現在までに：

• 本書の英語版および日本語版ウェブペ⁠ージへのアクセス数は約2200回を数えた。
• 原典である英語版のPDFおよびEPUB3のダウンロ⁠ードは約460回を数えた。
• 日本語版のPDFおよびEPUB3のダウンロ⁠ードは約120回を数えた。
• 18名の方々に英語版または日本語版の電子書籍版またはペ⁠ーパ⁠ーバック版を購入していただけた。

ということで、ベストセラ⁠ーまでにはとても及ぶべくもないが、私が想定していたよりは、いくらか好評を博してもらえたようだ。

Q. なぜ、PDF版を自由にダウンロ⁠ードできるようにしているのか？

A. 改めて、それで問題なかろう。金儲けのために書いた本ではないので、無料で配布することに何ら問題はないのである。また、この本の潜在的な読者は非常に限られていることを考慮すると、読みたい人が簡単にアクセスできるようにしたか⁠ったともいえる。PDFファイルならばほぼどの端末でも読めるし、特定のオンラインサ⁠ービスに縛られることもない。同様に、DRMのない標準的なEPUB3ファイルは、特別なアクセス機能を備えた読書用ソフトウェアを含め、一般的な電子書籍リ⁠ーダ⁠ーで読むことが可能なのである。

Q. なぜ、Amazonなどのオンラインサ⁠ービスでも販売するのか？

A. Kindleのような特定のサ⁠ービスに縛られた端末で電子書籍を読むことの利便性を好む人もいるし、その利便性に見合⁠った金額を支払⁠ってもらうことにも問題は感じないからといえる。電子書籍版の価格は、一般的な自己出版物の価格と同じになるように設定した。

また、紙媒体で本を読みたい人もいるので、アマゾンでペ⁠ーパ⁠ーバック版も販売している。こちらも、他の自己出版作品と同じような価格に設定させていただいた。

Q. なぜ、この本のソ⁠ース・テキストファイルを公開したのか？

A. むしろ、しない意味があろうか？この本の各章は、ブログの投稿と同じように、通常のテキストファイルとともに、Markdownフォ⁠ーマット言語を使⁠って書かれている。そしてこれもブログの投稿と同様に、多くのソフトウェア開発者が使用している「git」システムを利用して、バ⁠ージョン管理システムで改訂記録を残すこともしている。この本の内容をそういう「生のまま」で公開することは技術的に容易だ⁠ったし、そうすれば、いつかどこかで誰かの役に立つかもしれないと思⁠ったのだ。

特に、この本の各版のフォ⁠ーマットに使用したElectric Bookというソフトウェアを宣伝したか⁠ったということもある。このソフト自体は無料でダウンロ⁠ードできる。これから本を執筆しようとする人たちにと⁠って、私がElectric Bookを使⁠って自分の本を作ることができるという実例を示すことは、役に立つかもしれないと思⁠ったわけだ。

（自分でできない人、やりたくない人でも、Electric Book Works社の素晴らしい社員たちの協力で、Electric Booksのシステムを大いに利用することが可能である。彼らは大変いい人々で、私のような人間にもソフトウェアを使えるようにしてくれたので、そのお返しに私は喜んで潜在的な顧客を紹介するつもりなのである。）

Q. なぜ、CC BY-SAライセンスで本を公開しているのか？

A. CC BY-SAライセンスは、より正式にはCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licenseとして知られており、これに則り、誰でもこの本のテキストを、組版元となるMarkdownファイルを含め、変更の有無を問わず、自由に再配布することを許可している。主な制限は、改変・派生作品を同じCC BY-SAライセンス（またはGNU GPL 3.0のような互換性のあるライセンス）の下で配布する必要があるということのみである。

CC BY-SAライセンスは、ウィキペディアの記事にも用いられている。その実際の効果は、二次的著作物の作成と配布が容易になるということであり、こうして作品が他の文脈で使うために修正され再配布されるようになると、自由に配布できる著作物の総量も大きくな⁠っていくといえるわけだ。

つまり、例えば誰かが『That Type of Girl』を他の言語に翻訳することに興味を持⁠ったとしても、ライセンス条項に従⁠っている限り、私からの特別な許可は必要ないのである。そして、その翻訳を他の人がさらに改訂し、改良することも可能で、この場合も特別な許可は一切必要ないということになる。

とはいえ、そんな翻訳をわざわざする人がいるかどうか、甚だ疑わしくはあるわけだが…。しかし、もしそのような人がいたとしても、必要な許可を得るためにあれやこれや煩わされて欲しくないのである。特に、私がその許可を与えるためにもうこの世にいない状況であれば、なおさらである。

2022年8月6日更新：驚いたことに、匿名ブロガ⁠ーの紺助が、この本の全編を日本語に翻訳してくれた。（日本語版の購入およびダウンロ⁠ードに関しては上記のリンクを参照。）紺助はまずブログ（con-cats.hatenablog.com）で本書の各章を公開してくれたが、ブログでは彼による本書へのコメントや翻訳に関する私とのやりとりなども読むことができる。また、Twitterの@hitus_concatsでフォロ⁠ーも可能である。

This is a follow-up to my seven-part series (starting with part 1) on expanding the Howard County Council, using ranked choice voting to elect council members, and leveraging automated redistricting software overseen by an independent redistricting commission.

This particular post describes an alternative to the three-district map proposed in that series and illustrated in part 5: I retain the idea of a fifteen-member county council, but instead of using three districts (with five members each) I use five districts (as with the current council), electing three members in each district. As in the previous example I assume the use of ranked choice voting.

An example five district map

The map above shows the five districts produced by the Auto-Redistrict software based on the data and options I provided. The new districts divide the county into the following areas; I’ve numbered the districts so that they roughly correspond with the current council districts:

• District 1. Ellicott City.
• District 2. Northeastern Howard County, including Elkridge.
• District 3. Southeastern Howard County, including North Laurel, Savage, Maple Lawn, and Fulton, as well as the Village of Kings Contrivance.
• District 4. Central Columbia, excluding some outlying villages.
• District 5. Western Howard County, including the Villages of River Hill and Harper’s Choice.

Because of the way that the Auto-Redistrict software works, starting from a random assignment of precincts to districts and then “evolving” the map from there, each run may end up producing a somewhat different map. For this run I was lucky, as I think this particular map does a really good job of matching up with the key population centers in the county. The main departure is that Columbia is too populous to fit into a single district; the proposed District 4 includes only about two-thirds of Columbia’s population.

Based on the 2020 Census figures, the racial and ethnic groups in these five districts would break down as follows:

• District 1. Non-Hispanic Whites would comprise about half the population of this of this district, at 49%, with Asians the next largest group at about 31%. Non-Hispanic Blacks would comprise about 10% of the population at 10%, with multi-racial people (or people of other races) and people of Hispanic origin the smallest groups, at about 5% each.
• District 2. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a slight minority in this district, at about 46%. Blacks and Asians would be roughly equal as a proportion of the population, at about 20% and 21% respectively. People of Hispanic origin would be about 10%, and multi-racial people or people of other races about 6%.
• District 3. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a distinct minority in this district, at 41% of the population, with Blacks and Asians about 25% and 18% respectively. The proportions of people of Hispanic origin and multi-racial people (or people of other races) would be comparable those in District 2, at 10% and 6% respectively.
• District 4. Non-Hispanic Whites would again be a distinct minority in this district, at 42%. This district would have the highest Black population, at 30%. The next most populous group would be people of Hispanic orgin at 12%, with Asians at 9% and multi-racial people and people of other races at 7%.
• District 5. This would be the only district with a non-Hispanic White majority, at 58%. The proportion of Asians would be about 21% (similar to District 2), while the proportion of Non-Hispanic Blacks would be about 11% (similar to District 1). The proportions of people of Hispance origin and multi-racial people (or people of other races) would be similar to those in District 1, at %% each.

(For figures for Howard County as a whole, see part 5 of the redistricting series.)

Assuming some level of vote transfers, Blacks would be well-positioned to win seats in Districts 4, 3, and 2 (in that order), while Asians would be positioned to win seats in Districts 1, 2, and 5. (Again, see part 5 for a caution about interpreting “Asians” as a monolithic demographic group.)

The remaining nine seats would likely go to Non-Hispanic Whites. As of the 2020 Census Non-Hispanic Whites are now a minority in the county overall, but they’d likely still comprise a majority on the county council—though not as much so as at present.

How would Democratic and Republican candidates fare in each district, and what might the final makeup of the Howard County Council look like? When ranked choice voting is used in a three-member district, a candidate is automatically elected if they are selected as the first preference on at least 25% plus one of the ballots cast (the “quota”).

So, for example, in the precincts comprising the proposed new District 1 I estimated the Republican share of the total vote for Howard County Council in the 2018 general election at about 38%. If a single Republican candidate ran in the Northeast District they would pretty much be guaranteed to be designated as the most preferred candidate by more than 25% of voters. The Republican Party would thus have one “safe” seat in the proposed District 1.

On the other hand, for the precincts in the proposed new District 1 I estimated the Democratic share of the county council vote in 2018 at about 62%. Suppose that only two Democratic candidates ran in the Northeast District and they each received roughly equal shares of the first preference votes—in other words, about half of Democratic voters picked the first candidate as their most preferred candidate and about half of Democrats gave their first preference to the second candidate.

Then given a 62% Democratic vote share each candidate would be designated as the most preferred candidate by about 31% of voters, well over the quota of 25% plus one, and both would automatically be elected. The Democratic Party would thus have two “safe” seats in the Northeast District.

With one Republican seat and two Democratic seats that would fill all three seats in the district. The Democratic party might be tempted to run three candidates, or the Republican party two, but they’d be running a risk in doing so. (See part 6 for a more in-depth discussion of this issue.)

A similar analysis can be done for the other districts. A summary of the likely results for all districts is as follows:

• District 1. Party breakdown: 62% Democrats, 38% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat.
• District 2. Party breakdown: 64% Democrats, 36% Republicans (similar to District 1). Likely two safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat.
• District 3. Party breakdown: 71% Democrats, 29% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats and one safe Republican seat, although it’s possible that Democrats might be able to win all three seats against a weak Republican candidate.
• District 4. Party breakdown: 77% Democrats, 23% Republicans. Democrats would have an even better chance here for a three-seat sweep.
• District 5. Party breakdown: 51% Democrats, 49% Republicans. This would likely be a true swing district, with one safe Democratic seat, one safe Republican seat, and one seat a toss-up.

Overall with this district map and the use of ranked choice voting Democrats would likely win at least nine or ten seats on the Howard County Council and Republicans at least four. The remaining one or two seats would be in play, with the most likely result being a 10-5 or 11-4 Democratic majority—a more balanced result than the 4-1 Democratic majority on the current council. (And as noted in a previous post it’s also possible that a third party or independent candidate could capture a seat and act as a deciding vote on the council.)

Overall the idea of electing fifteen council members from five districts has a lot to recommend it: the use of five districts is a continuation of current practice, and the resulting map is very reflective of the geography of the county.

Electing only three members per district using ranked choice voting (as opposed to five) would also simplify both ballot design and the task of voters: there would likely be fewer candidates on the ballot to rank, and in some cases Republican voters at least would likely only need to indicate a first preference (assuming that they were indifferent as to which Democratic candidates were elected).

The major downside of this approach, at least from the point of view of the Republican party, is that it somewhat disadvantages Republican candidates relative to electing five members in each of three districts. That’s a general issue with ranked choice voting: for a minority party’s results to match its vote share, it helps to have more candidates on the ballot for voters to rank.

For further exploration

For the code used to generate the graphs above, see my document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 4. For the data behind the district maps see Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1. I ran the Auto-Redistrict application as described in part 4 of my redistricting series, using the same input data and the same settings, except that I specified five districts with three members each instead of three districts with five members each.

[This is part 7 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this final post I discuss what motivated me to spend the considerable amount of time it took to research the issue of county council redistricting, to analyze the data and find software to create a proposed district map, and to write this series.

Why do I care about this?

As I discussed in a previous post, my proposal would reduce the likely Democratic majority on the Howard County Council and allow Republicans to win proportionally more seats than they currently do. My fellow Democrats might therefore ask me, “Frank, what the heck are you thinking?!?” My answer is as follows:

First, in addition to being a proud and lifelong Democrat I am a strong believer in the value of liberal democracy: that liberty is best secured by a political system in which every person has equal power to influence government actions through their votes. Partisan gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression work against that ideal.

The Republican Party was once the party that freed the slaves, amended the Constitution to help secure their rights, and made it possible for some of them (i.e., the men) to vote for the first time ever. How the GOP wishes to treat that great legacy through its present-day actions is its own business.

But my own party has evolved from being the past architect of Jim Crow, and I abhor anything it might do that reminds us of the days of the poll tax, voter “literacy” tests, and other measures that served to make the votes of some people worth more than those of other people.

Second, if we are ever to move beyond our current polarized and poisoned political environment then that process will have to start at the local level, where the rewards for political misbehavior are less and a dedicated movement for electoral reform might have a better chance of being successful.

Finally, I believe that campaigning in a more competitive political environment will ultimately be good for the Democratic Party. Partisan gerrymandering can make for a weak party: why bother doing the hard work of grassroots organizing when you can just redraw district lines every ten years to give yourself a structural advantage over the other party?

(And as a corollary, a weak party is a party that can find itself taken over by politicians primarily interested in their own success rather than that of their party and their fellow candidates and elected officials.)

I think that improving the future prospects of the Democratic Party at a state and national level starts with building strong county- and city-level party organizations. Running under a ranked choice voting system would mean that those organizations couldn’t afford to get lazy when it comes to winning elections. And a stronger Democratic party that can win competitive elections means increased opportunities to advance the interests of Democratic voters and of Americans in general.

Betting on an alternative

OK, so I care about this issue. But why spend so much time working on this series of blog posts and the data analyses behind them, when it’s not clear that anyone else cares about this? As David Clifton remarked on Facebook, “I haven’t noticed people lining up outside the council building to complain they feel they have inadequate representation.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Howard County Republicans don’t care that they only have 20% of the seats on the county council despite having at least a third of the vote share. Maybe Democratic voters in District 5, or Republican voters in some other districts, don’t care that they don’t have a realistic chance of electing a council member from their own party.

Maybe young Democratic activists looking to run for elective office are happy to wait a decade or more for one of the few county council seats to open up, as Democratic council members are term-limited or move on to other offices. Maybe all the people with political ambitions in Howard County are content to work within the current two-party system.

And maybe Chinese-Americans, or Indian-Americans, or Korean-Americans, or people of Hispanic origin, or members of any of the other racial and ethnic groups in the county, don’t mind that no one of their background has ever been elected to the county council.

The work I put into creating this series of posts is in effect one big bet that there are people out there who are not happy with the way we currently elect the Howard County Council, and would like to see some alternative proposals. But the alternatives that have traditionally been on offer—an increased number of single-member districts, or a few at-large seats, both elected by the traditional “first past the post” method—will likely not address people’s concerns.

We know this because Howard County has already tried these methods: The initial use of five at-large county council seats led to Democratic dominance on the council beyond what the Democratic vote share would warrant. Howard County Republicans put a lot of effort into promoting and ultimately achieving a switch to five council districts, only to eventually find that this mechanism was vulnerable to Democratic gerrymandering of the district lines.

The computer scientist Alan Kay once said of the original Apple Macintosh that it was “the first personal computer good enough to be criticized”. That was my goal with this series of posts: to put forth an alternative plan for Howard County Council redistricting that seriously attempted to address issues with the current council district system, was backed up by a reasonable amount of data analysis (sufficient at least for a first attempt), and produced a district map and associated party and racial/ethnic breakdowns that could be usefully evaluated and compared against other alternatives. Whether or not I’ve succeeded in that goal I leave to others to judge.

Anyway, that’s it for me. I’m a blogger, not an activist or organizer. If anyone else wants to take these ideas and run with them they’re welcome to do so. In the meantime I’d be happy to answer any further questions and concerns others might have about this proposal, and will update the previous Q&A post as appropriate.

For further exploration

There are a number of other explorations that could be done relative to Howard County Council redistricting and alternative electoral systems. I list some of them here in case anyone wants to take them on.

• Repeat my redistricting analysis, but using census blocks as the basic unit of the districts instead of precincts.
• Do simulations of ranked choice elections for the proposed three districts using one of the many RCV simulators available. (Just do an Internet search for “ranked choice voting simulator.”)
• Repeat the redistricting exercise I did, but for other numbers of council districts or members per district, for example five districts with three members each (for the same total of fifteen members as my proposal) or three districts with three members each (for a total of nine).
• Do an analysis of the current five single-member council districts, but using ranked choice voting (in this context known as “instant-runoff voting or IRV) instead of “first past the post.”
• Repeat the previous analysis, but use approval voting instead of ranked choice voting. (This would require some assumptions on how voters would vote in such a system.)
• Analyze councils with seven, nine, eleven, or thirteen single-member districts, elected using ranked choice voting.
• Repeat the previous analyses with approval voting instead.

[This is part 6 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I attempt to answer various questions people have raised about this proposal. (Note: I also addressed other questions about ranked choice voting for Howard County Council elections in an earlier post, “Ranked choice voting: questions and answers”; however that post assumed electing only one council member per district. Also, I may make updates to this post if I get further questions that merit answers, or if some of my answers turn out to be incorrect or incomplete.)

Expanding the council and having fewer districts

Doesn’t Howard County’s charter provide for automatically expanding the number of council members based on population?

Unfortunately, it does not. The county charter specifically states that

The legislative power of the County is vested in the County Council of Howard County which shall consist of five members who shall be elected from the Councilmanic Districts. . . . Each Councilmanic District shall elect one Council member. (Section 202. The County Council.)

So the county charter would need to be changed even just to add new council members, let alone move to multi-member districts.

A related question is whether the use of multi-member districts is consistent with the Maryland Constitution. The relevant language is as follows:

The charter for the government of any county governed by the provisions of this Article may provide for the election of members of the county council by the voters of councilmanic districts therein established, or by the voters of the entire county, or by a combination of these methods of election. (Article XI-A, Section 3A.)

This doesn’t explicitly rule out having a county council elected from multi-member districts, but it doesn’t explicitly permit it either.

If each district had five county council members, how would a person know which of their council members to call if they needed help?

First, this is a problem Howard County has faced before. Liz Bobo, Ed Cochran, C. Vernon Gray, Lloyd Knowles, and Ginny Thomas were all elected to the Howard County Council during a time when council members were elected at large, before council districts were adopted in 1984. So in a sense each of them had the entire county population for their constituency, and we can look to their experience to see how this worked in practice.

My own answer is as follows: If a constituent has five council members whom they can go to for assistance or to lobby for something, they’ll go to whomever has a particular interest or expertise in the issue at question, has proved helpful in the past, and/or has political views congenial to themselves.

Each council member in a district would likely have natural constituencies, based on the area of the county in which they live, particular interest groups they represent, and so on. For example, someone living in Ellicott City concerned about, say, Route 40 development would likely contact whichever council member in the West District happened to live in Ellicott City and seemed interested in that issue.

Council members within a district might then compete with each other to provide services to their constituents and address their concerns. It’s possible that in some cases a constituent who’s a Democratic voter may prefer dealing with a Republican council member, or vice versa, because they find that that council member is more effective at getting things done for them. But it’s also possible that they might join forces and establish unified channels for dealing with constituent requests, especially if they were of the same party.

Could we find fifteen people who could and would invest the time to serve on an expanded county council? And wouldn’t that be expensive?

I think there are more than enough ambitious political activists of all parties and ideologies in Howard to fill a fifteen-member council. And I would rather have them running for the county council and leave the Board of Education elections to people whose primary interest is in overseeing the Howard County Public School System.

As for the expense, in the proposed Howard County FY22 operating budget the budget for the county council is just under $6 million out of an overall budget of $1.8 billion, or about 0.3%. Even if it doubled or tripled with an expanded county council it would still be under 1% of county operating expenditures.

Wouldn’t expanding the county council expand the power of the county executive by weakening the ability of any one council member to hold the county executive accountable?

A county council is a legislature, and it’s inherent in the nature of a legislature that there will be many legislators relative to the executive. Even with a fifteen-member council an individual council member would have significantly more power to affect legislation and hold the executive branch accountable than (say) a typical Maryland state delegate out of the 141 members of the House of Delegates, or a typical state senator out of the 47 members of the Maryland Senate.

In practice I suspect that a fifteen-member council would delegate much of its work to committees, and the committee heads would hold significant power in terms of holding the county executive accountable.

If we reduce the number of districts from five to three, would western Howard County have any representation at all?

As discussed in the previous post, one of the three proposed districts would include western Howard County, and would have five council members (out of fifteen). It would be roughly equivalent to the current District 5, but a bit bigger, since it would contain about one hundred-ten thousand people vs. about sixty thousand today. I’m confident at least some of the five council members from the proposed West District would be from western Howard proper (as opposed to, say, Ellicott City or River Hill).

Wouldn’t decreasing the number of districts to three increase the potential to gerrymander districts so that no Republicans get elected to the Council?

This might be the case if members within each district were elected at-large. However ranked choice voting has the effect of ensuring Democratic or Republican shares of seats proportional to the parties’ vote shares. See my previous post.

Wouldn’t this proposal reduce the diversity of representation in terms of the different types of communities in Howard County, and enable certain high density areas to control the agenda?

My guess here is that the concern is with reducing the number of districts from five to three, thus lumping different different communities into larger subdivisions. My response is that even though the number of districts would be smaller, the number of council members per district would be much larger, and that would allow more effective representation of different communities.

For example, in the proposed West District there would be three relatively large communities, Ellicott City, River Hill, and Maple Lawn, along with the various smaller communities of Western Howard County. It’s perfectly possible that candidates could pitch themselves as representing one of those distinct areas (for example, a candidate specifically focusing on the Maple Lawn/Fulton area).

As for the concern about high-density areas controlling the agenda, areas with more population will always have more voting power and consequently more representation at the county council. See for example the current council, in which there are four council members representing relative populous and high density areas and only one representing the lower-density and less populous rural West.

Wouldn’t having a fifteen-member county council at least double or triple the meeting length? Would council members still be able to stay part time?

Baltimore city has a fifteen-member city council. We can look to them to see what to do (or not to do) to efficiently conduct council business. I suspect one approach will be to do what other larger legislatures do, namely to delegate some matters to committees, with the full council needing to get involved only at later stages.

If the goal of expanding the council is to enable council members to be better serve their constituents, couldn’t that be accomplished more cheaply and effectively just by increasing the number of staff members assisting each member?

Serving a constituent is not the same as representing a constituent. A progressive Democrat in District 5 may be served by their Republican council member, and served well at that, but may not feel represented by them. Ditto for a conservative Republican in other districts in which Democratic candidates invariably win.

Questions about ranked choice voting

In ranked choice voting how do you determine which excess ballots get transferred from a candidate that wins election to another candidate?

Per the FairVote advocacy site: “[Vote transfers] can be done many different ways, but the best way is to transfer a fraction of every vote to its next choice. That way, every vote is treated equally and no part of any vote is wasted.” So if a candidate is (say) 20% above the quota of first-preference votes, you take the second preference votes for everybody who voted for that candidate, multiply them by 0.2, and add these fractional votes to each of the candidates receiving the transfers.

How do you resolve the fact that whether Candidate A or Candidate B wins a seat may depend on whether a much lower ranked Candidate C gets more votes than Candidate D?

How do we resolve the fact that in the 1992 presidential election Bill Clinton won with a minority of the vote, due in large part to Ross Perot taking a large percentage of the vote away from George H. W. Bush, when it’s quite possible that most Perot voters would have preferred Bush to Clinton?

Any electoral system used in a race with more than two candidates has theoretical cases where it will fail to adhere to some set of reasonable criteria. (There’s even a mathematical theorem about this.) But how often do these situations occur in practice? Ranked choice voting with multi-member districts has been used for a long time in Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular (under the name “proportional representation with a single transferable vote,” or PR-STV) and to my knowledge has not experienced major issues of the type described.

It’s also important to look at the overall effect of a given electoral system. I dislike the “first past the post” electoral system (the one used in the US) not because of the results of a single presidential race, but because as a general tendency it tends to lead to the dominance of two political parties and the crowding out of independents and third parties, and because when used in multi-member districts it tends to produce one-party dominance at the expense of proportional representation. If ranked choice voting can help correct that then I think the occasional odd result is bearable.

Why wouldn’t parties at least run five candidates for five districts?

The problem here is as follows: When a party runs too many candidates relative to their vote share, it will likely find that none of the candidates get enough first-preference votes to be elected in the first round.

For example, in a five-member district using RCV the quota is approximately 16.7%. If Democrats had (say) a 60% vote share and first preference votes were spread relatively evenly among five Democratic candidates, each would receive about 12% of first preference votes, and would therefore fail to be elected in the first round (which requires exceeding the quota).

One might say, “well, they can be still be elected on transferred votes.” But the question then becomes, where are those transferred votes going to come from? In the second round the only source of transfers would be from winning candidates in the first round who have excess votes (i.e., above the 16.7% quota), or from a last-place candidate eliminated because no candidate met the quota.

But in our example no Democrats won in the first round, so there would be no excess votes to transfer from them. And if a candidate was eliminated, there are two possibilities: 1) The eliminated candidate was either a Republican or third-party candidate, which may not result in any transfers to Democrats. This would leave all of the Democratic candidates still below the quota. 2) The eliminated candidate was a Democratic candidate, in which case the Democratic party’s goal of electing five candidates has failed at the starting gate.

The second and subsequent rounds can be similarly analyzed. Such an analysis raises two questions: 1) If in the scenario described it’s very likely that at least one Democratic candidate will be eliminated, and possibly more than one, what was the point in running five candidates in the first place? 2) What happens if some people voting for Democratic candidates just mark a first-preference vote for their favorite candidate and don’t indicate second, third, etc., preferences? Then even after a Democratic candidate is eliminated there may not be enough second preference votes for other Democratic candidates available to make up the shortfall for another Democratic candidate.

Exploring the full ramifications of running too many candidates would take too long for this post. Suffice to say that I have read a lot of material about real-life RCV elections, and everything I have read is consistent with the view it is a potentially disastrous strategy for a party to field many more candidates than their vote share would warrant.

It seems really easy for a voter to accidentally mark two third choice candidates. Does this spoil the entire ballot?

It does indeed. The possibility of users making errors on ranked choice ballots is a real one. Opponents of ranked choice voting point to rates of spoiled or rejected ballots as high as 10% or more in past US elections using RCV.

This problem can be addressed through a combination of proper ballot design, voter education, and voter experience in using RCV. In the 2020 Irish general election the rate of spoiled ballots was only 0.8%. This is comparable to the rate of ballot spoilage and rejection for absentee and mail-in ballots in the 2020 US election, which per Ballotpedia was also 0.8%.

The New York City Democratic primary was conducted using ranked choice voting, and it took a long time to get the results. Is this an inherent problem with RCV?

The problems in New York City appear to be in large part due to inexperience and possibly outright incompetence on the part of the NYC elections board. However, there is one inherent issue with ranked choice voting that can in fact delay announcement of results:

As previously noted, key to ranked choice voting is the concept of the quota, which for a five-member district is defined as one-sixth of the total number of votes, plus one. But that means that in order to compute the quota you first need to know the total number of votes, and that means that you have to have all the votes in hand first before you can starting calculating results.

That’s not that big an issue for votes cast on election day. But what about mail-in ballots? Maryland’s current rules for mail-in voting allow up to ten days after election day for mail-in ballots to be received. If mail-in ballots are a significant fraction of the total vote then with an RCV election it might take several days after election day for there to be even preliminary results.¹

Why didn’t you consider using approval voting? Or a party slate system? These don’t have the problems that ranked choice voting does.

There are multiple answers here. First, my primary goal was to look at a system that both reduced the number of districts (to reduce the potential for gerrymandering) and provided representation for political parties and other groups commensurate with their voting power. That naturally led me to look at ranked choice voting, and having software (i.e., Auto-Redistrict) that could compute district maps under those assumptions sealed the deal.

Other systems may not necessarily address the goals I have. For example, approval voting (in which each voter can indicate multiple candidates that have their approval) is worth looking at when electing a council member in a single-member district. However when applied to a multi-member district, at least in its simplest form, it can behave like traditional at-large voting and thwart proportional representation.

For example, suppose that we use the simple rule that in a five member district the five candidates receiving the most approvals will be elected. If Democrats form the majority, if all Democratic voters approve all Democratic candidates, and if no Democratic voters approve Republican or third-party candidates, then all five Democratic candidates will be ranked in the top five based on the number of approvals, and all five will be elected.

I think it’s definitely worth considering other election systems for use in Howard County. But—not to brag or anything—I put a lot of work into my analysis of ranked choice voting in the context of Howard County Council elections, and I’d like to see a similar amount of work put into evaluating any suggested alternatives.

As mentioned above, I’ll update this post as appropriate. But in the meantime I’m coming to the end of the series, with my next (and final) post discussing why I think this general issue is so important.

For further exploration

The following may be of interest:

• The Wikipedia article on the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system contains a discussion of how vote transfers can be done. (STV is an older term for ranked choice voting.)
• Ballotpedia summarizes various arguments for and against ranked choice voting.
• The Center for Election Science, an organization supportive of approval voting, argues for it over ranked choice voting. Note that their analysis appears to assume that only a single candidate will win election, and if so is not necessarily applicable to multi-member districts like those I’ve proposed.
• FairVote, an organization supportive of ranked choice voting, argues for it over approval voting.

[This is part 5 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to this one.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I present the results of the automated redistricting I did using the Auto-Redistrict software to draw district lines for a fifteen-member Howard County Council elected in three districts using ranked choice voting.

What might the new districts look like?

The map above shows the three districts produced by the Auto-Redistrict software based on the data and options I provided. The new districts divide the county into the following areas:

• Southeastern Howard County, including Savage, North Laurel, most of east Columbia south of Route 175, and most of west Columbia except the Village of River Hill.
• Northeastern Howard County, including Elkridge, Ellicott City south of Route 40, and east Columbia north of Route 175.
• Western Howard County, including Ellicott City north of Route 40, Maple Lawn, and the Village of River Hill in Columbia.

Based on the 2020 Census figures, the racial and ethnic groups in these three districts would break down as follows:

• Northeast District. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a minority in this district, at 46%. Non-Hispanic Blacks and Asians would form roughly equal parts of the population at 18% and 21% respectively. People of Hispanic origin would be about half those percentages at 9%, and multi-racial people or people of other races would be the smallest group, at 6%.
• Southeast District. The population of non-Hispanic Whites in this district would be even lower, at 40%, with Blacks at about three-quarters of the White population, at 29%. The population of Asians and people of Hispanic origin would be roughly comparable at 13% and 11 % respectively, with multiracial people or people of other races again the smallest group, at 7%.
• West District. This is the only district in which non-Hispanic Whites would form a majority, at 54%. At 26% Asians would have almost as significant a presence in this district as Blacks would in the Southeast District. The population of Blacks would be the smallest of any of the three districts, at 10%. Finally, the populations of people of Hispanic origin and of multiracial people or people of other races would be relatively small, at 5% each.

For Howard County as a whole the breakdown of groups is as follows: 8% persons of Hispanic origin, with the remaining (non-Hispanic) population 47% White, 20% Asian, 19% Black, and 5% multiracial, with the number of American Indians, native Hawaiians, and people of other races negligible.

(The breakdown for those 18 years of age or older is similar but leans slightly whiter: 7% Hispanic origin, 51% White, 19% Asian, 18% Black, 3% multiracial, and the remaining groups negligible. I used total population figures with Auto-Redistrict because many of those under the age of 18 will become voters over the next ten years.)

The task of estimating the number of council members from the various racial or ethnic groups is complicated by several factors. One is that the “Asian” category encompasses both East Asians (e.g., Korean- or Chinese-Americans) and South Asians (e.g., Indian-Americans or Pakistani-Americans), and it can’t be assumed that they would vote in similar ways. Another is that it’s not clear who exactly comprises the group of multi-racial voters, and how they might vote.

Having said that, my guess is that under the proposed council district scheme that Blacks and Asians would be represented on the county council in rough proportion to their presence in the population. For example, there would likely be one Black council member from the Northeast District, and at least one and possibly two Black council members from the Southeast District. There would also likely be an Asian council member from the West District, and possibly one each from the Northeast and Southeast Districts.

How would Democratic and Republican candidates fare in each district, and what might the final makeup of the Howard County Council look like? When ranked choice voting is used in a five-member district, a candidate is automatically elected if they are selected as the first preference on just over one-sixth of the ballots cast, or about 16.7% of those voting. (This number is known as the threshold or quota.)

So, for example, in the precincts comprising the Northeast District I estimated the Republican share of the total vote for Howard County Council in the 2018 general election at about 34%. If a single Republican candidate ran in the Northeast District they would pretty much be guaranteed to be designated as the most preferred candidate by at least 16.7% of voters. The Republican Party would thus have one “safe” seat in the Northeast District.

On the other hand, for the precincts in the Northeast District I estimated the Democratic share of the county council vote in 2018 at about 66%. Suppose that only three Democratic candidates ran in the Northeast District and they each received roughly equal shares of the first preference votes—in other words, about a third of Democratic voters picked the first candidate as their most preferred candidate, about a third of Democrats gave their first preference to the second candidate, and about a third of Democrats gave their first preference to the third candidate.¹

Then given a 66% Democratic vote share each candidate would be designated as the most preferred candidate by about 22% of voters, well over the quota of 16.7%, and all would automatically be elected. The Democratic Party would thus have three “safe” seats in the Northeast District.

What about the remaining seat? Suppose that the Republican Party ran two candidates, the Democratic Party ran four, and each candidate received first preference votes from a roughly equal share of their own party’s voters. Then each Republican candidate would receive about 17% of first preference votes (34% divided by two), and each Democratic candidate would receive about 16.5% of the first preference votes (66% divided by four).

Since all six candidates would be close to the threshold value of 16.7%, and they could not all be elected, it would be a toss-up as to whether the Democrats or Republicans would win the fifth and final seat after accounting for all the second, third, etc., preferences expressed by voters.²

A similar analysis can be done for the other two districts. A summary of the likely results is as follows:

• Northeast District: Party breakdown: 66% Democrats, 34% Republicans. Likely three safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat, and one toss-up.
• Southeast District: Party breakdown: 75% Democrats, 25% Republicans. Likely three safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat, and one leaning Democratic.
• West District: Party breakdown: 53% Democrats, 47% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats, two safe Republican seats, and one leaning Democratic—albeit only slightly.

Overall with this district map and the use of ranked choice voting Democrats would likely win at least eight seats on the Howard County Council and Republicans at least four. The remaining three seats would be in play, with the most likely result being a 9–6 or 10–5 Democratic majority—a significantly more balanced result than the 4–1 Democratic majority on the current council. (And as noted previously it’s also possible that a third party or independent candidate could capture a seat and act as a deciding vote on the council.)

In my next post I attempt to answer various questions that have been raised regarding this particular proposal and regarding ranked choice voting in general.

For further exploration

For the code used to generate the graphs above, see my document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 3. For the data behind the district maps see Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1.

[This is part 4 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss how to draw district lines for the proposed three districts, with ranked choice voting used to elect five members in each district.

Automated redistricting for everyone

At present the boundaries of the five Howard County Council districts are created and proposed by an appointed redistricting commission, and then adopted by the county council. Each of the two parties appoints an equal number of candidates for the commission and the county council appoints the chair of the commission.

In practice the district boundaries are actually drawn by computer, with each of the two parties using redistricting software to draw potential districts so as to favor their own cause. Since Democrats currently have a majority on the county council, the district boundaries adopted will be those that help get Democrats elected to the council.

Ordinary voters and third parties have little or no influence over this process: the rules are designed to exclude third parties from the redistricting commission, and access to redistricting software has traditionally been restricted to the two major parties.

However there’s no longer any reason (other than inertia and a desire to maintain control) for county council redistricting to be done in this way. Any interested person can now download free software that can automate the process of redrawing district boundaries. They can also download the data that’s required as input to the redistricting software, including population data derived from the US Census, digital maps of precinct boundaries, and past election results. Armed with this software and data they can create their own proposed districts.

That’s exactly what I’ve done for this series of posts. I used the Auto-Redistrict software (created by Kevin Baas), in large part because it supports creation of multi-member districts elected using ranked choice voting. Not only is it free but its source code is also available, so that the way it works can be inspected for correctness and potential biases.

Running Auto-Redistrict to create a three-district map

As input to the program I used the public data released by the Maryland Department of Planning after each decennial census for use in Congressional redistricting. The data files include precinct boundaries and populations for each precinct, including population figures broken down by race and ethnicity to help ensure that districts are not drawn to disadvantage particular minority groups.¹

I also used as input to the program the public data on election results released by the Maryland Board of Elections. This can be used to help ensure that districts are not drawn to disadvantage particular political parties. In this case I used results from the 2018 general elections for Howard County Council, since those are the results most relevant for county council redistricting.

(Since there was no Republican candidate in District 3, I estimated the potential vote share for a hypothetical Republican candidate in that district. I also did further estimation to account for early voting and absentee voting, which are not reflected in the official precinct-level results.)

The Auto-Redistrict program allows you to tweak various parameters representing various trade-offs between different goals: for example, how important is it that the districts’ populations be as equal as possible, or that districts be as compact as possible? In my case I used all the default settings.

Howard County has over a hundred precincts. The number of ways in which those precincts could be combined to form three districts is much too large for a person to check each possible district map, and even too large for computers. The Auto-Redistrict software therefore takes a different approach: it generates a set of random maps, evaluates them according to the various criteria being used (compactness, competitiveness, etc.), and then selects the best maps to be carried forward. It then mimics biological evolution, creating a new set of maps by combining different maps together to form new ones, while also introducing some random changes (analogous to mutations).

This process—evaluating maps, picking the best ones, using them to create new maps, and then repeating the evaluation—continues until the generated maps become more and more alike, representing the “best of the best” in terms of meeting the desired criteria. In my case I stopped the program after over eight thousand iterations and went with the last map produced. Using a modern laptop the whole process took about half an hour from start to finish.

“Automated” doesn’t mean “nonpolitical”

Having extolled the virtues of using software to automate the process of doing redistricting, I now have to stop and issue a caution: just because the process can be automated using software designed to handle the mathematics doesn’t mean that we can simply “leave it to the mathematicians”. There are multiple aspects of automated redistricting that entail decisions that are political in nature.

That means in turn that an inclusive approach to redistricting requires the inclusion not just of people who can run software like Auto-Redistrict, but also of people who can question the assumptions and data that go into the software, as well as the results that come out of it. Hence my suggestion that redistricting needs to be overseen by an independent commission that is (as much as possible) designed to be nonpartisan and representative of all the major groups with a stake in the results.

As but one example, I made a judgement call when deciding what party-related data to include in the input to Auto-Redistrict. In particular, I chose to use only the results of the 2018 county council races, and did not use the results of the 2018 county executive race (which had a higher vote share for Republicans). Others may quibble with that decision.

I also haven’t considered using detailed voter registration data (e.g., registered Democrats vs. registered Republicans in each precinct). To my knowledge that data is not fully publicly available, so if I were able to obtain detailed voter registration data I would not have been able to present my analysis in a fully public and transparent manner. Making that trade-off is, again, an inherently political decision: should I have prioritized possibly doing a better job of drawing maps at the expense of excluding people without access to the same data?

Other decisions are involved in how redistricting software like Auto-Redistrict is configured to run. For example, I chose the default settings when prioritizing geometrical considerations like compactness of districts against considerations of fairness like balancing party, racial, or ethnic vote shares. Perhaps others might have had different priorities. Again, these become political decisions, and should not simply be left to the “experts” to decide.

So what I’ve done here in running Auto-Redistrict for my proposed fifteen-member three-district county council shouldn’t be construed as a perfect effort, not to be questioned, or even as the best that could possibly be done. It’s just one example out of many possible ones. In any case, in the next post I’ll present my particular results.

For further exploration

For more information on attempts to take redistricting out of the control of legislative bodies and put it in the hands of independent redistricting commission see:

• “Independent and Advisory Citizen Redistricting Commissions” is a list of links to information about states that have reformed redistricting to one extent or another.

For more on drawing district boundaries using computer sofware see:

• The Auto-Redistrict web site has more information about how the software works and how to run it.
• My document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1, discusses creating the input data that Auto-Redistrict uses (Howard County precinct maps combined with demographic data and election results). It includes a detailed discussion of the measures I took to select particular data to be considered, and to estimate data where it was not available for one reason or another.
• My video “Howard County Council Redistricting with Auto-Redistrict” demonstrates how to run Auto-Redestrict to generate a district map for the proposed expanded Howard County Council.

[This is part 3 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In my first post I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss why ranked choice voting is a better way to elect five members in each of the three proposed districts.

Why ranked choice voting?

If we want to have only three districts, with five members in each, and we don’t want to elect members using at-large voting within each district, how should we elect each district’s members? My proposal is to use ranked choice voting.

Using ranked choice voting in a multi-member district (like the three districts proposed here) helps ensure that elections are fair for all voters, and that each voter has an equal chance to make their votes matter. It allows voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference: one, two, three, and so forth. If a particular person’s vote cannot help their top choice win, that vote counts for their next choice.

The image above shows a sample ballot for a hypothetical Howard County Council election for the West District (as discussed in a future post) conducted using ranked choice voting. Here the voter, a progressive Democrat, indicated Democrat candidate Alice Doe as being her first preference, but then has marked Emily Zhang of the Green party as her second preference, ahead of the other Democratic candidates. She then marked Democrats Latoya Green and Sanjeev Patel as her third and fourth preferences, and then marked the other candidates as her fifth, sixth, etc., preferences.

Note that there is no requirement that the voter indicate a preference for all six candidates; she could have just stopped after marking her ballot for the three Democratic candidates and Emily Zhang. However, it may be that some of the Republican candidates are more acceptable to her than others, so she may want to give them preference ahead of other candidates. She may also dislike libertarians on general principle, so takes care to mark the Libertarian party candidate as least preferred.

(Note that there are only three Democratic candidates and three Republican candidates on the ballot. You may wonder, why wouldn’t the two parties put forth five candidates each, given that there would be five open seats? That’s because in ranked choice voting it doesn’t make sense for a party to put more candidates on the ballot than that party’s expected share of voters would warrant. I’ll discuss this in more depth in a future post, but will note for now that in this example district Democrats and Republicans are evenly matched.)

In a five-member district like the hypothetical Howard County West District in this example, there would be a 16.7% “quota” for election.¹ If more than 16.7% of ballots cast marked a particular candidate as their first preference then that candidate would be automatically elected. Any of those votes that they received from voters in excess of the quota would be transferred to other candidates, more specifically the candidates named by their voters as their second preferences.²

In our example suppose that Democratic candidates Alice Doe and Sanjeev Patel had enough first preference votes to win outright in the first round of county. (In other words, they both got more than a 16.7% share of all first preference votes cast.) If enough Doe or Patel voters followed our example voter and indicated a second preference vote for Emily Zhang of the Green party, the excess votes for Doe and Patel (i.e., above the quota) could help elect Emily Zhang in the second round of counting, after all excess voters were transferred to other candidates.

More specifically, if Zhang did not have enough votes in the first round of counting to exceed the quota, she might have enough votes in the second round to exceed the quota, by virtue of votes transferred to her because Alice Doe and Sanjeev Patel didn’t need the votes, and their voters marked Zhang as their second preference. Zhang would then be deemed elected in the second round of counting. (The colloquial term for this is “getting in on transfers.”)

Other candidates could benefit from this as well. For example, if Republican Joe Jones were elected with first preference votes in the first round of counting, and he were the only Republican candidate to be elected in that first round, his excess votes (above the quota) could end up being transferred to Elana Garcia or Christopher Park.

On the other hand, suppose that after excess votes from the first round were transferred to other candidates, there were still no candidates with votes in excess of the 16.7% quota. In that case the candidate with the least amount of votes would be eliminated, and their votes would be transferred to others according to their voters’ preferences. So, for example, if Emily Zhang were in last place after the second round of county, any votes assigned to her after the first round would be transfered to other candidates (probably Democratic candidates) heading into the third round of counting.`

Vote tabulation would proceed in this manner round by round, transferring votes from successful candidates to other candidates, and eliminating last place candidates, until five candidates were elected. (The way in which the quota is defined makes it impossible for more than five candidates to be elected.)

(In some cases voters may not rank all candidates. For example, the voter in the example above may indicate her preferences for Emily Zhang, the Green party candidate, and the three Democratic candidates, but may not indicate her preferences regarding the Republican candidates and Janet Smith, the Libertarian candidate. If so, her ballot will not be considered further once Emily Zhang and the three Democratic candidates are either elected or eliminated; at that point the ballot is said to be “exhausted.”)

Promoting political and ideological diversity

In addition to allowing voters to rank candidates from the two major parties according to the voters’ preferences, ranked choice voting also allows voters to vote for third-party candidates without “wasting” their vote. This can be seen in the example above: even if Emily Zhang was eliminated in the second round of counting, the expressed preferences of voters like our example voter could end up helping to elect other candidates in the third or subsequent round.

As another example, suppose that there were a third party associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. That party could run a DSA-backed candidate in a council district with lots of progressive voters, and encourage those voters to give that candidate their first preference. If the DSA-backed candidate were unsuccessful then their first-preference votes would simply transfer to the candidate (most likely a progressive Democrat) that those voters had marked as their second preference, and could then help that candidate be elected.

The same logic works for independent candidates. For example, if a “Never Trump” conservative couldn’t make it through the local GOP primary then they could run for a county council seat as an independent. If their popularity were high enough then they could potentially attract enough first and second preference votes to be elected in their own right. As with the DSA example above, a Republican voter giving such a candidate their first preference would not be “throwing their vote away,” since they could—and presumably would—designate the official Republican candidates as their second, third, etc., choices.

Promoting racial and ethnic diversity

The same dynamic works for promoting racial and ethnic diversity on the council. For example, a Black Democrat running for the council in a district could appeal to Black Democratic voters to give the candidate their first preference votes, and then to give other Democratic candidates their second preference votes. Such a candidate might also attract second or third preferences from conservative Black voters who might give their first preference votes to Republican candidates.

This would allow Black candidates to leverage Black voter support in all three districts, as opposed to having Black voters be concentrated in a single district.

Similarly, a Korean-American Republican candidate might get first preference votes from Korean-American Republican voters, second preference votes from other Republican voters, and second or third preference votes from Korean-American independents or even Democrats who wanted to see some Korean representation on the county council.

To repeat, in none of these cases would voters be “wasting” their votes on a candidate with marginal prospects. They could vote according to their own heart’s desires, secure in the knowledge that their preferences would be reflected in the final results one way or another.

So, let’s assume that we have three council districts with five members each, and that we’d elect those members using ranked choice voting within each district. How could we draw district lines in a way that would reflect the racial, ethnic, and political diversity of Howard County, be open and transparent, and could be justified to the voters and candidates who participate in the resulting elections? That will be the topic of my next post.

For further exploration

For more on the topic of ranked choice voting see the following:

• FairVote is an advocacy site for ranked choice voting. Its recent report “Ranked Choice Voting Elections Benefit Candidates and Voters of Color” and its analysis of the use of ranked choice voting in the 2021 New York City primaries are particularly relevant to my comments above regarding promoting more diversity on the Howard County Council.
• The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center has more in-depth information, including a detailed discussion of issues relevant to election administrators.

For a more detailed discussion of how ranked choice voting might work in the context of a Howard County Council election, see my 2012 post “Electing a council that reflects Howard County, part 1” and its followup post. These were written for the case of electing the five current Howard County Council members by ranked choice voting, but they are also relevant to the problem of electing five council members in a single district of the proposed three. (Note that the posts refer to ranked choice voting using the alternative name “Single Transferable Vote” or “STV.”)

[This is part 2 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In my previous post I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss why having three districts is better than having fifteen districts (or no districts at all) when it comes to promoting diversity on the Howard County Council.

Why three council districts? Why not fifteen?

Why reduce the number of council districts from five to three? With fifteen council members shouldn’t we have fifteen council districts?

The first problem is that electing one council member in each of fifteen districts can dilute the voting power of minorities. Look at the graph above, which shows the population percentages for various racial and ethnic groups within an example set of fifteen council districts. (The associated district map was drawn by the same automated system described in the next post.)

As of the 2020 Census non-Hispanic Whites make up less then half of Howard County’s population, but they would still form the largest voting bloc in thirteen of the fifteen example districts. There is only one example district in which Blacks would form the largest voting bloc, and only one in which Asians would.

If such a map were to be adopted, and if voters tended to vote for people of their own race or ethnic group, the result would likely be a White-dominated council, similar to what’s been the historical norm in Howard County. It’s possible that there might be only one Black council member out of fifteen (down from one in five currently), and only one Asian council member.

Creative drawing of district lines could “solve” this problem, by lumping minority populations into a few select districts where they might have a chance of electing one of their own. But this would be at the expense of minority voters in other districts. (This is similar to the situation with the current council districts, in which Black candidates have been elected in District 2 but not in any other districts.)

The same techniques used to draw district lines to favor particular racial or ethnic groups also can be—and have been—used to favor one political party over another. This brings us to the second problem:

Drawing district lines for fifteen districts is a lot of work compared to drawing them for five districts, and offers more opportunities for partisan gerrymandering and endless political fights over redistricting. The process of Howard County Council redistricting is contentious enough—I literally wrote the book on this—so why make it even more divisive and time consuming than it already is? The fewer districts, the less opportunity for gerrymandering.

Howard County originally had five council members representing the entire county, with no councilmanic districts. Howard County now has over three times the population as it did then. So you can think of the proposed scheme as a return to the county council’s roots, with each of the three districts being comparable in population to Howard County fifty years ago, and each district having five council members representing it, just as Howard County as a whole did back then.

But . . . the original Howard County Council elections had a fatal flaw, one which we need not and should not replicate. I discuss that in the next section.

Why not elect council members at-large?

OK, so having fifteen districts may not be a good idea. Why not eliminate districts altogether, and elect all fifteen council members in county-wide at-large elections? Or have three districts as suggested, with five members chosen in at-large elections in each district? Or have a smaller number of districts (say, nine or ten) and then elect the remaining members at large, similar to how Howard County Board of Education elections work?

The problem here is that at-large elections can entrench the dominance of majorities and work against minorities: since voters can vote for multiple candidates, and the candidates with the most votes win, if a 51% majority votes as a unified bloc for a slate of at-large candidates, they can succeed in having all of their candidates being elected. The 49% minority would then have no representaion at all.

This is not just a theoretical concern. It’s exactly what happened in Howard County in the first years after it moved to a council form of government: Because all five members were elected at-large, and because Democrats formed a majority of voters (in large part due to the establishment and growth of Columbia), the council was dominated by Democrats. In fact, at one point there was no Republican council member at all.

The same thing would happen with an expanded fifteen-member council elected in at-large elections. In fact, it would likely be even worse than in the 1970s because the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans is much larger now.

The push to switch the Howard County Council from at-large elections to elections by district came mainly from the Republican party, because Republicans were under such a disadvantage in at-large elections. But election by districts is not a panacea for Republican concerns, especially when the number of districts is large.

Suppose we abandon the idea of electing fifteen council members in county-wide at-large elections and go back to the idea of electing one council member in each of fifteen districts. Republican candidates would then be severely disadvantaged if we used our hypothetical example set of fifteen districts (which was created by an automated system designed to minimize partisan advantages).

Although there’s a substantial body of Republican voters across the county, as shown in the graph above there is only one district out of the example fifteen districts in which Republican voters would form a clear majority, and only one other district where their numbers would be comparable to Democratic voters. (This is based on estimates derived from the 2018 county council elections.)

If there were only three districts, and members were chosen at-large in each district, the Republican party would still have the problem of majority dominance. There are so many Democrats relative to Republicans that it would probably be possible to draw district lines such that all three districts had Democratic majorities. Using at-large elections to elect five council members within each district would allow those majorities to elect full slates of Democratic candidates in those districts, again locking Republicans out of county council representation.

So if we want to have only three districts, with five members in each, and we don’t want to elect members using at-large voting within each district, how should we elect each district’s members? That’s the topic of my next post.

For further exploration

For the numbers and code behind the graphs above showing the racial, ethnic, and party breakdowns for a hypothetical fifteen districts, as well as the generated fifteen-district map, see “Howard County Council Expansion, Part 2.”

[This is part 1 of a seven-part series. See also part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

Howard County is too big for its county council

For over fifty years now Howard County, Maryland, has been governed by a five-member county council and a county executive.¹ In those fifty years Howard County has grown from about sixty thousand people to well over three hundred thousand, more than five times as many people as when its first county council was sworn in.

In 2019 the Howard County Charter Review Commission recommended expanding the size of the county council from five members to seven. This was a relatively minor change, but one which seemingly did not attract any support from the county executive, the county council, or—for that matter—anybody else. So why am I writing about this topic now?

Because I don’t think the Charter Review Commission was being bold enough in its recommendations. Even I wasn’t being bold enough in my previous post recommending a move to ranked choice voting for either a five- or seven-member council.

I believe that the structure of the County Council needs a more thoroughgoing reform in order to bring it closer to the people of Howard County, better reflect the preferences of county voters, and potentially reduce political polarization that can bleed over into other areas, most notably the Board of Education.

So in line with the motto “go big or go home” I’m coming back with an even bolder four point recommendation:

1. Triple the size of the Howard County Council, expanding it from five members to fifteen.

2. At the same time, reduce the number of council districts from five to three, with five council members elected from each district.

3. Elect each district’s council members using ranked choice voting, in which each voter would list the candidates they want to see elected, in order of preference.

4. Establish a nonpartisan commission to draw the district lines using a process that takes into account various criteria important in redistricting—creating compact and contiguous districts with equal populations, not diluting the voting power of minorities, and ensuring competitive races not marred by partisan gerrymandering—with all code, data, and background assumptions made publicly available.

In this post I address the first part of this proposal, namely expanding the Howard County Council.

Why fifteen council members?

Why expand the Howard County Council? First, to provide better service to county residents. When the Howard County Council was first established there was one council member for every twelve thousand people or so. Now each council member serves almost seventy thousand people, a number that makes it more difficult for a council member to attend to the needs of any given constituent.

As the graph above shows, Howard County is in the top five of Maryland juridictions when it comes to population per council member or county commissioner. The average ratio for all Maryland counties and Baltimore city is thirty-six thousand people per member. The median ratio is twenty-two thousand people per council member. (Half of all counties have a higher ratio than the median, and half a lower ratio.)

Note that Baltimore city, despite having a population considerably larger than Howard County, has a ratio of population to council member that is significantly lower than Howard County. That’s because Baltimore city has a fifteen-member city council, compared to Howard County’s five-member county council.

How big should the Howard County Council be? Increasing the council by only two members, as the Charter Review Commission recommended, would in my opinion just be putting a bandage on the problem without really solving it. On the other hand, if we wanted to keep the ratio of constituents to council members the same as in the late 1960s we’d need a council of twenty-five to thirty members. That’s a lot: I’m not sure the council chambers in the George E. Howard building has enough room to hold that many council members.²

Let’s consider an intermediate approach, increasing the size of the Howard County from five to fifteen members to match the size of the Baltimore city council. That would lower the ratio of population to council members from the current sixty-six thousand to a third of that value, or twenty-two thousand people per council member. This would match the current median value for Maryland, and be comparable to the ratios for St. Mary’s County and Allegany County.

Of course Howard County is still growing in population, so this ratio would degrade over time. However a fifteen-member council should be large enough to suffice for most if not all of the twenty-first century without requiring any further expansion.³

Enabling more people to serve Howard County

Increasing the size of the Howard County Council also provides more opportunities for up-and-coming community activists and politicians to serve the county—and we have a lot more qualified candidates than there were in the late 1960s. Consider the picture above: of the many Howard County Democratic activists attending this dinner, surely more than a handful would be interested in making a future run for the Howard County Council and would make good candidates and council members.

If we have a lot more people qualified to run for elected positions but the number of positions doesn’t change, that leads to increasingly contentious, expensive, and partisan elections—something we see in the US at the national level, as more and more people compete for a limited number of Congressional seats.

The large number of qualified candidates can also lead to ostensibly nonpartisan elected positions becoming bones of partisan contention, as with the Howard County Board of Education: thwarted by the lack of openings on the Howard County Council, ambitious political activists can try to use the Board of Education as a springboard to future runs for the county council or other positions.

As a result Board of Education elections may become increasingly partisan affairs, featuring explicit party endorsements and people voting for candidates based primarily on their political affilations. Expanding the county council could help reduce this incentive.⁴

Let’s assume that there’s a consensus on expanding the Howard County Council, and that having fifteen council members is the desired council size. How should the county be divided into districts, and how should council members from each district be elected? That’s the subject of my next post.

For further exploration

For a discussion of the need to expand legislative bodies, in this case the US House of Representatives, see:

• “America Needs a Bigger House” by the New York Times editorial board.
• “Congress Needs to Be Way, Way Bigger” by David Litt in The Atlantic.

For commentary about increasing partisanship in Howard County Board of Education races see:

• “Will Partisan Politics Make The Howard County Public School System No Longer The Best In The State?” by Scott Ewart at Scott E Blog.
• “What’s at Stake in the Increasingly Politicized Howard County Board of Education Elections” by Jeremy Dommu at The Merriweather Post.
• “Partisan school board elections erode trust” by Robert Miller (letter to the editors of the Baltimore Sun).

For the numbers and code behind the graph above showing the population per council member or county commissioner, see “Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1.”

tl;dr: On the occasion of Michael McCall’s death I reflect on his signature achievements in Columbia, Maryland.

Two weeks ago I was distressed to learn of the death of Michael McCall. Although Michael was a long-time resident of Columbia, he was actively involved in Columbia and Howard County affairs for less than six years, from the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2017.

During that time he put forth a new vision for a park in Symphony Woods in downtown Columbia, reigniting excitement about the future of one of the signature places in the county. In his pursuit of that vision Michael left behind two tangible legacies, one architectural and one institutional: the striking green Chrysalis amphitheater that forms the centerpiece of the park, and the Inner Arbor Trust created to oversee the park’s future development.

Beginning in late 2013 I took a personal interest in Michael’s vision for Symphony Woods, and since then have written over a hundred thousand words on his “Inner Arbor” plan, and in particular on the design and construction of the Chrysalis. During those years I also had extensive correspondence with Michael, as he generously shared photos, plans, and other material relating to the Chrysalis and the park for use in my writing.

It was not unusual for me to publish an Inner Arbor- or Chryalis-related post and then shortly thereafter get a call from Michael offering additional information, or providing his own thoughts on how things were going. He also shared with me a fair amount of insider gossip about the various people and organizations involved with the Chrysalis and Inner Arbor plan to one degree or another. (Needless to say I left that material out of my writing, except in those cases where I could independently confirm it from public sources.)

Thus although I can’t provide a full account of Michael’s life and work, I feel more able than most to assess his legacy when it comes to Columbia.

Michael McCall, developer

In the title of this post I very deliberately referred to Michael as the “developer” of the Chrysalis, not as the “creator” or a similar term. In Howard County these days the word “developer” has become for many a slur, as they attribute most if not all of the county’s problems, ranging from school overcrowding to traffic congestion to flooding in Ellicott City, to “greedy developers” and their alleged quest to pave over the county in pursuit of profit.

But I think it’s appropriate to call Michael a developer, and I think he would have accepted the designation gladly. He was not responsible for the visual appearance of the Chrysalis, for the design of its structural steel backbone, for the creation of its green aluminum skin, or for the detailed architectural work needed to make it work for its users and visitors. Those responsibilities fell in turn to the New York-based designer Marc Fornes of THEVERYMANY, the international engineering consulting firm Arup, the A. Zahner Company of Kansas City, Missouri, and the Baltimore firm Living Design Lab, the architects of record.

What Michael did was everything else: creating an overall vision and strategy for Symphony Woods, selecting designers and architects for the various components of the Inner Arbor plan, working with and securing funding from various sources, including Howard County and the Columbia Association, taking the project through the Howard County design approval and planning process, overseeing and managing all of the various firms involved in design and construction, and in general working to see these activities through to the successful completion of the Chrysalis and its opening to the general public.

These are exactly the things that developers do. Michael himself started his career working with one of the most well-known and revered American developers, Jim Rouse, who was responsible for the creation and development of Columbia and then later founded the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners) to support the development of affordable housing across the country.

In 1982 Michael left his home state of Minnesota and moved to Columbia to join the Enterprise Development Company, the for-profit subsidiary of the Enterprise Foundation. He worked there for ten years before leaving in 1992 to found his own development consulting firm, Strategic Leisure. In that capacity he worked on a number of development projects across the US and elsewhere in the world—but never in Maryland, Howard County, or Columbia.

The Inner Arbor plan and the creation of the Chrysalis

Amost twenty years later Michael came to be involved with Symphony Woods, as the Columbia Association was encountering problems with county design and planning authorities in its attempt to develop a park—an attempt that came after decades of what can best be described as benign neglect of the woods on the part of CA and others.

Michael first appeared in the public record for Columbia with comments during the “Resident Speak Out” period at a Columbia Association board meeting on September 22, 2011. He agreed with the concerns about CA’s Symphony Woods plan expressed by the county’s Design Advisory Panel, and questioned the lack of an overall unifying strategy for developing the park.

Michael’s comments did not go unnoticed. Introduced by his mentor, George Barker, his former manager at the Enterprise Development Company, beginning in 2011 and continuing through 2012 he entered into a series of conversations with various people and entities involved in downtown Columbia development, including Howard County, the Howard Hughes Corporation, I.M.A. (operators of Merriweather Post Pavilion), and the Columbia Association itself.

The result of those conversations was a concept plan for what McCall called the “Inner Arbor” project (punning on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor festival marketplace, one of Jim Rouse’s most famous projects), intended to fulfill the vision expressed in the Howard County General Plan that Symphony Woods become “a new kind of cultural park, where the landscape becomes a setting for arts, cultural and civic uses”. That concept plan was adopted by the Columbia Association Board of Directors on January 24, 2013, as the board abandoned its previous plan for Symphony Woods in response to further hiccups in the Howard County planning process.

Soon afterward the Columbia Association board also decided to establish a separate organization, the Inner Arbor Trust, to implement the previously-adopted concept plan for Symphony Woods, under a perpetual easement from CA. On May 10 the Inner Arbor Trust officially came into existence, with Michael as its first President and CEO.

Things moved fairly quickly after that, at least in comparison to previous Symphony Woods plans. Michael spent the summer selecting a design team for the project, and in November presented the full design team, including designer Marc Fornes, in a public meeting held soon after the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Columbia. The end of the year saw the public presentation of plans for various park structures, including the Fornes-designed Chrysalis amphitheater.

The year 2014 saw the Inner Arbor Trust receive official 501(c) tax-exempt status (January), the Inner Arbor plan approved by the Howard County Design Advisory Panel (February), submittal to Howard County of a Site Development Plan, including final plans for the Chrysalis (May), and approval of that SDP by the Howard County Planning Board (November)—just ahead of a November 30 deadline set by the Columbia Association board.

After completing the easement agreement with the Columbia Association in December 2014, the first part of 2015 was taken up in securing further funding for the Chrysalis and negotiating additional legal agreements with various entities, including Howard Hughes Corporation and I.M.A. Actual construction activities for the Chrysalis began in earnest late in the year, after selection of Whiting-Turner as general contractor and A. Zahner Company as “design-build” contractor for the Chrysalis shell, and the official groundbreaking ceremony on September 22.

2016 saw the bulk of Chrysalis construction, including completion of the concrete “subfloor” (April and May), erection of the steel “skeleton” (completed in August), installation of the ZEPPS panels intended to support the aluminum “skin” (completed in October), and installation of the green skin panels themselves (completed in late 2016 or early 2017).

On April 22, 2017, the Chrysalis amphitheater, was officially dedicated and opened to the general public, and on May 1 Michael officially stepped down as President and CEO of the Inner Arbor Trust. (He was succeeded by Nina Basu, former general counsel of the Trust.) Michael went on to work on other development projects elsewhere, but his work in Columbia was done.

The institutional legacy

As noted above, Michael’s tangible legacy in Columbia can be divided into two parts: the Inner Arbor Trust and the Chrysalis amphitheater.

The creation of the Inner Arbor Trust resolved a long-standing problem, namely the relative inaction and inertia of the Columbia Association when it came to downtown Columbia in general and Symphony Woods in particular. Despite multiple attempts beginning in the 1990s to interest it in enhancing Symphony Woods as a community park for downtown, the CA board declined to take any action.

After the Columbia Association board did get around to proposing a plan for a Symphony Woods park, only to run into trouble with Howard County planning authorities, Michael provided them with both an alternative plan and an alternative way of getting that plan implemented, namely putting Symphony Woods development under the effective control of an independent nonprofit organization.

The success of that approach speaks for itself: in addition to successfully completing construction of the Chrysalis, under the continuing leadership of Nina Basu the Inner Arbor Trust has maintained and enhanced the park’s natural setting and has worked to attract visitors to the park, both through programming at the Chrysalis and such seemingly simple (but apparently never previously considered) steps as putting picnic tables in Symphony Woods.

The Trust has also continually evolved its plans for Symphony Woods to reflect budget and other realities (including in particular creating a revised concept plan), and in general has worked in conjunction with other stakeholders to enhance the overall appeal of the Merriweather-Symphony Woods neighborhood (as Howard County planning documents refer to it).

The architectural legacy

The Chrysalis is a beautiful and striking structure, to my mind the most distinctive piece of architecture in Howard County, surpassing Merriweather Post Pavilion and the former Rouse Company headquarters turned Whole Foods Market (both I think overrated in retrospect because of their association with Frank Gehry).

It’s also becoming a very useful one. I once had a local politician express concern to me that the Chrysalis might end up as a “green elephant,” but I think it’s safe to say that that will not be the case. That’s in large part due to the work of the Inner Arbor Trust in encouraging and hosting a wide variety of local programming, from yoga classes and kid’s activities to celebrations of the cultures of Howard County’s diverse population.

Although Merriweather Post Pavilion has traditionally been thought of as Columbia’s main cultural venue, its size makes it much more suited for nationally-known touring acts and other events drawing audiences from across the entire Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. For events targeted at a more local or more niche audience the Chrysalis is a much more suitable venue, more intimate and approachable.

As a result the Chrysalis is well on its way to becoming a beloved local landmark, a gathering place for the entire community, and a symbol of the evolving downtown of Columbia.

The intangible legacy

Like Jim Rouse, Michael’s reach exceeded his grasp. Jim Rouse sought to create a “new American city,” a “garden for the growing of people,” but a poor US economy in the 1970s and overall trends in society left Columbia as just a somewhat more diverse example of a typical American suburban bedroom community.

Similarly Michael had a vision of an arts and culture park in Symphony Woods worthy of comparison with Millennium Park in Chicago or Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, featuring the work of a host of world-class architects, designers, and artists—a park that could attract visitors from across the metropolitan area and even from elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard.

That dream was not and likely will not be fulfilled. Howard County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. However it has neither the concentrated private wealth that has funded signature parks elsewhere in the US (for example, the new Barry Diller-funded Little Island park in New York City) nor the governmental budget capacity to make up for the lack of private funding—especially given more pressing problems like the COVID-19 pandemic and flooding in Ellicott City.

Mindful of such realities and preferring things as they are, many residents of Columbia and Howard County, and more than a few community activists and local politicians, have been content to honor Columbia’s past while accepting a diminished future for it, simply tending the embers of a dying legacy.

In his desire to “make no little plans” Michael refused to believe that the best days of Columbia were behind it. He promoted a vision for Symphony Woods that could inspire a new generation, and in the Inner Arbor Trust and the Chrysalis gave us the first fruits of that vision. We can best honor his memory by keeping that vision in mind, and carrying on the work of creating a new park for Symphony Woods that he so determinedly began.

For further exploration

This article is based on material from my “Creating the Chrysalis” series, including in particular the post on Michael’s vision and strategy for Symphony Woods park development, and the post containing a complete timeline of events relating to the Chrysalis and Symphony Woods.

For more of my opinions on and explanations of various aspects of the Chrysalis and the development of Symphony Woods, see the Inner Arbor-related posts in the series “The Inner Arbor plan takes shape” and elsewhere on this blog. Note that some of these posts contain outdated information relating to park features that were later dropped or revised; for the very latest plans for the park see the article “A new plan for Symphony Woods.”

For more on Michael’s life and work see the Strategic Leisure web site. The Chrysalis and Merriweather Park page in particular has a lot of interesting material on how Michael himself saw his work in Symphony Woods.

tl;dr: I got my wish, but I’m not ready to sign a contract just yet.

Back in April I read about a new service Sudowrite, which promises that you can “bust writer’s block and be more creative with our magical writing AI.”¹ How could I resist? I signed up for the private beta, and last Friday I finally got my invite and a chance to try it out before the official launch.

Although the Sudowrite web site is coy about it, Sudowrite is based on the GPT-3 AI system, “an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text” (per Wikipedia). Stripped of the jargon, GPT-3 takes a vast mass of pre-existing text (extracted from the English-language Web, books, and Wikipedia) and “trains” itself on that text. You can then give it some of your own text and it will produce new text in response.

Sudowrite is primarily pitched to writers of fiction looking for help in fleshing out scenes, including generating suggested dialogue and descriptions. However it’s based on a general-purpose AI technology, so in theory at least you could use it to help create nonfiction as well. As a spare-time blogger and (self-published) book author this was like catnip for me, and I rushed to try it out.

The AI needs some text to start from. My first thought was to use a half-finished blog post I’ve been wanting to fill out, but my initial attempts were sort of fumbling—and in any case I wanted something that I didn’t mind exposing in a post like this. So I gave Sudowrite a three-paragraph blog comment I once wrote regarding the ending of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Here it is, unmodified except for my rewriting the first sentence to make it more like the introduction to an essay. (Note that I’m somewhat spoiling the ending of the anime, but I presume that you’ve either watched it already or you never will. In the latter case you can read the plot summary on Wikipedia to provide context for my comment.)

The anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica is sometimes hailed as a feminist take on the magical girl genre. Please forgive me if I take a more cynical view of the series’s resolution.

After Madoka’s wish young girls are presumably still lured into becoming magical girls by Kyubey (who presumably continues to withhold key facts from them unless asked), they are still estranged from their bodies and judged on the purity of their souls (the “Soul Gems” presumably working as they did before), they must still struggle and suffer in order for human civilization to survive and advance, and they are still treated as discardable objects by alien others who feed vampire-like on their emotions. The only real difference seems to be that instead of becoming adult women consumed with bitterness and rage (i.e., “witches”) they can never become adult women at all, but instead must die when they (inevitably) lose their purity and innocence.

So for me an alternative moral of the story might be: whatever else you do, make sure that Kyubey gets his magical girl fix. And since we the anime audience seem to agree with Kyubey that “emotional energy” is needed to counteract the force of boredom (excuse me, “entropy”), and that the most effective of all sources of such energy are “girls in the second stage of development,” the “meta-moral” might then be: whatever else happens, we the audience must have our magical girl fix as well. (And, hey, I hear there’s a new Madoka Magica movie coming out later this year . . .)

My own writing ends here. At this point I invoked the Sudowrite “wormhole” function. This feeds your text thus far to GPT-3 and produces several alternative ways to continue, each consisting of one or more paragraphs. You can then select one of the proposed continuations, insert it into your text-in-progress, and edit and/or extend it as you please.

In my case I chose the continuation that seemed most appropriate and include it here without modification, except for completing the last sentence (which was left unfinished) as indicated.

I mean I’m sure there’s a more charitable reading of Madoka Magica’s moral universe than the one I’ve just offered. For example, one could argue that Madoka’s wish “stablizes” [sic] the moral universe. If there is only a limited supply of magic, then the pressure on magical girls to fight witches to the death (and Kyubey’s need to negotiate with them) should start to decline. But even this reading of the situation suggests that the moral universe isn’t one we would really want to live in. At least under the old system magical girls had some control over their fates. Under Madoka’s new world order, love, fate, and the needs of the larger community all seem to play a much bigger role in the ex’s [?] decisions.

So on the one hand, everyone seems to have some control over their fates in this universe. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of pressure on all of the magical girls to [continue to fight, while everyone else stands by and lets them do their work].

My original blog comment was self-contained; I had said what I wanted to say and didn’t intend to say any more. So when I asked Sudowrite to add some more text I was unclear what it would produce. The proposed continuation that I chose did the logical thing, which was to start an “on the other hand . . .” transition.

It’s important to note that Sudowrite/GPT-3 is not simply pasting in whole chunks of someone else’s writing. A quick Google search of some sentences didn’t return any hits, and two online plagiarism checkers I tried detected no plagiarism. (The free version of Grammarly did detect “significant plagiarism” but didn’t provide further details. I didn’t feel like paying for the Premium service to find out more.) As far as I can tell the AI is producing at least some relatively novel text, and surprisingly readable text at that.

However there are a couple things that look out of place. The first is the misspelling of “stabilize” as “stablize.” This doesn’t seem to be a direct lift from anyone’s writing on Madoka Magica, but I did find some places online where “stablize” was used on the same page as a mention of Makoka Magica. The second is the reference to “the ex’s decisions.” It’s been a while, but I can’t remember an “ex” being referenced in Madoka Magica.

Flushed with success, I went through the wormhole again to generate more text. The following was my favorite of what was proposed, again included unmodified except for editing punctuation:

And so what Madoka Magica largely seems to be asking its viewers to do when they encounter the phantoms of loneliness and shame is . . . what? To cry, perhaps. To affirm that it’s not their fault. To empathize, so that we can regain a sense of our own innocence and freedom. But not to be too hard on our younger selves either. Finally, we’re told, “don’t forget how much the world needs magical girls.” Basically, I think what Madoka Magica is asking us to do is to recognize our own subjectivity, our own pain, our own alienation from the world, and to embrace these things because they are part of who we are—while simultaneously affirming the magic of the magical girl whose body dies every time she’s called up to fight.

In other words, Puella Magi Madoka Magica is asking us to stop and to give the aesthetics of the magical girl genre a chance to work on us.

The “is . . . what?” in the first sentence is a nice touch, and it continues well from there.

I took one last trip through the wormhole, and made my final choice of text:

Remember and imagine, Puella Magi Madoka Magica tells us as its viewers, remember what it feels like to be a magical girl, remember the joy and the weariness, remember the pain, the loneliness, the alienation, and the struggle to understand your own condition. Remember when you were young, and “you” were a magical girl. Remember when you looked out upon the world, when you suffered and cried, when you were vulnerable and elated, and when you dreamed of flying through the air. Remember and imagine, but don’t forget—in the end, you have to be a magical girl, constantly trying to save everyone, always getting hurt, and struggling against entropy. These things are the fate of magical girls, these are the things which you will remember, when you remember having been a magical girl.

Further Reading:

• Martha Nussbaum on Empathy
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Empathy

Again, this is readable and flows nicely (although it’s not clear to me exactly why the AI put quotation marks around one of the occurrences of “you”). The mention of “entropy” is apropos as well, since the need to fight entropy was the technobabble explanation Kyubey gave for why he needed to create magical girls. The text leans a bit heavily on repetition for my taste though, with the constant refrain of “Remember . . .”

The “further reading” reference (which I’ve edited slightly) is a surprise. I wasn’t able to find anything online directly referencing the philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the context of Madoka Magica, so I’m unsure exactly where this came from. (I did find a few articles mentioning empathy in connection with Madoka Magica, including the TV Tropes page on the “empathetic healer” trope, and Nussbaum has written on the importance on empathy and related emotions.)

Another surprise: one of the alternative text choices offered was simply the word “Source” followed by the URL “http://brilliantideas.us/2015/10/puella-magi-madoka-magica-and-the-aesthetics-of-the-magical-girl/”. This article certainly seems like a possible source for some of the concepts and phrasing in the AI-generated text, as well as the “further reading” references. Unfortunately the brilliantideas.us site is now offline and to my knowledge is not archived anywhere, so I can’t compare the article to the AI’s output.

What does it all mean?

So, what’s my verdict? I could say of the AI’s writing what Samuel Johnson said of women’s preaching, but (contra Johnson) there was and is no real reason why women couldn’t preach just as well as men. The “unreasonable effectiveness” of GPT-3 is a more genuine surprise.

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” and its inverse are relevant here. GPT-3 slurped up an entire Internet’s worth of writing in English, and what it produces is for the most part a reflection of that, for both good and ill. Here I suspect the difference between fiction and (certain types of) nonfiction may come into play, along with the specific way that Sudowrite might be “tuned” for the use case of writing fiction:

A lot of fiction, especially genre fiction, is based on relatively common story templates. For example, a romance set among the rural gentry in Regency England will share a lot of elements with other romances of the same type. It’s the style and sensibility of a individual writer that makes a novel in this genre more or less enjoyable, as much or more so than its particular plot twists.

An author of such a fiction can use a tool like Sudowrite to generate possible dialogue, character and locale descriptions, and turns of phrase that can be adapted to their particular needs. Since GPT-3 has presumably seen a lot of text of this general type, it has a good stock of material from which to generate such suggestions.

Much nonfiction is based on common templates as well, for example, reporting on the outcome of sporting events or recapping corporate product announcements—and indeed AI technology is being put to use in those cases. However in the type of nonfiction I like to read, and the type I’d like to write, the primary attraction is insight: a novel and interesting idea well-argued and well-supported. For example, whatever the merits of my blog comment above, I’m at least putting forth a clear proposition supported by specific examples.

In contrast the AI-generated text seems more expressive than insightful—not surprising for a tool intended primarily for fiction writers—and doesn’t reference or cite any details in support of what the text is saying.

However, as cryptanalysts say of the task of breaking ciphers, “attacks always get better.” I have no doubt that GPT-3 is far from the final word on what AI systems can do for text, and that future systems will be significantly more capable of creating both fiction and nonfiction.

Leaving aside dystopic or utopic scenarios in which advanced AIs either exterminate humanity or enable us to live as gods, what does that mean for writers specifically? How might tools like Sudowrite and its future successors be used?

The current consensus view among people who’ve tried it is that different authors will likely use Sudowrite in different ways: some will use the wormhole feature to generate possible ways to continue a story, some will use the (experimental) “expand” feature to take outlines of scenes and generate example text to fill them out, others will use the “description” feature to give them ideas of how to enrich writing around characters and locales.

To my knowledge no one to date is using the system to auto-generate whole chapters, and at least one author (Leanne Leeds) who has tried a milder form of this reports that over-using the tool can lead to her feeling disconnected from her own writing. The preferred model is to become a “centaur,” a term from chess referring to players who make their moves in close consultation with a computer chess program, but do not simply turn the game over to the machine.

From my point of view as someone writing blog posts and other nonfiction, Sudowrite is still far from being generally useful. I had some hopes for using the “expand” feature in a nonfiction context, to fill out an argument where I had written the basic points. It didn’t work very well for this, either generating somewhat off-topic text or just repeating my own text back at me.

The “summarize” feature (also still experimental) may have more promise. It seems to work well for summarizing one’s own text (e.g., to see if key points are coming across), but when I tried to use it to summarize an entire academic paper (as a shortcut to reading the whole thing) it produced a “summary” that was multiple times the length of the original paper, repeating sections of summary text barely modified from one instance to the next.

In a spirit of fairness I’ll turn things over to Sudowrite to close out this post. First, a summary based on what I’ve written thus far (leaving out the sections where I talk about the AI-generated text). This definitely shows the current orientation of the service toward writing fiction:

The protagonist, a writer, is trying out the new service Sudowrite. The service promises to help people write better by getting them in touch with their creative side. The protagonist uses the service to generate possible dialogue and descriptions for a story. However, the AI has difficulty generating insightful writing.

And for the conclusion of the post, one of the alternatives generated by the wormhole feature that I thought worked best:

What does Sudowrite (and GPT-3 in general) mean for non-fiction writing going forward? I’m not sure yet. I do think there’s an important principle here, that given enough text of the same general type, even an AI system that isn’t exactly “aware” will begin to have instincts about what to do with that text.

There are a lot of interesting questions for any writer, but for a blogger in particular: What types of text am I writing, and how can I use AI systems to help me? How can I use AI systems to expand my capabilities—or “replace” me, if only partially and subtly—in writing?

The rising tide of AI-generated language will raise all writing boats, regardless of what is written. In turn those writers who are able to understand the AI-generated waves and surf them will gain a competitive advantage. I’m looking

Looking for what? It doesn’t say. I’ll finish the sentence myself: while I don’t think I’ll be signing up for Sudowrite in the short term, I’m looking forward to seeing what systems like this evolve into.

Further exploration

In case you’d like to read more about Sudowrite (or GPT-3):

• “The computers are getting better at writing” by Stephen Marche for _The New Yorker is the article that originally got me interested in Sudowrite, and is probably the best introduction for a general audience.
• An interview with Amil Gupta, one of the creators of Sudowrite, by author Joanna Penn. Gupta explains why he and co-founder James Yu decided to create Sudowrite, and how he sees the service being used.
• Author Leanne Leeds has an interesting series of blog posts describing how she tried to use Sudowrite when writing a new novel.
• The Alliance for Independent Authors issued a call for comments on AI for indie authors, to which one of the comments in response was from Amit Gupta. The call for comments was followed by an official ALLi statement “AI for Authors: Practical and Ethical Guidelines.”
• “Introduction to GPT-3” by Daniel Guterriez is a not-overly-technical summary of GPT-3 and related natural language processing systems.

And of course you can sign up for the private beta at the Sudowrite web site. It appears that the service is going to cost $20 per month after the free trial. (In comparison, the Grammarly service I mentioned above starts at $12 per month for the Premium version.)

In case you’d like more takes on Puella Magi Madoka Magica, here are some written completely by humans:

• “Kyubey’s Multi-Level Marketing Scheme: The Capitalist Metaphor of Madoka Magica” by Audrey Dubois for Anime Feminist. This essay is in the same general spirit as my blog comment, although I remain more cynical than her regarding the resolution of the plot.
• Nick Creamer’s review of episode 12 of Madoka Magica (part of his overall series of reviews) is a much more positive take on the ending of the series.
• A Google Scholar search for “Puella Magi Madoka Magica” returns a number of academic papers discussing the anime, some of which have full text available online without charge.

April 22, 2017 marked the official opening of the Chrysalis amphitheater, the first element of the Inner Arbor plan to be constructed as part of the planned Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods in Columbia, Maryland. The series “Creating the Chrysalis”

• explains in detail the design and construction of the Chrysalis amphitheater in layperson’s terms;
• highlights the various organizations on the “Chrysalis team” and the parts each of them have played or are playing in its creation.
• describes the place of the Chrysalis amphitheater within the plan for Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods and the overall history of Symphony Woods itself; and
• includes and provides context for more visual material relating to the Chrysalis, including detailed renderings, excerpts from engineering drawings, and photographs of construction and fabrication.

“Creating the Chrysalis” includes the following articles:

1. Symphony Woods: The history of Symphony Woods and the various attempts over the years to develop it as a park.
2. Vision and strategy: The initial vision for a new park in Symphony Woods and the strategy to implement that vision, as developed from the initial Inner Arbor concept plan to the current county-approved plan for Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods.
3. Politics and process: The various institutional activities related to implementation of the Inner Arbor plan, with a focus on the Columbia Association, the Inner Arbor Trust, and the Howard County government, including its planning process.
4. Design: The overall form of the Chrysalis and how that design came to be.
5. Theater: The theatrical functions of the Chrysalis, including the stage, sound system, theatrical lighting, and “back of house” functions.
6. Shell structure: The steel framework supporting the Chrysalis skin and the theatrical equipment.
7. Shell skin: The skin forming the external surface of the Chrysalis.
8. Subfloor: The structural concrete foundation/basement or “subfloor” of the Chrysalis, and related construction.
9. Details, details: The final details of the Chrysalis and its surroundings.
10. Attracting the public: How the Chrysalis and other features of Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods will accomodate the general public and attract visitors.
11. What comes next: Future features of Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, including the Butterfly, the Merriground, the Picnic Table, the Caterpillar, and the Merriweather Horns.
12. Timeline: A detailed timeline, with references, of the events and activities from the creation of Symphony Woods through the public opening of the Chrysalis amphitheater.

This series is based on material published by the Inner Arbor Trust and others, as well as on my previous blog posts about the Inner Arbor plan and its various features. Any opinions expressed are solely mine as an individual and do not necessarily represent the views of the Inner Arbor Trust, its contractors and partners, or any other person or organization.

All materials created by me for this series are available for use by others under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For photographs and other images, include a standard photo credit. For textual material beyond the scope of fair use, use a notice similar to the following:

This work contains material from “Creating the Chrysalis” by Frank Hecker, originally published at frankhecker.com and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

For further exploration

For more of my opinions on and explanations of various aspects of the Chrysalis and Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, see the Inner Arbor-related posts in the series “The Inner Arbor plan takes shape” and elsewhere on this blog. (Note that some of these posts contain outdated information relating to park features that were later dropped or revised.)

Bloggers can write articles for their blogs, or they can fiddle about with the technical underpinnings of the blog itself—with the latter often serving as a substitute for the former. So it is with me: the writing I’ve been doing is not writing that will show up on this blog any time soon (or perhaps ever), so instead I’m doing something I’ve thought about doing for a while, namely renaming the website to use my own name and domain.

My reasons for doing this are pretty straightforward. My goal as a blogger remains to write in a way that upholds the ideals of civility and truth: civility to all, including those with whom I might disagree, and the truth as I can best determine it, even when it’s not to my liking. However in these polarized times actually putting the words “civility” and “truth” in a website name invites mild skepticism at best and cynical sneers at worst.

I could rename the website to something more stirring and of the moment, as for example the Howard County Library System did when they “sunset” their “choose civility” campaign and rebranded under the more pugnacious slogan “brave voices, brave choices.”

But in the end I concluded that it would be better just to use my personal domain frankhecker.com that I already use for my email address. The zeitgeist might change, but I’ll be “Frank Hecker” as long as I’m here to write.

If you’ve bookmarked old articles or linked to them, rest assured: URLs referencing the old domain name civilityandtruth.com will still work fine, and your browser will be redirected to the same place on the renamed site. (Incidentally, my ability to implement this is one of the advantages of maintaining my own platform rather than relying on someone else’s.)

Finally, as part of this renaming I’ve also decided to suspend my newsletter at civilityandtruth.substack.com. I never used that newsletter for its stated purpose, namely sending out alerts of new articles on my main blog, and the articles I posted there were things I could have just as well as posted here. So I thought it best to consolidate my online writing to a single website, one that I control (see above).

If you want to get notified of new articles you can either follow me on Twitter (@hecker) or use a news reader and point it to this site’s RSS feed (https://frankhecker.com/feed.xml). (If you already have a news reader pointing to this site, it should continue to work. However you may want to resubscribe using the new URL.)

Thanks to all of you who come to this site from time to time. I’m sorry there hasn’t been much for you to read here lately, and hope I’ll be able to remedy that in future.

I’ve therefore decided to deprecate the newsletter and go back to posting articles only to this site. If you want to be alerted to new posts, follow me on Twitter (@hecker).

I won’t be posting anything else to the Civility and Truth Substack site, but I will keep it online for the foreseeable future for the benefit of folks linking to old posts.

For Americans today is the first day of what is hoped to be a better year than 2020. For residents of the United Kingdom it also marks another milestone: the first day after the end of the eleven-month transition period after the UK’s formal exit from the European Union.

To be pedantic, “Brexit” in the strict sense occurred on January 31, 2020. However during the transition period the UK was still effectively treated as a member of the EU for matters relating to trade in goods and services; the idea was that this would allow time for the UK and EU to negotiate a formal agreement on their relationship going forward. So January 1, 2021, is the day from which Brexit has real consequences for British companies and consumers.

I previously wrote a post “Boy’s Own Brexit” about the various commentators I was reading to keep up with Brexit-related developments. I thought it worth doing a quick update on the current state of play, and offering a few thoughts for the future.

Getting Brexit done

The first person I highlighted in my original post was Sir Ivan Rogers, formerly British Permanent Representative to the EU before he resigned in protest of then Prime Minister Theresa May’s handling of the Brexit process. He seems to have been relatively silent lately, though I did find some comments from him quoted in the British press regarding the past year’s negotiations between the UK and EU regarding their future relationship. Rogers thought that the present PM, Boris Johnson, would walk away from the transition period negotiations and have the UK do a “no deal” Brexit.

Rogers was wrong about this: Boris Johnson did in fact conclude an agreement with the EU, albeit at almost the very last minute. (The announcement was made on Christmas Eve, and the agreement itself signed by Johnson on December 30.) That agreement is less a final dispensation than an agreement to continue negotiating: to a large degree the agreement itself kicks the can down the road, deferring final decisions on a wide range of matters to a set of joint intergovernmental bodies to be established by the two parties.

However I doubt that this really matters to Boris Johnson, and that’s why I think Rogers so misread him. As a politician Johnson deals in slogans and broad brush pronouncements, and seemingly pays little or no attention to the details of policies until and unless they’re relevant to his own political fortunes. (In this Johnson has been compared to Donald Trump.) Johnson was chosen as leader of the Conservative Party, and the Conservatives were victorious in the most recent general election, on a pledge to “get Brexit done,” with no real definition as to what that would actually mean in practice.

So it was presumably important to Johnson that there be a UK-EU agreement, and that he be seen as “standing up for Britain” by stretching negotiations out as long as possible, but the actual details of the agreement were of secondary importance to him. All that was important was that his political allies and the Tory-sympathetic press hail it as freeing the UK from domination by the EU, which is apparently exactly what has happened.

This strategy of focusing on the slogans and not discussing the details was the same as that followed by the “Leave” side in the original 2016 EU referendum. Not coincidentally, the person most identified with that strategy, Dominic Cummings, was also closely involved in the Conservative Party’s campaign strategy in the December 2019 election. A decisive victory in that election allowed Boris Johnson to continue as Prime Minister (after previously taking over from Theresa May), and Cummings continued as Johnson’s key advisor.

However this was presumably only a marriage of convenience. Cummings has made no secret of his contempt for the upper class Eton- and Oxbridge-educated politicians who have traditionally ruled Britain, and Boris Johnson is a very pure example of the type. Johnson most likely did not give a fig about Cummings’s dreams of reforming the Whitehall bureacracy and the British educational system, and building a 21st century British economy based on AI, genetic engineering, and other scientific and technological advances.

Cummings found himself under widespread criticism for flouting COVID-19 travel restrictions (thus committing an advisor’s greatest sin, namely making himself more newsworthy than his boss), and relatively soon after departed Johnson’s circle. He hasn’t posted anything to his blog since a year ago, and I suspect he’ll remain in limbo until and unless he can find another politician willing to use him and be used in turn.

Endless negotiations

Meanwhile Richard North—a “leave” advocate who considers Boris Johnson a liar and a buffoon, and equally despises Dominic Cummings—continues his daily chronicling of Brexit-related news and views at his EU Referendum site, with articles also posted to the Turbulent Times site, along with those by his son Peter North.

Both North father and son agree that, all things equal, the UK is better off out of the EU. However they also lay great stress on the point that while the UK may be more free to choose which agreements it enters into, and which regulations it chooses to adopt, the reality of 21st century globalization is that both the UK and the EU will need to conform to regulatory frameworks set at a higher level, for example industry-specific standards set by global bodies under United Nations sponsorship.

(Although they lay less stress on this point, it’s also the case that the UK as a relatively small country and economy will be at a disadvantage in negotiating with the major trade blocs, i.e., the US, the EU, and China.)

It’s also arguable whether in leaving the allegedly-undemocratic embrace of the EU, the UK will now be able to decide its fate in a more democratic manner. As the lawyer David Allen Green points out on his own Law and Policy Blog commenting on matters Brexit-related, the just-signed agreement between the UK and the EU actually removes a great many matters from democratic decisions in the UK Parliament, and places them in the hands of the UK government acting as an executive: “whatever is agreed directly between government ministers and Brussels modifies all domestic law automatically, without any parliamentary involvement”. Thus Green claims that rather than the UK “taking back control,” the bill in Parliament implementing the UK-EU agreement “instead shows that Whitehall—that is, ministers and their departments—has taken control of imposing on the United Kingdom what it agrees with Brussels.”

But, again, as many people have commented, Brexit was arguably less about the details of the UK-EU relationship and more an expression of British (or, in some eyes, English) nationalism in opposition to the proto-nationalism of a European Union looking to further political integration of its member states. And that’s not necessarily a problem, at least if we interpret nationalism not as the ethnonationalism it can devolve into, but rather simply as a matter of a country’s residents being proud of their country and wanting it to exercise self-determination in acting to the benefit of its own citizens. In that sense English nationalism is no worse than (say) Irish or Scottish nationalism, to which I now turn.

The Irish question

In my previous post I noted my reading of the Slugger O’Toole blog, seeking insight into the special post-Brexit situation of Northern Ireland, both as the only part of the UK that will share a land border with the (now UK-less) EU, and as a jurisdiction with special status due to its historical conflicts over Protestant-Catholic relations and Irish reunification, a status acknowledged in the Belfast Agreement intended to foster a resolution to those conflicts.

To briefly recap events since I last wrote: Originally due to the Conservative Party’s not quite having a majority in Parliament, the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party held veto power over the UK government’s attempts to “square the circle” between having the UK be able to diverge from EU regulations post-Brexit (as desired by most “leavers,” including the Euroskeptics who were dominant in the DUP) and having a relatively open border between Northern Ireland and (the Republic of) Ireland (as desired by Irish nationalists and allegedly dictated by the Belfast Agreement).

However, in the December 2019 general election the Conservative Party won such a large majority that Boris Johnson no longer needed the votes of DUP MPs, and hence apparently decided to ignore any further demands they might make. Johnson’s decision was to preserve a relatively open land border between Ireland north and south, at the expense of imposing additional customs checks and other regulatory red tape between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK: the so-called “border in the Irish sea.” (A BBC article provides more background on how it all happened.)

Many commenters on Slugger O’Toole and elsewhere believe that this presages even greater integration between Ireland and Northern Ireland, followed by a referendum (or “border poll”) on Irish reunification in which Irish nationalists will be victorious. I think this may well happen, but on a timescale much longer than such people think.

At the moment Northern Irish politics remains dominated by a political stalemate between the DUP and Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that arose out of the Provisional IRA. As a party SF remains toxic to a good number of Irish voters and to other political parties, not just in the north but in the south as well. (As an example, despite winning the most votes in the most recent Irish general election SF could not form a government, since neither of the two parties traditionally dominant in Irish politics, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, would enter into coalition with it.)

Since Sinn Féin is seen as the leading exponent of Irish reunification, both in its own eyes and in others’, the widespread hostility toward it in turn drags down the Irish republican cause in general. Thus rather than dissatisfaction with the status quo and the travails of the DUP and political unionism greatly increasing support for reunification, instead Northern Ireland has seen a rise in “middle ground” politics, exemplified by the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland.

(It’s worth noting in passing that the use of proportional representation with a single transferable vote—what’s known in the US as ranked choice voting—is what allowed Alliance to make headway against the DUP and Sinn Féin, since they are a relatively safe “second choice” for many voters whose first choices were one of the traditional unionist or nationalist parties, in addition to picking up first preference votes on their own.)

Alliance is nominally neutral on the issue of Irish reunification, but in practice this amounts to its trying to make Northern Ireland work given its present status as part of the UK. That stance is matched by that of the present Irish government, a coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which has been soft-pedaling discussions of reunification in favor of a “shared island” approach.

In the end I suspect Irish reunification will not occur until Sinn Féin ceases to be disdained by the majority of voters and by other parties, or until SF ceases to be the main driving force behind reunification. I suspect the former will occur only after the departure from political life (or, for that matter, from life itself) of all Sinn Féin figures who have IRA connections or are otherwise associated with “the Troubles”. The most prominent such figure is Gerry Adams, the previous leader of Sinn Féin who now is seen by many as exercising veto power behind the scenes. At 72 years of age he possibly has another fifteen or twenty years on the scene, which would bring us to 2035–2040.

However even this may not be enough time. As one example, Martina Anderson, former Sinn Féin Member of the European Parliament, was not even born when the Troubles started. She went to prison for IRA activities in 1986 at the age of 18 (eleven years before the final IRA ceasefire in 1997), and given her present age of 58 possibly might have another twenty or even thirty years in public life.

Thus it may not be until 2040–2050 that Sinn Féin finally comes out from under the “shadow of the gunman,” and the legacy of violence committed by the IRA, Protestant loyalists, and the British state ceases to be a factor in voters’ decisions in a reunification referendum. Accordingly I’ll predict the chances of Irish reunification in the next ten years at no more than one in ten.

An independent Scotland?

After English nationalism and Irish nationalism we move to Scottish nationalism. (At present Welsh nationalism is apparently not powerful enough to have any significant implications for the UK as a whole.) Scotland is distinguished from Northern Ireland by having a government led (since 2007) by an explicitly nationalist party (the Scottish National Party) that is dominant both in local elections and in elections for the UK Parliament, and a public that is currently expressing majority support for Scottish independence.

(In the series of polls tracked by James Kelly on his Scot Goes Pop! blog, support for independence has been hovering around the 55% mark, compared to the 45% of voters who voted Yes in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.)

A majority of Scottish voters in the EU referendum voted for the UK to remain in the EU, and any problems seen as resulting from Brexit may increase the number of voters willing to see Scotland leave the UK behind and possibly rejoin the EU as an independent county. However, the SNP and the cause of Scottish independence face two barriers that Irish nationalists do not.

First, there is no equivalent of the Belfast Agreement that gives an external entity (in that case, Ireland) a stake in whether Scotland becomes independent or not. Scottish independence is seen by others as a purely internal matter for the UK to deal with itself.

More importantly, unlike with Northern Ireland the British (or, to be more precise, English) political establishment has a strong interest in keeping Scotland part of the UK, even against the expressed wishes of the Scottish people themselves. Scotland provides the political establishment benefits including revenues from North Sea oil, a place to host the British nuclear deterrent (in the form of submarines and their missiles), and a playground for the upper classes to fish and hunt (like the nobility of old). And, of course, as with any ruling class throughout history, secession of a restive territory is seen as constituting a diminution of the ruling class’s power, and is resisted accordingly.

The UK’s ruling Conservative Party in particular has no motive to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence or, for that matter, to respect the results of a Yes majority voting in such a referendum. The Tories have a comfortable majority in Parliament based almost solely on their performance in England and Wales, and have no need to cater to the desires of the SNP and Scottish voters, a situation which will likely continue through 2024 at least.

If the Labour Party is able to come to power at some point it may be willing to countenance an independence referendum, especially if it needs support from the SNP to form a government. However letting Scotland go would mean the withdrawal of that support, and could put Labour at a permanent disadvantage to the Tories in England and Wales. So while Labour might be coerced into allowing a second referendum on Scottish independence, they might also be unwilling to respect a Yes result, or at least might try to introduce additional delays and difficulties into the process.

Thus while I think there’s a good chance that Scotland will end up as an independent country some day, I put the chances of that happening in the next ten years no higher than 50-50 at best, and probably closer to one in three given the unfavorable political environment at the UK level.

This is however assuming that the process of deciding on independence is dependent on and endorsed by the British government. If the frustration of the Scottish people gets high enough, and the SNP’s current relatively moderate approach loses the party political support in future elections, it’s possible that a future Scottish government (whether SNP-led or not) may issue a unilateral declaration of independence. At that point all bets are off.

Finally, getting back to Brexit: although both Scottish voters and politicians are generally EU supporters, it’s an open question whether an independent Scotland should actually (re)join the EU or not.

Arguably as a country on the northwest fringe of Europe Scotland has more in common with the Nordic countries than it does with core EU members like France and Germany. Of those countries, only Finland is (like Ireland) both a member of the EU and using the euro as its currency. Denmark and Sweden are EU members but not in the Eurozone (and apparently are unlikely to join any time soon), while Norway and Iceland have remained outside the EU.

Instead Norway and Iceland are members (along with Switzerland and Liechtenstein) of an parallel organization to the EU, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), and (along with Liechtenstein) participate in the European Economic Area or EEA, which gives them access to the EU “single market” for goods and services. That might be a preferable approach for Scotland as well.

And with that I reach the end of my second Brexit post. I apologize for the length, but can promise you that I won’t be writing anything more on Brexit for the foreseeable future (if ever).

tl;dr: The Inner Arbor Trust is revising its plans for Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods to reflect new realities.

In April 2017 the Chrysalis amphitheater in downtown Columbia, Maryland, was opened to the public as the first element of Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods. The amphitheater was built by the Inner Arbor Trust, the nonprofit organization created to manage and develop the Symphony Woods property under a perpetual easement from the Columbia Association, the property owner.

Since then the Inner Arbor Trust has promoted and hosted a set of free events at the Chrysalis and hosted other events in the park, while at the same time planning for further development of the park, based on the so-called “Inner Arbor” plan. The Inner Arbor Trust is now proposing a revision to that plan, and recently held a briefing for the boards of directors of the Trust and the Columbia Association.

The Merriweather Post posted a good overview of the revised concept plan, so I won’t recap it in detail in this post. Instead I want to explore the factors I think are driving the revision and comment on the various elements of the plan.

Note: While I have been a long-time supporter of the Inner Arbor Trust and its plans for Symphony Woods, I have no formal affiliation with the Inner Arbor Trust, the Columbia Association, or any other of the organizations that are or might become involved with park planning. This post contains my personal opinions, and is based solely on the slide presentation and briefing video released to the general public by the Inner Arbor Trust.

New realities, new plans

This revised concept plan is the latest of three attempts to develop Symphony Woods as a park. Before discussing the new plan, let’s briefly review how we got here:

For forty years the Symphony Woods property was little more than a relatively neglected piece of land over which people traveled by car or on foot to get to Merriweather Post Pavilion, which it surrounds. Finally in 2008 the Columbia Association began planning for a park in Symphony Woods and, after an initial plan met with criticism during the Howard County planning process, adopted the Inner Arbor plan (referred to by some as the “McCall plan,” after its creator Michael McCall).

In 2013 the newly-established Inner Arbor Trust further expanded and refined the Inner Arbor plan, took it through the 16-step county approval process in 2014, and successfully built the Chrysalis amphitheater as the first step in creating the newly-named Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods.

Why is the Inner Arbor Trust now considering revising the existing approved plan? As an outside observer I can see at least three realities with which the Trust must contend.

First, the economic reality: As currently approved the Inner Arbor plan is a very ambitious plan, with a estimated price tag well into the eight digits just for the first phase. Although Howard County is a relatively wealthy county, it lacks the concentration of great individual or corporate wealth (e.g., in the form of a billionaire or Fortune 100 company) that in other locales has provided the bulk of funding for world-class public parks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has further strained the finances of those entities that might be candidates for funding Merriweather Park development. An anticipated slow economic recovery from the pandemic, coupled with a possible recession in the coming decade, would likely make it difficult to impossible to fully develop Symphony Woods as envisioned in the current plan.

The economic reality then influences the political reality: the Inner Arbor Trust will need support from as many as possible of the people and organizations who can influence funding decisions. It’s no accident that the new concept plan presentation begins with a list of all the stakeholders whom the Trust has consulted in the process of deciding on a plan revision.

This includes the Columbia Association in particular, since its approval is needed for any changes to the park plans. The Columbia Association is also currently involved in an legal dispute with the Downtown Columbia Arts and Culture Commission, owner of Merriweather Post Pavilion, and the tenor of that relationship may constrain the form of any future park development. (See the discussion below.)

Finally, priorities for park development have arguably been changed by the progress of the Howard Hughes Corporation’s development of the Merriweather District, including completion of Merriweather Drive and Symphony Woods Road bordering Symphony Woods on the west, south, and east, completion of the multi-use pathway next to those roads, and completion (or impending completion) of office, residential, and retail developments along Merriweather Drive.

The park and the pedestrian

Although Symphony Woods was designated as public open space from the very beginning of Columbia, making it fully accessible to the general public was not a major priority for most of its existence. Until recently there were only two pedestrian access points to the park, both intended primarily for getting people to and from Merriweather Post Pavilion: one pathway from Little Patuxent Parkway to the west gate of the pavilion, and a second pathway to the south of the pavilion leading from the then-undeveloped land used for parking during events.

Once within Symphony Woods there were no pedestrian pathways providing access to the other parts of the property. Visitors had to walk along the bare ground next to the fence surrounding the pavilion, walk on the sides of roads providing vehicular access to the Merriweather VIP parking lot and the backstage area, or take their chances on a turned ankle or an encounter with thorns by striking out into the woods to the east and south of the pavilion.

The original Inner Arbor plan partially rectified that lack, proposing a set of pathways in the northern part of Symphony Woods that would provide enhanced access from Little Patuxent Parkway back to the Chrysalis. However that plan provided nothing for the southern part of Symphony Woods, at least in the first phase.

Now that it’s possible to walk all the way around the park on the new multi-use pathways, that lack of pathways into and within the park has become quite glaring: walkers on Merriweather Road near the intersection with Hickory Ridge Road confront a set of guardrails and then a steep drop into a creek valley, while walkers on the sidewalk on the west side of Symphony Woods Road find a steep upslope broken only by a one-lane access road (Chrysalis Drive) intended for cars and trucks, and then a less steep drop into a second creek valley.

There are now a new staircase and ramp leading from Merriweather Drive down to the previous path leading to Merriweather Post Pavilion. However, walkers seeking to go into the park proper still face a lack of pathways if they want to explore the creek and lake area to the south of the pavilion, or must take another steep hike up Dennis Lane if they want to go to the Chrysalis.

The revised concept plan proposes a set of new gateways into the park, along with an expanded set of pathways once you get into the park. Going clockwise from the western side of Merriweather Drive, these are as follows:

Southwest gateway: This proposed entrance point is not from Merriweather Drive itself, but under it, along the creek that runs below a bridge just south of the intersection with Hickory Ridge Road. As such it would provide a nice link into the park from what will be preserved open space between Hickory Ridge Road and the Juniper apartment complex.¹ The pathway from that point would then lead into the park to a short (45-foot) “hidden bridge” spanning the creek just south of the pavilion fence line.

Southern gateway: This is the most striking proposed gateway, consisting of a 290-foot pedestrian bridge carrying park visitors from the multi-use pathway along Merriweather Drive over the creek and onto a pathway next to Dennis Lane. (See above for the approximate location.) In the revised concept plan this bridge is shown alongside the existing path to the pavilion, including the staircase, ramp, and wooden bridge over the creek. However, the bridge would save visitors the hike down a couple of dozen feet to the creek and back up again, improving accessibility of the pavilion from the south, and could also provide access to ADA-compliant pathways within the park itself. Thus it can also be seen as a potential replacement for the current southern entrance.

Eastern gateway: This proposed gateway includes a shorter (78-foot) bridge from the sidewalk next to Symphony Woods Road over a second creek to the rear of the Chrysalis amphitheater. (See above for the approximate location.) If this were to be combined with a suitable crosswalk on Symphony Woods Road, it would provide a very convenient and accessible connection between the Chrysalis and the proposed New Cultural Center on the current site of Toby’s Dinner Theatre.²

Northeast gateway: This would include yet another bridge, this one 150 feet long, leading from the northeast corner of the park at Little Patuxent Parkway. This bridge would take the place of a boardwalk proposed in the current Inner Arbor plan, carrying visitors over the second creek and into an expanded set of pathways north of the Chrysalis.

Western gateway: I’ve left this one for last because it does not involve an expansion of pedestrian access, but rather a refinement of the access that already exists. As one of the presenters remarked during the briefing, this area (at the intersection of Merriweather Drive and Divided Sky Lane) is if anything over-supplied with paved access roads and pathways.

The problem is not therefore to provide access where there was none, but to make this area more visibly a part of the park and more welcoming to people walking into it. The revised concept plan proposes to rectify this by providing a terraced landscape that includes play spaces for children and a visitors center with restrooms.

The topic of restrooms leads us into the next section.

The park and the pavilion

Since the 2000s a common theme in planning for downtown Columbia has been the need to consider the combined Merriweather Post Pavilion and Symphony Woods properties as a single whole, what the Downtown Columbia Plan dubs the “Merriweather-Symphony Woods neighborhood.” In accordance with this approach Howard County planning authorities encouraged greater integration of activities, uses, and design features between Merriweather Post Pavilion and any park developed in Symphony Woods. (Among other things, this was one of the key recommendations the Howard County Planning Board made with respect to the Columbia Association’s original plan for a park.)

The current Inner Arbor plan takes this recommendation to heart, and proposes eliminating the existing fence between the Merriweather Post Pavilion and Symphony Woods properties (at least along the northern boundary), incorporating the existing historic buildings and pathways within the pavilion as a shared area between the pavilion and park (perhaps with a fountain). Instead of a fence the Inner Arbor plan proposes controlling access to the pavilion via a long cylindrical structure, the Caterpillar, acting as an artificial berm separating the northernmost portion of the park from the area shared with the pavilion, and providing infrastructure for events within the park.

For various reasons the Caterpillar has always been one of the most controversial elements in the Inner Arbor plan. But beyond any concerns previously expressed, one major problem with the Caterpillar is that it assumes a very high degree of cooperation between the respective property owners and managers, cooperation that may be beyond the desire and ability of the various parties to sustain.

The revised concept plan, perhaps following the dictum that “good fences make good neighbors,” deletes the Caterpillar and proceeds on the linked assumptions that there will continue to be a fence between the two properties, and that visitors to the park would normally be locked out of the pavilion.³

This has various implications, beginning with the western gateway discussed above. The revised concept plan proposes constructing a small visitors center here, perhaps in the spirit of the original Exhibit Center built by the Rouse Company to welcome prospective Columbia residents. Whether or not that’s the case, the practical use of this structure would be to provide restrooms for visitors on the west side of the park—since the Merriweather Post Pavilion restrooms would be locked away behind the fence.

In the revised plan that fence would itself be either replaced or overlaid with a new fence, designed to be more aesthetically pleasing and to provide park visitors at least partial screening of the ice machines, golf carts, and other Merriweather Post Pavilion fixtures currently visible on the other side of the fence. Based on the slides in the revised concept plan presentation, the proposed fence could use wooden pickets spaced closely together, providing a visual tie-in with similar pickets used for railings at the Chrysalis.⁴

That would take care of the west and east sides of the fence, next to the western gateway and the Chrysalis respectively. In between, on the northern portion of the fence, the revised concept plan attempts to solve a problem and create an opportunity.

Because the area just north of the fence is heavily used by vendors and others during Wine in the Woods and similar events held in the park, alternative infrastructure to that within Merriweather Post Pavilion must be provided to support merchandise booths, food and drink stalls, and the like.

The revised concept plan addresses this need via a proposed covered walkway or colonnade located next to the fence, running east-west along what the plan terms the “Ridgeline.” This colonnade could be used for vendor stalls, for public art, or simply as a quick and easy way to get from the western gateway to the Chrysalis without having to take a longer route over other park pathways.

The plan further proposes locating a stage in the middle of this colonnade, providing the opportunity for small-scale performances either standalone or as part of larger events. For events that use both properties, gates in the fence on either side of the stage would open to provide free access for event-goers crossing between them, without their having to walk all the way to the east or west pavilion entrances.

Continuing clockwise, just as on the west side of the park there is a need for restrooms on the east side of the park near the Chrysalis. Currently that need is served by a temporary restroom located next to the historic building housing the Merriweather Post Pavilion staff.

However that temporary facility will be replaced at some point by a new restroom designed to alternately allow access to either park or pavilion visitors, depending on whether events are being held in Merriweather Park Pavilion or not. (Since visitors will be allowed in the park during most Merriweather Post Pavilion events, they would still need to be accomodated during those times; presumably the proposed visitor center restrooms would fill that need.)

Priorities and pitfalls

Overall I think the revised concept plan does a good job of addressing the realities that development of Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods will need to deal with going forward. However there are still decisions to be made regarding priorities in proceeding with the next phases of development, as well as potential pitfalls along the way.

In terms of priorities, the first order of business is to complete the already planned and funded pathways in the northern section of the park. The first portion of this pathway system has recently been completed, and provides pedestrian access from Little Patuxent Parkway into the northeastern portion of the park and from there to the Chrysalis. The next portion of this pathway system will extend the current pathway system further west into the northwestern section of the park. When completed this pathway system will help address the needs of events like Wine in the Woods.

What will the next park improvements be after that? That will I think depend on higher-level priorities. I see two general ways to go:

The first is to prioritize the needs of events like Wine in the Woods that use the northern part of the park. For example, this might drive earlier construction of the above-mentioned colonnade and stage running along the northern boundary of Merriweather Post Pavilion.

The second approach would be to serve the needs of the new Merriweather District developments to the south of the park. For example, constructing pathways along the lake might encourage residents and workers from those buildings to explore the park’s southern reaches and build more awareness of and support for further proposed park developments like the southern gateway.

There are also potential pitfalls along the way. Soliciting support from as many organizations as possible will help with fundraising and gaining financial support from Howard County and the state of Maryland. However it also invites potential micromanaging of park development in a way that may detract from the overall vision for the park.

For example, the Downtown Columbia Plan envisions the Merriweather-Symphony Woods neighborhood as “a new kind of cultural park . . . a setting for arts, cultural and civic uses.” Taking its cue from this, the Inner Arbor Trust advertises Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods as a place where “where arts, culture, and community come together.”

However now that more residents and workers are moving into the Merriweather District and nearby areas, they may be looking for more conventional park features for recreational and other uses. As but two examples, in the concept plan briefing Virginia Thomas of the Columbia Association board discussed putting a bocce court in the park, and I can also see some local residents lobbying for a dog park—there’s already an area next to the multi-use pathway along Merriweather Drive with signs directed at dog owners.

Many if not all of these other uses may be ruled out by existing easements and agreements. However they may nonetheless end up distracting from the work needed to realize the park as one devoted to art and culture.

Speaking of art, and the art of architecture in particular, another area of difficulty may be realizing a high degree of design excellence for the park’s various features. In architecture there is sometimes a trade-off between aesthetics and practicality, and better-looking structures are typically more expensive to build and maintain. I can see designs like those presented in the concept plan for the gazebo, the Nest, and the two pavilions (see above) possibly being compromised in the interests of saving money and serving more utilitarian purposes. (Again, an example: in the concept plan briefing Alan Klein of the CA board suggested that the gazebo be redesigned to shelter park visitors from the rain.)

Thus although I think adoption of the revised concept plan would significantly increase the chances of completing the development of Merriweather Part at Symphony Woods according to the vision in the Downtown Columbia Plan and the Inner Arbor Trust mission statement, realizing that vision will still require much work and attention. As refinement of the plan continues I hope to be here to chronicle accomplishments and promote further progress.

For further exploration

For more information on the revised concept plan see the video recording of the briefing to the Inner Arbor Trust and Columbia Association boards, and the accompanying slide presentation [PDF]. For a briefer overview see the Merriweather Post article “Columbia’s ‘Central Park’: The Inner Arbor Trust Plan for Symphony Woods.”

For more information on the various attempts over the years to develop Symphony Woods as a park, see my history of Symphony Woods and an accompanying timeline of events up through May 2017, as well as my other posts on the Inner Arbor plan.

In my last post I sort-of-promised that that would be my final commentary on all matters Mozilla. I am breaking that promise, but will console myself with the thought that this post is only going out to the handful of subscribers to my Substack newsletter (which I use for less formal posts), and I won’t be tweeting about it or otherwise promoting it. But of course every post of this newsletter is publicly viewable and sharable, and many of you have Twitter accounts too, so that’s not much of a concession.

Anyway, on to Mozilla. One thing I regret not discussing in my prior posts was the sort-of-announcement of the extension of the Mozilla Corporation’s deal with Google. I say “sort of” because there was no formal press release or blog post. Instead the news was leaked to the press through back channels. To quote The Register: “Within hours of the browser maker laying off a quarter of its staff this week, a well-placed source told The Register Moz had signed a three-year agreement with Google.”

The key words here are “within hours” and “well-placed source.” This has all the hallmarks of Mozilla Corporation senior management trying to correct a public communications problem, after a layoff announcement that not only was silent about the fate of popular Mozilla-sponsored projects like Rust or MDN, but also by implication cast doubt on the long-term future of the Mozilla project as a whole.

The Register’s story goes on to say, “Our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.” The key words here are “likely” and “internal discussions”. The reference to “internal discussions” (within the Mozilla Corporation? between the Mozilla Corporation and Google?) might imply that the deal was anticipated at press time but not yet signed. However as reported in the same story, a Mozilla spokesperson did confirm that the contract had been extended.

So, if the deal was done, why is the amount of revenue to Mozilla characterized as a “likely” range rather than a fixed amount? A clue here is in Mitchell Baker’s blog post announcing the layoffs: “Economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic have significantly impacted our revenue.” If the contract was for a fixed amount, payable no matter what, then COVID-19 should have had no impact. So the implication is that the contract value was dependent on certain metrics whose values could fluctuate, for example, based on the number of active Firefox users and/or their web browsing activity.

That implies that the estimated annual contract value of $400–450 million is dependent on maintaining Firefox market share or even possibly increasing it somewhat (which was possibly the main subject of the “internal discussions”). By comparison, from the 2018 Mozilla consolidated financial statement [PDF] we see that “royalties” (the category used for search engine revenue) were $430 million in 2018 compared to $539 million in the previous year (page 4, “Consolidated Statement of Activities and Change in Net Assets”).

However, royalties include more than just search engine revenue. Actual search engine revenues were about $391 million in 2018, 91% of overall royalties, down from $501 million or 93% of royalties in 2017 (page 25, note 12). So the estimated annual $400–450 million in search engine revenue for the next three years, while a conservative estimate compared to the peak year of 2017, is still relatively optimistic compared to the actual search engine revenue in 2018.

The change from $501 million to $391 million represents a 22% decline in search engine revenues from 2017 to 2018. Even assuming that the estimated revenues of $400-450 million are achieved going forward, that’s still a 10–20% decline from the peak year of 2017.

The “2018 State of Mozilla” report noted that overall Mozilla employed over 1,000 people. (It’s unclear whether this is as of the end of 2018 or as of November 2019, when the report was released.) Almost all of these people work at the Mozilla Corporation, so we can take 1,000 people as an estimate of the size of Mozilla Corporation staff at that time. (This same report noted the Mozilla Foundation as employing 80 people, while Part VII, line 2 of the Mozilla Foundation 2018 Form 990 listed the number of Foundation employees with compensation greater than $100,000 as 43.)

The Mozilla Corporate laid off 70 people early in 2020. Combined with the more recent reduction in 250 “roles” announced in the Mozilla Corporation internal memo [PDF], that amounts to a decrease in staff of up to a third from its highest point. Presuming that the Mozilla Corporation had staffed in 2018 in anticipation of 2017-like revenues continuing, and that 2019 search engine revenues were comparable to those in 2018 (which we’ll find out this November), that explains why such a large fraction of the Mozilla Corporation workforce was laid off: That’s the reduction in staff that was needed to bring costs in line with anticipated revenues for the years ahead.

Another topic I wanted to expand on was the issue of individuals paying to support Firefox development. Anyone perusing Reddit, Hacker News, or other online forums will encounter comments urging people to contribute to Mozilla to help keep Firefox alive. As I previously noted, there is in fact no direct way for individuals to pay directly for Firefox itself, since donations to the Mozilla Foundation go to support Mozilla Foundation activities, and do not find their way to the Mozilla Corporation where the actual Firefox developers are employed. Even with new products like Mozilla VPN the money users pay will support Firefox development only indirectly.

However, even if users were able to directly fund Firefox development the resulting revenue would most likely fall far short of the funds needed. To get a sense for this, let’s look at the current level of Mozilla donations:

The 2018 Mozilla Foundation IRS Form 990 [PDF] reports just under $14 million in revenue from contributions and grants (Form 990, Part I, line 8). But of this almost $9 million was received in the form of large contributions (Schedule B, Part I). So the amount contributed to the Mozilla Foundation by ordinary Firefox users was no more than $5 million at most and may even be lower, since it’s not clear whether the list of large contributions includes the over $3 million from government sources noted on Part VIII, line 1e.

The disconnect is clear: in their generosity individual Firefox users collectively would likely directly contribute at most a few million dollars per year to Firefox development, while the actual cost of Firefox development is one or two orders of magnitude greater than that. I was probably guilty in my previous Mozilla post of being overly pessimistic about the long term prospects of the Mozilla project. But there’s no denying that this is a major gap to fill, and it’s understandable why Mozilla Corporation senior management have not yet found a way to fill it, beyond depending on search engine royalties from a third party that owns a “cash cow” business with a dominant market position.

This is a specific instance of a more general problem with software development today, which I may address in a future post. As for Mozilla, I’ll likely be back with an update after the 2019 Mozilla financials are released in November, unless there’s major news in the meantime.

tl;dr: Four graphs show that almost all of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google et al., and the majority of its expenses go to software development.

In my last post about Mozilla I included a bit of data and a lot of opinions. In this post I’ll reverse that and provide more data and fewer opinions.

I was interested in knowing at a high level what were the major categories of Mozilla’s revenue and (what’s a bit more interesting) what were the major categories of Mozilla’s expenses. To do this I went through the consolidated financial statements for the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, extracted the data I was interested in, and applied a bit of R code.

The graph above shows the major categories of revenue for Mozilla from 2005 through 2018, the last year for which we have financial data. Note that I consolidated some categories of revenue to simplify the graph. For example, I combined income from interest and dividends, investment gains and losses, and similar categories into an overall category of miscellaneous revenue.

The results are not surprising: by far the major driver of revenue was royalties received from Google and other search engine vendors, with everything else (including grants and donations to the Mozilla Foundation) being relatively negligible.

The data for the various high-level categories is bit more interesting when expressed as a percentage of total revenue. Again, royalties from Google and other search engine providers dominate the picture, never going below 90% of total revenue and typically at 95% or greater.

There’s one interesting anomaly for the years prior to 2009, in which miscellaneous income rose to almost 10% of total revenue and then dropped below zero (i.e., it constituted a net loss). This appears to be due to Mozilla Foundation and/or Corporation investments doing well in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008, and then suffering losses. Since 2009 miscellaneous income has been more stable as a percentage of total revenue, possibly due to the favorable economic environment and/or more conservative investment strategies.

Also, for future reference note the category relating to subscriptions and advertising, which is currently under 5% of total revenues. I presume that revenues relating to Pocket are assigned to that category, and that revenues from the Mozilla VPN and other services will go there as well. It will be interesting to see in future financial statements whether that category grows substantially as a percentage of total revenue. That will be a key indicator of whether Mozilla is going to be able to move beyond its dependence on Google and other search engine providers.

The graph above shows the main categories of expenses incurred by the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation considered together. As one might expect, the largest category of expenses is for activities related to software development, including the salaries of the software developers themselves.

The next two largest categories are marketing, i.e., activities relating to promotion of Mozilla products and services, and general and administrative, i.e., all the support activities needed to keep Mozilla running, including the salaries of people not involved in software development. It’s interesting to note that marketing-related expenses seem to have leveled off somewhat in the years leading up to 2018.

The programs category includes things other than software development that further the nonprofit goals of Mozilla. Mozilla Foundation grants and fellowships go here, among others.

The final graph shows the data in the previous graph expressed as a percentage of total expenses. Here again we see the large amount of expenses relating to software development, just above 60% in the years leading up to 2018.

Marketing and general and administrative expenses have tended to be in the range of 10% to 20%, with marketing sometimes higher than G&A and sometimes lower. Finally, program-related expenses have been rising in the years leading up to 2018, and if this trend continues in 2019 and beyond may come to make up around 10% of total Mozilla spending.

That concludes this brief tour of Mozilla’s finances. There is more that could be said about Mozilla’s finances, but that’s a task I will leave to others; see the section below for how to get started.

Finally, thanks to all who read my prior post and tweeted about it, and to those who ended up following me on Twitter or subscribing to my (very occasional) newsletter. If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on Mozilla I will likely end up disappointing you: this will probably be my final Mozilla-related post for a while, and perhaps forever. Feel free to unfollow me or unsubscribe unless you have an interest in whatever other topics I might end up writing about next.

For further exploration

For the calculations and data behind the graph above, see “A high-level overview of Mozilla finances” and the source code for that article in the mozilla-finances code and data repository.

tl;dr: Some thoughts on Mozilla for people who don’t know Mozilla.

By now everyone in the tech world has heard of the major layoffs at the Mozilla Corporation, the organization that creates and distributes the Firefox web browser. (For those who haven’t heard, about 250 people were laid off, about a quarter of the work force.) Lots of people in the tech world have spoken their piece about the significance of this event and what it means for the future of Mozilla, the web, and so on.

Rather than write something of and for the tech world, I wanted to briefly explain what’s going on for those of my readers who don’t know HTML from XML, and who are more familar with the worlds of nonprofits and regular old businesses. I used to work for Mozilla, and have more knowledge of it and (I hope) insight into it than most people, but I’ve been gone from Mozilla for ten years now. Thus what I write below is based on observing it from a distance, like seeing an old friend whose life has long since diverged from mine.

Disclaimer: I work for a tech company, and I don’t usually write about other tech companies. So I will strongly emphasize that what I write here are my personal opinions only, and do not represent the positions of my present employer or past employers.

What is Mozilla?

Mozilla is actually two things, the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, which are often confused and conflated in public discourse. (There’s actually at least one other piece, but these two are the main ones.) The Mozilla Foundation, founded in 2003 to take over development of the source code for the Netscape web browser, is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization, with a staff of 80 people and a budget of about $27 million in 2018, the last year for which figures are available. The Mozilla Corporation, founded in 2005, is a for-profit business, wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, with a staff of about a thousand and revenue of about $440 million, again from the 2018 financials.

This organizational structure was designed to allow the Mozilla Corporation to engage in business activities which would be incompatible with 501(c)(3) status, with a portion of the revenues from those activities directed to the Mozilla Foundation to help fund its activities. Having a nonprofit parent also means that the management and employees of the Mozilla Corporation can help serve the public benefit goals of the Mozilla Foundation, while still having interesting jobs, being paid reasonably well, and feeling themselves to be part of the overall Silicon Valley high-tech milieu.

Second: The customers of the Mozilla Corporation are not the users of Firefox (among whom you may count yourself). The Mozilla Corporation’s customers are large corporations like Google that pay for things that will help them make money, most notably having their Internet search service be the default in the Firefox browser. And to complete the old saying, “If you’re not the customer . . .,” then the 200+ million Firefox users are the product, potential viewers of ads served up by Google or others.

(The existence of the Firefox browser as a competitor to Google’s Chrome browser also supposedly helps Google avoid unwelcome antitrust attention, especially now that Microsoft has abandoned its own browser development efforts to base its own browser on the Chrome code. But it’s unclear how important this consideration actually is to Google senior management.)

In the early days of the Mozilla Corporation these search engine relationships proved extremely lucrative, jumping from less than $5 million in 2004 to over $50 million in 2005, the first year in which the Mozilla Corporation reported financial results, and eventually growing to a high of about $540 million in 2017.

But as the number of Firefox users decreases (due to the growing market dominance of the Chrome browser), and those users click on fewer online ads (for example, because they’re spending less during the COVID-19 pandemic), the willingness of Google and other customers to pay the Mozilla Corporation for those users decreases accordingly. Thus the Mozilla Corporation cutting a quarter of its workforce.

(In contrast, to my knowledge the Mozilla Foundation itself is not laying off anyone, at least at this time. It gets its funding from a combination of royalties from the Mozilla Corporation for use of the Firefox and Mozilla trademarks, government and foundation grants, and individual donations. For 2018 the royalties accounted for about half of the Mozilla Foundation’s budget, with grants and individual donations each accounting for about a quarter of the budget.)

So, if you’re an avid user of the Firefox browser and want to chip in a few dollars to help support its development, there’s actually no way for you to do so, at least not at present. Your donations will go to the Mozilla Foundation, which will use them to help fund its outreach and advocacy initiatives, of which it has several. The Mozilla Foundation itself does not develop Firefox—or any other software, to my knowledge.

Whence Mozilla?

How has Mozilla (or, more correctly, the Mozilla Corporation) come to its present pass? The best way I can explain it is that the Mozilla Corporation is not really a business in the way we’d normally think of a business, profit-focused and subject to market discipline.

Instead you can think of the Mozilla Corporation as being analogous to the Bell Labs or Xerox PARC of yore, R&D organizations funded by a seemingly-unending stream of profits earned by other businesses that enjoyed dominant positions in their respective markets. In this sense Google is to Mozilla as AT&T was to Bell Labs, or Xerox to Xerox PARC.

Like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, the Mozilla Corporation provided a home for some of the smartest software developers around. Like those organizations, the Mozila Corporation has initiated a myriad of projects ranging from the mundane and useful (like the Firefox browser) to the esoteric and speculative. Like those organizations, the Mozilla Corporation has given away much of what it has produced in the form of public goods available to everyone at no charge.

Like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, the Mozilla Corporation has indulged a taste for “build it yourself” vertical integration, and in particular for creating its own bespoke development tools and software stack. For example, like those organizations the Mozilla Corporation has created its own operating system (FirefoxOS), its own programming language (Rust), and (of course) its own graphical user environment in the form of the Firefox browser (not to mention yet another web browser, this one more research-oriented, and various experiments in software for virtual reality environments).

And finally, the Mozilla Corporation is engaged in the same struggle that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC found themselves in: trying to convert a research-oriented organization into an actual business, and capture for itself more of the value that it has been providing to the world (and to its past, present, and future competitors) for free.

Whither Mozilla?

What will happen to Mozilla, and to the Mozilla Corporation in particular? The basic situation is that Mozilla has tried to be at least three things simultaneously: an advocacy organization, a developer and distributor of mass market consumer software and related services, and (as noted above) a research lab.

Being an advocacy organization is relatively inexpensive, but the other two functions are not: software development (including research-related activities) and branding and marketing together consumed almost three quarters of the combined Mozilla Corporation and Foundation expense budget of $450 million in 2018. Thus when COVID-19 hit and the Mozilla Corporation hit a brick wall in terms of search engine revenue, its choice was apparently either to stop being a consumer software and services company, or to stop being a research lab.

In the end Mozilla Corporation senior management apparently decided to go for being a consumer software and services company, and to ditch any activities not related to that, including research projects. Having done so, the Mozilla Corporation faces a number of problems:

First, as noted above the Mozilla ethos is arguably more like that of an R&D lab than of a business proper. Just getting Mozilla employees to think of themselves as working in the service of a profit-driven business, and to act in accordance with that thought every single day, may be an uphill battle.

Second, Mozilla is arguably becoming superfluous, at least as far as its own largest customer, Google, is concerned. Google has its own browser and browser development team, its own research lab, and presumably an inclination to want to spend its R&D money on things it can control and direct itself. Google also has the ability and the opportunity to capture the remaining base of Firefox users, at least those that are monetizable.

There will always be a core of enthusiastic Firefox users, but a lot of them switch their search engine to something other than Google, run ad blockers, and don’t click on online ads. Thus they are for the most part irrelevant from Google’s point of view. At some point the major value Firefox has for Google will be as presumed insulation from antitrust enforcement efforts targeting Chrome, but such insurance, even if it’s of value to Google, doesn’t necessarily require a large Firefox user base.

Finally, it’s not at all clear how successful the Mozilla Corporation can be at the task of running a business for which individual consumers are the customers, not search engine vendors. The Mozilla Corporation has had a number of previous efforts to try to break out of its dependence on Google, et al., none of which were successful. Based purely on history one would be skeptical of their succeeding this time.

This is especially true given the basic math: To replace (say) $100 million of lost revenue from search engines Mozilla would need to make 50 cents or so per year from each of its $200+ million Firefox users. This seems reasonable, but remember that Internet users have been used to a world where everything is provided to them for free, so the number of Firefox users who would pay anything at all is likely to be low.

If we assume 2% of Firefox users would purchase Mozilla products and services (apparently a fairly typical conversion rate for “freemium” products), replacing $100 million of lost revenue with a user base of approximately 200 million users would require each paid user to be contributing about $25 per year to the Mozilla Corporation’s bottom line. Assuming the same conversion rate and no growth in the user base, matching the $500+ million of revenue the Mozilla Corporation had at its peak would require each paid user to purchase $75 $125 per year of Mozilla products and services. That’s a fair amount of money.

Assuming that the Mozilla Corporation can’t convert itself into a true profit-making business serving individual customers, what are the other possibilities?

One is to aggressively shrink the organization to a size that is sustainable long-term on greatly-reduced revenues, while still ensuring that Mozilla as a whole is able to do a reasonably good job of fulfilling its nonprofit mission. For example, this might involve cutting out all development except for basic maintenance of Firefox itself, in an effort to preserve a user base large enough to justify someone paying the Mozilla Corporation for access to it.

A problem with this approach is that it likely does not accord with the feelings and ambitions of either Mozilla employees or senior management, who are used to thinking of Mozilla as being on the cutting edge of web development. It would be a far step down from that to maintaining an aging browser code base in an attempt to sustain a relatively small revenue stream.

A more drastic approach would be to get out of the software development business entirely in a few years, liquidate the assets of the Mozilla Corporation and direct any remaining revenue into an endowment, and revert to being a pure nonprofit organization focused on Internet and web advocacy. I suspect such a conversion could be very complicated and time-consuming from a tax and legal perspective due to the money involved and the restrictions placed on how it can be moved around, but that’s why you hire lawyers and tax experts, to determine what’s possible and how to do it.

I consider this scenario even less likely than the previous possibility: senior management of the Mozilla Corporation seem very attached to the idea of software being a “force multiplier” for the Mozilla Foundation’s efforts, supplementing advocacy efforts by creating software that implements the public benefit ideals of the nonprofit.

Finally, a more “out there” possibility is leaning even more into the idea of being a “public interest R&D lab” for the Internet and the web, focusing on research activities primarily producing public goods, and looking for increased funding from foundations and governments as opposed to funding from corporations and end users. It’s certainly possible to build large nonprofit organizations this way, with billion dollar budgets and thousands of employees; see for example the Battelle Memorial Institute, the MITRE Corporation, and Howard County’s own Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

However the way that Battelle, MITRE, and APL got to be that big is by aggressively pursuing defense contracts. I doubt that Mozilla management or employees are interested in the Mozilla Corporation becoming a DoD contractor, and it’s unclear to me how much government or foundation funding Mozilla could attract as an R&D lab focused purely on civilian applications in the Internet and web space.

In the end it’s possible and perhaps most likely that the Mozilla Corporation will continue down its present path, trying a variety of new business opportunities without any of them being a runaway success, drawing upon a steadily declining revenue stream, and slowly contracting the organization over time. In ten years it’s possible that the Mozilla Corporation may be just a memory, with the Mozilla Foundation surviving as a modestly-funded advocacy organization.

And, honestly, there are worse fates than that. The Mozilla Corporation has existed now for fifteen years, the Mozilla Foundation for seventeen, and the overall Mozilla project for over twenty. Mozilla as a whole has done many great things, greater than many organizations much bigger in size and public awareness. Even if it were to close up shop tomorrow, like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC its place in history would be secure.

For further exploration

The most recent State of Mozilla report gives an overview of the Mozilla organizations’ activities and finances. The 2019 report should be out later this year. The report is released concurrently with the release of the Mozilla Foundation IRS Form 990, i.e., its tax return, and the Foundation always requests an extension and files its tax return in November. Thus we won’t know the true impact of Mozilla’s current financial woes until late 2021.

Incidentally, doing a Twitter search on ”Mozilla” gives a good feel for public perception of Mozilla among technologists, but unfortunately most of the people commenting have no real idea what they’re talking about.

Like other registered voters in Howard County, I recently received my postal ballot for the 2020 presidential primary. Some of the decisions I have to make are easy (yes, I’ll vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee for President) while others are hard (gee, there are a lot of Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives, and I have no idea who most of them are). And then there’s the question of who I should vote for in the Howard County Board of Education election.

In recent days there have been posts on the Board of Education race by Jenny Solpietro and Jason Booms, both progressive Democrats, commenting directly or indirectly on the lack of BoE candidates in District 5 that match their own political views. If you’re a progressive Democrat in District 5 then presumably no one you like will end up representing you on the BoE. This is reminiscent of past complaints by conservative Republicans living in (say) County Council District 2 that there was little to no chance of their being represented by someone who shared their own views.

These complaints support my firm opinion that electing Board of Education members (or County Council members) by district makes no sense. Why, do you ask?

First, it causes the problem we see in the current Board of Education race and past County Council races: if your views are at odds with the majority of people in your district, you don’t have a realistic chance of electing someone who reflects your views.

Second, in my opinion electing members by district does not do a very good job of what it was originally justified as doing, namely giving people more of a say in what happens in their “local” schools, i.e., schools in their part of the county. That’s because the district boundaries are arbitrary divisions.

For example, in past times the boundary line between District 1 and District 5 ran down the middle of the street in front of my house. If someone moved across the street to a different Board of Education district, would their concerns as a voter, a taxpayer, and a current or future parent of school-age children change in any significant way?

No, because they’d still be Howard County residents and taxpayers, and they’d still be dealing with a county-wide school system with a single budget, curriculum, and set of policies. The schools that their children attended (or would attend in future) probably also wouldn’t change, since the Board of Education districts are based on County Council districts and don’t necessarily have any relation at all to how HCPSS draws its own district boundaries.

Third, electing BoE members by district ignores the other ways in which voters might differ in their interests, beyond just the part of the county they happen to live in. For example, suppose that you have an interest in seeing more advanced math and science classes, or more funding for arts programs, or increased choices for vocational education, or you have concerns about disorderly classroom environments, or want more attention paid to issues around social justice and equity, or in general have strong opinions concerning any of a host of other issues that might arise in running a large public school system.

Electing members by districts may do little or nothing to ensure that your views are represented on the Board of Education: while there may be a lot of people across the county who share your views, there may be few like-minded individuals within the district you happen to live in.

So, what would be a better approach? The first step would be to abandon election by districts as a well intentioned approach that unfortunately does not address the true problems of representing the views of a diverse county population, and go back to electing all Board of Education members on a county-wide basis. (Under the current scheme only two at-large members are elected county-wide.)

But we can’t stop there. Using the traditional way of electing Board of Education members has its own set of problems. If we simply count the votes for each candidate and elect the five (or seven, or whatever) people with the most number of votes, then we run the risk of having minority views not be represented at all:

If 51% of voters think one way, and 49% of voters another way, the 51% of voters will vote for their preferred candidates and the 49% will vote for their (different) candidates. The result will be that the 51% of voters will get all of their candidates elected, and the other 49% will have no one on the Board of Education representing their views.

(Incidentally, the roles of the majority and the minority can vary. In the past this approach of electing the top set of candidates was used in many US jurisdictions as a way to systematically suppress the votes of African Americans—who would always be a minority in a city- or county-wide election—and elect all-white city or county councils. As a different example, in Howard County in the 1970s electing county council members at large resulted in Democratic dominance of the council, with no Republicans at all elected to the council at one point.)

So what’s the alternative? The alternative is to combine county-wide election of Board of Education members with a voting scheme that better takes into account the full range of voters’ interests, by allowing them to rank candidates in order of preference. I’ve previously written about this “ranked choice” scheme in the context of Howard County Council elections, proposing it to the Charter Review Board and then addressing various follow-up questions about it.

I want to particularly focus on how ranked choice voting can actually do a better job of providing “local” representation on the Board of Education than election by districts:

Suppose you live in (say) Elkridge and think that that area of the county has been neglected by the Board of Education and the Howard County Public School System. Even though in the scheme I’ve proposed the candidates would be running county-wide, nothing would prevent a candidate from running as the “champion of northeast Howard”. This candidate could then be elected as follows:

First, people living in that area could designate that candidate as their first preference. Note that in doing so it wouldn’t matter exactly where these voters live: there would be no artificial district boundary dividing Elkridge from Ellicott City, for example, such if you live just on the Ellicott City side of the boundary line then you don’t get to vote for the “northeast Howard candidate”. This increases the size of the voter pool that the candidate can attract votes from.

Second, it’s possible that other people elsewhere in Howard County might think that northeast Howard needs more attention by the BoE, even if they don’t see it as the most important issue. Those people could vote for the candidate that best represents their own perceived interests, designating them as their first preference, and still vote for the “northeast Howard candidate” as their second preference. If enough people do so, that candidate could be elected even if the number of their supporters in Elkridge or Savage might not be enough to get them elected just on “first preference” votes.

What about the concern that parents wouldn’t know who on the Board of Education to contact if they had concerns about their local schools? That’s easily solved: just have the Board of Education itself assign members to different parts of the county, to serve as the official liasons to parents and students in those areas.

BoE members would naturally nominate themselves to serve those areas that are their natural constituencies, as in the “champion of northeast Howard” example above. And because the Board of Education would be doing this assignment as a matter of board procedure, and not in strict accordance with state law, it could assign members to areas that would be as closely aligned as possible to the actual school catchment areas, and not have to go back to the Maryland legislature in the event that those boundary lines change.

What about the concern that it would be more expensive to campaign county-wide, and that election by districts makes it easier for “local” candidates to run in their own districts without having to raise a lot of money? I think what we are seeing now is at odds with that ideal: since the number of voters in each district is relatively small, and the turnout for a primary is going to be relatively low, it’s possible for wealthy donors inside or (as Julia McCready has complained) outside a district to have an outsized influence in that district’s election.

I’ll close by noting that even though the Board of Education elections have in the eyes of many become more politicized and partisan, adopting a county-wide ranked choice voting scheme for the BoE or County Council should not be a point of partisan contention. In the context of this year’s Board of Education election ranked choice voting would help progressive Democrats who live in western Howard. In the context of the 2022 County Council election ranked choice voting would help conservative Republicans who live in eastern Howard.

That’s because ranked choice voting is designed to better reflect voters’ preferences in general, and to do a better job of ensuring that preferences held only by a minority of voters can nonetheless lead to those voters having representation on elected bodies like the Board of Education or County Council. Who will be in the minority will vary by time, place, and the issues involved, so ranked choice voting offers something for everyone regardless of their particular political views.

Further exploration

For more on this topic see the following:

• “Analysis of Scott E’s D5 BOE Debate”. Jenny Solpietro bemoans the lack of progressive candidates in District 5.
• “Contemplations on the Board of Education Races”. Jason Booms reviews the 2020 Board of Education races and states that he will not be commenting on the District 5 candidates.
• “Here’s the Context”. Julia McCready’s thoughts about the new dynamics of Board of Education races.
• “A better way to elect the Howard County Council” and “Ranked choice voting questions and answers” contain more of my thoughts on ranked choice voting in the context of Howard COunty.
• “Bill proposes to elect Howard school board members by district,” a 2015 Baltimore Sun article by Amanda Yeager and Lisa Philip, discusses the early stages of the effort to elect Board of Education members by districts. The justification was that “constituents . . . are confused about where to turn when they have a question for the board.”
• “Howard school board bill moves forward,” a 2017 Baltimore Sun article by Amanda Yeager, contains quotes from several local politicians for and against the move to elect Board of Education members by district.
• “Howard County Board of Education primary election features new district format, vote-by-mail ballots,” a current Baltimore Sun article by Jacob Calvin Meyer, discusses the new scheme for electing the Board of Education.

tl;dr: I answer questions about ranked choice voting raised by the Howard County Charter Review Commission and others.

I was able to make it to the Howard County Charter Review Commission’s public hearing last night and request that the commission recommend the adoption of ranked choice voting for the Howard County Council, with all members elected county-wide. (See my prior post for a copy of my testimony.)

The members of the commission had various questions about ranked choice voting, as did people on Facebook when I posted a link to my testimony. My answers were off-the-cuff and could be improved in many cases, while one answer (to a question about examples of ranked choice voting in Maryland) was outright incorrect.

Here’s the complete list of questions along with my improved answers.

Wouldn’t this make running for Howard County Council more expensive, since candidates would have to campaign county-wide?

I think running under a ranked choice voting election could be somewhat more expensive, but I think this fear is overblown.

The key point is that running in a ranked choice election for one of five or seven council seats is not like running for county executive. In the county executive race a candidate must aim for more than 50% of the vote, but in a ranked choice election a candidate need only get more than 16.7% (for a five member council) or 12.5% (for a seven person council) of the vote.

That means a candidate could (and should) concentrate expensive and/or time-intensive activities like canvassing or direct mail on their natural base of voters, which might be concentrated in a particular geographical area or based on shared interests. The rest of the voters could be addressed through less expensive means, for example using social media.

If county council members no longer have districts, how would a person know which council member to call for constituent services?

I’m not really the person to ask about this. The people to ask about this are Liz Bobo, Ed Cochran, C. Vernon Gray, Lloyd Knowles, or Ginny Thomas, all of whom were elected to the Howard County Council during a time when council members were elected at large, before council districts were adopted in 1984.

But if you ask me, I’d answer as follows: Even though council members would be elected county-wide, they’d still likely have natural constituencies, based on the area of the county in which they live, particular interest groups they represent, and so on. For example, someone living in Ellicott City concerned about, say, Route 40 development would likely contact whichever council member happened to live in Ellicott City and seemed interested in that issue.

Since there would be no districts, it wouldn’t be possible for redistricting to split up those natural constituencies. If you find a particular council member is responsive to your concerns, you can continue to treat them as “your council member” for as long as they serve. And if that council member ceased to be responsive you’d have the choice of several others to ask instead.

Question: What about retaining council districts and electing members for each district using ranked choice voting?

Answer: This is a perfectly possible scheme to implement, and in fact is implemented in at least one nearby jurisdiction (see below). The technical term for it is “single winner ranked choice voting” or “instant runoff voting”. Voters express their preferences among candidates as before, but only a single winner is chosen.

One problem with single winner ranked choice voting is that it makes sense only if there’s more than two candidates. With two candidates the counting of votes works just like a regular election: whoever has the most first preference votes wins, with the voters’ second preferences not mattering.

So how do we get more than two candidates? There are two possibilities (which are not mutually exclusive). The first is that the two major parties continue to put forward one candidate apiece, but those two candidates are joined by additional candidates who represent smaller parties or who are running as independents.

With ranked choice voting, voters unhappy with the two major parties are free to express their displeasure by giving their first preference votes to someone other than a major party candidate. Their votes would not be wasted, since if their favored candidate doesn’t win their second preferences can help elect someone else, such as the major party candidate they consider the lesser of evils.

Another possibility is that the two major parties put forth multiple candidates of their own, for example, as a substitute for their traditional primaries. Alternatively, they could retain the current primaries but let two or three winners advance to the general election rather than just one. This might help when it’s not clear which of the candidates is more suited for general election success.

However, using single winner ranked choice voting by district does not help with the problem of ensuring that minority groups are represented on the county council. Only if members of such groups were concentrated in one or two districts would they have enough critical mass to help get their favored candidates elected.

What about keeping the five council districts as is, with election by district as done today, and adding two at-large council members elected county-wide?

If the at-large elections were conducted as they usually are, this would almost certainly just result in adding two Democratic council members to the council.

Each party would nominate two candidates for the at-large seats. Given that Democrats have a significant edge in both party registration and votes county-wide (based on the 2018 election), and given that most people (even supposedly unaffiliated voters) would likely vote a straight party ticket, the two Democratic candidates would almost certainly end up with the most votes and be elected.

We know this because this is exactly what happened on a larger scale during the period when Howard County elected all five council members at large. During that era Republicans had more than one member on the county council only once, at a time when Democrats and Republicans were more evenly matched in voting strength than they are today. In 1974 the effect was so pronounced that all five Democratic council candidates were elected and Republicans had no member on the council.

What about using ranked choice voting for the two at-large seats? This would almost certainly always lead to one Democrat and one Republican being elected at-large. In a ranked choice election with two candidates, a candidate can be elected if just around 33.4% of voters select them as their first preference. It’s a simple matter of arithmetic: if two candidates each get 33.4% of first preference votes, or 66.8% between them, the best that any other candidate can do is to get 33.2% of first preference votes and come in third. The first two candidates would then be elected to the two seats.

Given the number of Republican voters in the county and past voting patterns for county council elections (see below), if the Republican party ran a single candidate then that candidate would likely clear the bar of getting 33.4% of first preferences. The same is true of the Democratic party. The two parties would then split the seats between each other.

If ranked choice voting were implemented with a seven-member council and county-wide elections, what would be the likely split between Democratic and Republican council members?

If there were no other parties were involved, my best guess is that we’d see at least two Republicans on the county council (i.e., a 5–2 split), and possibly three (a 4–3 split).

The math again is fairly simple: Using a similar argument as above, with ranked choice voting for a seven-member council a candidate would win if they got just over 12.5% of the first preference votes (100% divided by 8).

In the 2018 election Republican candidates for county council collectively got 43,772 votes out of a total of 136,524 votes in all county council races combined, or about 32%. However, there was no Republican candidate in District 3; if there had been one then the total vote for Republican county council candidates might have been a few points higher, say around 36–38%.

If Republicans ran two candidates in a ranked choice election for seven council seats, and the two GOP candidates each got an equal number of first preference votes, a 32% share of the total vote would translate into 16% of the first preference votes for each candidate, more than the 12.5% needed to get elected.

Could three Republicans win election to a seven-member county council with ranked choice voting? It’s possible, but it would be tight: With three candidates and an equal share of first preference votes, the three candidates collectively would have to get more than 37.5% of the vote (3 times 12.5%), significantly more than the 32% GOP share in the 2018 council election.

However, even if there were not enough first preference votes to elect three Republicans it’s possible that a third Republican might be elected if they could secure a fair number of second preference votes from voters who selected Democratic candidates for their first preferences. The type of candidate best positioned to do this would be a moderate Republican who appealed to many Democrats, for example someone like Allan Kittleman.

Is any jurisdiction in Maryland currently using ranked choice voting?

I answered “no” to this during the hearing, but I was wrong. It turns out that the city of Takoma Park has been using ranked choice voting since 2006 for both its mayoral elections and elections to its city council. All of these are single winner ranked choice (“instant runoff”) elections. Six members of the city council are elected by ward, and the mayor is elected at-large.

Takoma Park’s experience is not fully applicable to Howard County, for at least two reasons. First, Takoma Park does not use a multiple winner ranked choice system like I’ve been discussing above. Second, the total number of votes cast is relatively small. This makes it feasible to count the votes by hand, something that would be relatively time-consuming in Howard County.

However the use of ranked choice voting in Takoma Park does indicate that the concept is not foreign to Maryland, and it seems to be both well-understood and popular among voters in the city.

Would the Maryland legislature have to pass special legislation in order for Howard County to use ranked choice voting?

I’m not a lawyer and can’t give a definitive opinion on this. However to my knowledge the only restriction imposed by the Constitution of Maryland on Howard County is as follows:

The charter for the government of any county governed by the provisions of this Article may provide for the election of members of the county council by the voters of councilmanic districts therein established, or by the voters of the entire county, or by a combination of these methods of election. (Article XI-A, Section 3A.)

A ranked choice election conducted on a county-wide basis would appear to satisfy this requirement.

That’s all the questions I can remember. If you have further questions please feel free to ping me on Facebook or Twitter (@hecker).

For further exploration

For more information on ranked choice voting in Takoma Park, see the following:

• “Instant runoff voting in action in Takoma Park”. A description of how single winner ranked choice voting worked in a 2012 special election in Takoma Park Ward 5.
• “Frequently Asked questions about instant runoff voting”. How the Takoma Park city government explains single winner ranked choice voting to city residents.
• “Takoma Park Municipal Code, Section 606, Election of Mayor and Councilmembers”. The section of the Takoma Park municipal code outlining the “instant runoff” procedure for voting for the mayor and members of the city council.
• “City of Takoma Park, Maryland, Ward 5 Special Election, January 30, 2007 Ballot”. Sample ballot explaining to Takoma Park voters how to use the single winner ranked choice system.

Numbers for Republican vote share in the 2018 county council elections are from the official 2018 gubernatorial election results for Howard County. See also my 2012 post “How to win an STV election for Howard County Council, part 1” for an example of how a ranked choice election might have played out based on the 2010 election results.

Finally, Section 3A of Article XI-A of the Constitution of Maryland appears to be the governing language on how Maryland charter counties (like Howard) can conduct council elections.

tl;dr: Tweaking the council redistricting process is the wrong solution. Ranked choice voting is the right one.

I’ve been preoccupied with other things and missed the fact that the Howard County Charter Review Commission is having its last public hearing tonight. James Howard, one of the commission members, recently published a preview of the commission’s recommendations.

The primary recommendation is to increase the size of the Howard County Council from five members to seven, presumably to reflect the increased population since the first Howard County Charter was adopted in 1968. I support this recommendation.

A second set of recommendations is tweak the process of redrawing council district lines, apparently in an effort to make the process less partisan. While these recommendations are worthy in and of themselves, I think they miss the point in terms of reforming the way the Howard County Council is elected. I think a better approach would be to ditch the entire council district system.

Here’s a statement I wrote to give in public testimony before the Charter Review Commission. Since it’s too late to submit written testimony by email, and I may not be able to get to the last public hearing tonight, I’m publishing it here in case anyone else wants to use it. (I’ve timed the statement to make sure it comes in under three minutes, the limit for individuals proving testimony.)

As I understand it, the Charter Review Commission is likely to recommend increasing the Howard County Council from five members to seven. However, I would like to go on record as asking the commission to consider recommending an alternative approach: to get rid of council districts, and instead elect council members on a county-wide basis using ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank the various candidates in order of their preference.

I also understand that the commission is likely to make other recommendations to improve the process of council redistricting. But beyond the time-consuming and contentious task of drawing new district lines, electing council members by districts has an inherent flaw that cannot be remedied: Suppose you are a voter who is a member of a minority group spread relatively evenly across the county, whether that be a minority ethnic or racial group, a minority political party, or a minority interest group of any type. Your chances of having a council member representing your group are low, because your group is not likely to be a majority in any individual council district.

But in a ranked choice county-wide election your vote will count again: With a seven-member council, if your group makes up at least 10-15% of the voting population you have a good chance of electing at least one council member sympathetic to your interests. If your group makes up at least 20% of voters, that chance becomes almost a certainty.

As documented by FairVote (fairvote.org), the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center (rankedchoicevoting.org), and others, ranked-choice voting schemes do a much better job of electing candidates who reflect voters’ true preferences. They help to preserve the voting power of minority populations, by ensuring that their votes are not wasted: even if their most preferred candidate loses, their second, third, and other preferences can help elect other suitable candidates.

When implemented using properly designed ballots, ranked choice voting is both simple for voters to understand and compatible with optical scan systems like those used in Howard County. The actual tabulation of results can be carried out either by computer or, if desired, by hand, for example in a recount of paper ballots.

Ranked choice voting has been successfully implemented in a number of US jurisdictions, including at the state, city, and county level. In particular, I recommend for the commission’s consideration the charter language and detailed voting rules implemented by the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for elections to its nine-member City Council and six-member School Committee.

Like Cambridge, Howard County prides itself on its high-tech economy and educated population. It deserves no less than a modern voting system that helps ensure that the Howard County Council reflects as much as possible the rich diversity of Howard County and the true preferences of Howard County voters. Thank you.

For further exploration

For more information on and arguments for ranked choice voting, see the following:

• Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. “The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center provides a compilation of best practices and first-hand experiences from jurisdictions that have used this method of voting.” The people behind it have deep experience as election administrators.
• FairVote. More activist in nature, “FairVote is a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice, and a representative democracy that works for all Americans.”
• Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. Argues that the current two-party duopoly is driving political polarization and gridlock, and that the only way to fix it is by moving to ranked choice voting.

For more information on other local jurisdictions considering ranked choice voting, see the following news stories:

• “Group pursues ‘ranked-choice’ voting for San Diego city elections”. An initiative in San Diego, California.
• “Portland voters will decide whether to expand ranked-choice voting”. An initiative in Portland, Maine.
• “Vancouver eyes ranked-choice voting system”. An initiative in Vancouver, Washington.

For more information on how Howard County came to have council districts in the first place, see my book, Dividing Howard. For more details on how ranked choice voting might work in Howard County, see my series, “Electing a council that reflects Howard County”. (Those posts, written eight years ago, use the older term “proportional representation” used in other countries. The term “ranked choice voting” is what is used now in the US.)

UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.

Some thoughts on the Iowa caucuses vs. the Irish general election.

There’s a saying in the world of information technology: fast, cheap, or good, pick any two. It captures the inherent trade-off between the desire for a solution that provides high performance and/or rapid response times, that’s doesn’t cost a lot of money, and that actually does what it’s supposed to do without errors or failures.

This saying applies in other areas as well, including elections. We saw this most recently in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, which devolved into a spectacular mess of non-working apps, jammed phone lines, voter confusion, and misinformation (and sometimes disinformation) propagated by media pundits, politicians, and activists all vying to declare definitive results as soon as possible.

The Iowa caucuses involved a mere 176,000 people, comparable to the number of people who turn out in a local Howard County election. Across the Atlantic ocean this weekend there’s an election involving an order of magnitude more voters. If past experience is any indication, while the election results may be surprising (see my next post) the actual process of getting to those results will be reassuringly boring.

I’m referring to the general election in Ireland—or the Republic of Ireland, to distinguish it from Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. The election is to select representatives to the Dáil (pronounced “doyle”), the lower house of the Irish parliament (comparable to the House of Commons in the UK).

To take the “good” aspect first: the Irish voting system does a good job of producing results that reflect what voters actually want, and is pretty simple for voters to use: voters fill out a single ballot sheet listing all the candidates for the (multiple) Dáil seats in their particular constituency. They then put numbers beside the names of each of their favored candidates, ranking them in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Then they turn in their ballot. That’s it.

(Incidentally, the Iowa caucus rules are also designed to also reflect voter preferences among multiple candidates, but they don’t do as good a job, and are much more complicated for voters to understand and follow.)

As implied above, Irish elections do not use any sort of electronic voting equipment. This reduces capital expenses for elections and removes the possibility of voting machines or other computer-based systems being hacked. This checks both the “cheap” and “good” boxes.

So, what about the “fast” box? Recall the catch: “pick any two.” Voting in the 2020 Irish general election was yesterday, Saturday, February 8. However, the final results of that election are not likely to be known until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest.

Why so long? Because by making the voting system more likely to reflect voters’ preferences, simple for voters to use, not needing electronic equipment, and not vulnerable to hacking, the vote count itself becomes a very people- and time-intensive process. Greatly simplified, it goes something like this (see this “dummy’s guide to election count” for a more detailed explanation):

After collecting paper ballots and storing them securely overnight, the next morning election workers open the ballot boxes in the presence of political party representatives (as shown above). The vote counters sort the ballot papers by voters’ first preferences: one pile for ballots noting candidate A as “number 1,” a second pile for ballots noting candidate B as “number 1,” and so on. They then count the number of first preference votes for each candidate and the total number of votes.

Based on the number of seats, the total number of votes, and the vote shares for each candidate, it’s possible that one or more candidates receive more than enough first-preference votes to be elected without further ado (i.e., “they exceed the quota on the first count”). If so, their excess votes (more than were needed to elect them) are distributed to other candidates who were indicated as the second preferences of voters voting for the just-elected candidate(s). A second count then occurs in which one of the remaining candidates now has enough votes or (failing that) the candidate receiving the fewest votes is eliminated.

This process of electing or eliminating candidates, followed by transferring votes to the remaining candidates based on voter preferences, continues until candidates are elected to fill all open seats. This typically requires several counts, each of which (again) requires manually inspecting the ballot papers. If the counting isn’t finished by the end of the day then everyone goes home and resumes the process the next day.

Americans, or at least American media, are notoriously impatient and desirous of instant gratification. Americans are also addicted to technology almost for technology’s sake, so that each new shiny thing that comes along (touch screens! the Internet! blockchain!) is hailed as the solution for voting that will truly and finally deliver on “fast,” “cheap,” and “good” all at once.

There are also many people with a vested interest in the current winner-take-all US electoral system, starting with the politicians and activists of the two major political parties. Thus it’s difficult to see the US ever adopting the Irish voting system or anything similar to it, at least at the national level. And indeed if this ever does happen I suspect it will not be until a generation or two has passed, and resistance to the idea is overwhelmed by ongoing political conflicts that motivate peoples’ desire for fundamental changes to the American political and electoral system.

But whether it comes soon or not for a generation or two, I think the US would be well served to look to change its way of electing candidates to better match the way it’s done in Ireland. It’s possible that with appropriate electronic assistance it can be done in a way that’s quicker than typical Irish experience (though of course not without bringing some risk into the system).

Some US cities and states are now experimenting with a form of the Irish system, under the names “ranked-choice voting” or (when a single position is being filled) “instant-runoff voting.” For some thoughts on why this nascent movement is on net a good thing for the US, see my next post.

I don’t usually post articles commenting on what my fellow Howard County bloggers write. However I’m more likely to jump into the fray when important points need to be clarified—all the more so when I myself haven’t done a good job of being clear in my own blog posts.

The topic today is the oft-repeated claim that Howard County has a shortage of 5,000 (or 5,500) affordable housing units, and in particular the post “The High Cost of Affordable Housing” by the pseudonymous blogger “Shaykh.” In this post they write,

The current refrain of the far left is that Howard County “needs more affordable housing,” making claims such as “we have a shortage of 5,500 affordable housing units.” Why is there a shortage? Where are these 5,500 families that are without housing? Are they living in a tent city like we now see out in Seattle?

Shaykh then goes on to speculate:

If each of these 5,500 affordable housing units sees an average of 2.5 persons, that would equal 13,750 more residents, or a 4.3% population increase over the current 321,000 residents. This is more than 3.5 times higher than the current growth rate of 1.2%. . . . If each of these 5,500 affordable units has an average of 1.5 children (I feel this is a reasonable guess), that would mean 8,250 more children in HCPSS, a 14% increase of the roughly 58,000 students currently enrolled.

First, to nitpick: I think the number 5,500 should actually be 5,000, if (as I think) the source of this estimate is ultimately the the 2018 Howard County Rental Survey commissioned by the Howard County Housing Commission. If so, this is not Shaykh’s fault, as various politicians and activists have used the 5,500 number in their public statements.

More fundamentally, the estimate of 5,000 “missing” affordable units does not mean that there are 5,000 Howard County households who are homeless, or 5,000 households living elsewhere who would like to move to Howard County but cannot. Instead it is an estimate of the number of households already renting housing in Howard County who are paying more for rent than is considered “affordable.”

I already posted about how this estimate was derived, but looking back on that post I’ve concluded that I didn’t do a very good job of explaining things. So, I’ll try again:

The 5,000 estimate is based on a comparison to a theoretical ideal: If the housing market were a totally free market and if there were no factors artificially inflating the price of housing, then we would presumably see developers and landlords offering a range of housing options priced to be suitable for households in each and every income range, just as we do with other types of consumer goods. (Just as, for example, with clothing we see the free market offering options ranging from buying low-priced outfits at TJ Maxx to buying haute couture from Christian Dior.)

At the time the 2018 Howard County Rental Survey was produced, there were an estimated 9,545 households with household income of less than $50K who were living and renting in Howard County. To put this in context, at the time of the survey there were an estimated 116,711 households in Howard County, of which an estimated 32,358 households were renting. (See page 17 of the survey, Table 10, “Renter Household Characteristics.”) These lower-income households thus make up about 8% of all Howard County households, and about 29% of renting households.

So, if the housing market in Howard County were a totally free market and if there were no factors artificially inflating the price of housing in Howard County, then we would expect to see these 9,545 lower-income Howard County households renting units that were priced roughly in line with the incomes these households have.

However at the time of the survey there were only 4,486 rental units in Howard County that were considered to be “affordable” to those 9,545 lower-income households, with “affordability” based on the (somewhat arbitrary) guideline that a household should spend no more than 30% of its income on housing. The difference of 5,059 (9,545 minus 4,486), rounded off to 5,000, is then considered to be the amount by which Howard County falls short in terms of providing affordable housing.

So this has nothing whatsoever to do with enticing thirteen thousand poor people to move to Howard County, or adding eight thousand more FARM students to Howard County public schools. Those people are already living here, and their children are already attending school here. They’re just paying more than 30% of their household income for their rental housing.

As for how to make housing more affordable in Howard County, Shaykh’s position is that the best solution lies in making the housing market more of a free market, for example by loosening zoning restrictions. I agree with this, and said so in my previous post.

The fundamental problem with government policy on housing is summed up by the economist Arnold Kling as “restricting supply then subsidizing demand.” On the one hand, zoning regulations and other government-imposed restrictions (e.g., APFO regulations) result in less housing built than would otherwise be built in a totally free market, reducing the supply of housing and driving up its price.

Government then seeks to offset the impact of increased housing prices through various direct and indirect subsidies, including things like Section 8 vouchers (which attract the most attention and controversy) but also including providing tax credits for developers building affordable housing and allowing homeowners to take tax deductions for mortgage interest and real estate taxes.

These subsidies not only divert government spending from arguably more useful purposes (like improving transportation infrastructure), they also have the effect of increasing the demand for housing beyond what it would have been in the absence of the subsidies. This then further drives up the already high housing prices caused by the restricted supply of housing.

From this point of view the way to address the issue of housing affordability is not to create more “affordable housing,” it’s to build more housing, period.

After writing something I almost always think of things I wanted to say but didn’t have the time or space for. So it was with my last post touching on housing affordability issues in Howard County. Here are a couple of random follow-up comments,:

School redistricting and housing affordability

I have for the most part stayed out of directly commenting on the current controversy on school redistricting in Howard County. My family is not directly affected by it since we don’t have a child in the public school system, and I didn’t have the time or inclination to do the sort of in-depth research I normally feel is necessary before I make public comments on my blog or elsewhere.

However I did at least obliquely comment on the issue in my post “Moving to opportunity in Howard County.” To recap briefly, I suspect supporters of the superintendent’s proposed redistricting plan are likely over optimistic as to how much of a real difference the plan would actually make in the lives of students, especially students already in high school. (I think one could make a stronger case for redistricting at the elementary school level.) At the same time I definitely believe opponents of the plan downplay the extent to which the current situation is the result of deliberate government “social engineering” that has the effect of isolating lower-income households geographically and discouraging their living in Howard County.

Some people claim that rather than redistricting the school system we should be instead focusing on issues of housing affordability, making sure that lower-income households are able to live in any part of the county and take advantages of the schools in those areas. That’s a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold, and I look forward to seeing these people work to build political support for concrete proposals to do just that.

The “no public transit” argument against affordable housing

Still on the topic of affordable housing, Tom Coale (who is variously an attorney representing developers, a progressive activist, and co-host of the Elevate Maryland podcast), recently tweeted, “Time after time, inadequate public transportation is used as an excuse to reject affordable [housing] projects,” and claimed that “The median income in certain parts of Maryland is high enough that those eligible for affordable housing, based on percentage of median [income], make enough to own a car, but not enough to pay for housing.”

As it happened, that tied in nicely with the analysis I had been doing on new vehicle sales, and so I tweeted in response. To expand a bit on my comment:

The median new vehicle price is around $35,000, and according to the affordability criterion I used (the vehicle price should be no more than 50% of pre-tax income) such a median vehicle should be affordable to a household making $70,000 a year. Although such an income is above the US median income of approximately $62,000 a year, it is well below the Howard County median income of almost $120,000 a year, and so it’s quite possible such a household would have difficulty affording housing in the county.

If we turn to households making between $25,000 and $50,000, they should be able to afford a single vehicle worth $12,000 to $25,000, used or even new. They could even probably afford two high-mileage used vehicles. But, again, they would almost certainly have problems affording housing in Howard County.

The result is that, as Coales tweeted, “There is no record of people being ‘stranded’ because we built affordable housing without a bus route.” As he also pointed out, housing affordability is a problem across the state, even in areas where people absolutely need a vehicle to get around, and presumably are able to afford one one way or the other.

That’s it for follow-up for today, though I may have some additional comments later.

UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.

tl;dr: The story behind the claim that Howard County needs 5,000 more affordable units.

If you’ve been following Howard County matters you’ve probably heard someone claim that there’s a shortage of over 5,000 (sometimes 5,500) affordable housing units in the county. Have you ever wondered where that number came from? What it means? How it was calculated? If so, I am here to (I hope) shed some light on these questions.

To answer the first question, this estimate is from the 2018 Howard County Rental Survey commissioned by the Howard County Housing Commission. (Thanks go to Tom Coale of the Elevate Maryland podcast for indirectly providing me this clue.) More specifically, it’s from pages 81–82 of that document, which is worth quoting at length:

There are 1,250 multifamily subsidized rental units and another 1,886 multifamily rental units that are rent-restricted. Additionally, Howard County administers approximately 1,350 tenant-based Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) of which 800 are county vouchers and 550 are Port-In vouchers from other jurisdictions. Assuming the unlikely scenario that no vouchers are used at tax credit communities, a combined 4,486 units are available to support the 9,545 low to moderate-income renter households in the county, leaving a gap of over 5,000 units, which provides a context for the county’s HCV waiting list of a comparable length.

So there you go. This appears to be the definitive number that’s bandied about (although I’ve also seen the number 5,500 used a couple of times): 1,250 plus 1,886 plus 1,350 adds up to 4,486 (affordable rental units), and 9,545 (households) minus 4,486 equals 5,059, the size of the claimed gap. (I’m not sure where the number 5,500 comes from. It may just be someone misremembering the report’s conclusion.)

Two additional points: First, the figure of 9,545 low to moderate-income renter households is from Table 11 on page 19, and comes from adding 2,524, 1,870, and 5,151, the numbers of rental households earning less than $15,000, between $15,000 and $25,000, and between $25,000 and $50,000 respectively. (In comparison, the number of rental households earning more than $50,000 is 22,813.)

Second, the 5,000 figure is buried in the conclusion of the housing survey analysis, not highlighted in the introductory summary. If you didn’t have the patience to read through the previous 80+ pages of very number-heavy text you would have missed it. That’s pretty casual treatment for a number that’s since received so much attention from politicians and activists.

You can stop reading here if you want to. But if you’re interested in exploring more of the story, including the “penetration rate” analysis discussed in the rental survey and whether or not the market for housing looks like the market for other goods and services, read on.

Let’s start with this graph, Figure 12 on page 80 of the survey, part of section D, “Penetration Rate Analysis.” (It’s also duplicated on page viii of the Executive Summary.) To quote from the beginning of that section,

By dividing the number of units in a specific affordability classification by the number of renter households that can afford or qualify for a unit at that price point, the penetration rate can tell us the extent to which renter households at particular income bands are adequately served by the existing supply.

For example, according to the graph, there are few “low rent” units targeting families earning 50-60% of the area median income, relative to the number of such families. In contrast, there are lots of “moderate rent” units targeting families earning 60-80% of the area median income, again relative to the number of such families. The former income range is said to have a low penetration rate (under-supplied), and the latter income range to have a high penetration rate (over-supplied).

(The survey divides Howard County into multiple sections and presents penetration rates for each one. Also, the “area” in “area median income” refers to the general Baltimore metropolitan area, not to Howard County specifically. Thus a household making less than 60% of the area median income actually makes significantly less than that compared to the Howard County median household income.)

There are several factors and assumptions associated with this analysis. Let’s explore this a bit more, moving from housing to other goods and services. As I see it, the penetration rate analysis used in this survey and elsewhere rests on one fact—that households vary in their income—and two assumptions: that in a free market profit-seeking businesses (but not necessarily the same businesses) will produce goods affordable to all households no matter their income range, and that in a free market the supply of goods targeted to households of a particular income range should at least roughly match the number of households in that income range.

Clearly households have a wide range of household incomes, as shown by the graph above, which displays the percentage of US households that have household incomes in certain ranges. (The definitions of the various income ranges are from the US Census Bureau, and reference household income before taxes.) As for the potential market for goods and services targeted to lower-income households, almost half of all US households have household income of less than $60,000 (the US median household income is about $62,000), and based on the graph it looks as if 20-25% of households have incomes of less than $30,000.

These are fairly large markets, and in a market economy it seems as if some businesses somewhere would find profitable ways to serve them. In the case of products like clothing that’s exactly what happens: we see retailers like Ross and TJ Maxx coexist with retailers targeting middle-income and upper-income households, like Macy’s, Nordstroms, Saks Fifth Avenue, and so on. All these are in turn supported by a global apparel industry capable of producing clothing at a wide range of price points, including relatively low ones.

The result is that households of all income ranges are reasonably adequately served by the products offered in the clothing market. Lower-income households might not be able to spend a lot on clothes, but there’s a reason we don’t see headlines about the “clothing affordability crisis.”

However we shouldn’t necessarily expect to see an exact matching of clothing of different prices to households of different incomes—that lower-income households buy only cheap clothes and upper-income households buy only expensive clothes. Some lower-income people want or need to present a more fashionable appearance, and will stretch their budget to do so. At the other end of the income scale, higher-income individuals do not typically spend every day dressed in haute couture.

The result is that a penetration rate analysis for clothing would likely not show 100% penetration rates across all income ranges, even in a completely free market. Instead we should expect to see higher penetration rates in the middle income ranges, and lower penetration rates at the extremes: relatively more mid-price clothing will be sold because there are lower-income households dressing up and higher-income households dressing down.

Let’s turn to a penetration rate analysis for another important class of goods, namely cars and light trucks. I was able to find the number of new vehicles sold for each model in 2017 along with price ranges for each model for the 2019 model year, and combined those to produce the graph above, which shows the percentages of vehicles sold that are targeted to each of the income ranges in the previous graph.

In creating this graph I had to make two key assumptions. The first was how to account for sales of vehicles where there was a large difference between the minimum price and maximum price. I tried to distribute sales for a given model across the price range in a reasonable manner, accounting for the fact that relatively few buyers purchase either the lowest price base model or the most expensive “loaded” model. See the full penetration rate analysis for details.

The other assumption, which also comes up in the penetration analysis in the rental survey, is how to decide what income range a particular vehicle is targeted at based on its price. Put another way, how do we measure vehicle affordability? After looking at various recommendations of the form “how much should I pay for a car”, I decided to use the following criterion: a new vehicle is affordable to a given household if its price does not exceed 50% of the household’s before tax income. Thus, for example, a household with an income of $60,000 should be able to afford a vehicle costing $30,000.

Put another way, given a vehicle offered for sale at a given price, a household’s income must be at least twice that price in order to afford the vehicle under this criterion. As it turns out, the typical (mean/median) price for new vehicles is around $35,000, so under this criterion we’d consider a typical vehicle to be targeted to households making around $70,000 a year before tax.

Combining the previous graph with the graph on the number of households in each income range produces the graph above, which shows the new vehicle penetration rates for each income range.

There are several points worth making about this graph. First, the details of the graph are obviously dependent on the assumptions made about vehicle affordability. If the criterion for affordability, i.e., a vehicle price no more than 50% of household income, were changed then the penetration rates for the various income groups would also change.

However the overall shape of the graph should remain the same, with under-penetration in the lowest and highest income ranges, and over-penetration in the middle income ranges. This general shape can be explained as follows:

In the higher-income ranges there are fewer vehicles sold than one might expect. For example, a household in the income range “$200,000 or more” should be able to afford a vehicle costing $100,000 or more, but relatively few such vehicles are sold (about a 25% penetration rate). This is probably due to two factors: 1) as with clothes, there’s an upper limit on how luxurious a vehicle a given household wants or needs, and 2) higher-income households almost certainly have multiple vehicles, for example buying two vehicles for $50,000 each instead of one vehicle for $100,000.

In the lower-income ranges there are also fewer vehicles sold than one might expect. Again this is likely due to two factors: 1) auto manufacturers find it difficult to sell truly low-cost vehicles in the US market, due both to government regulations and lack of market demand for small vehicles with limited or no amenities; and 2) some households buy vehicles that are more expensive than what they could supposedly afford, due to need (for example, a truck for work or an SUV to transport a large family) or simply the desire to have a nicer vehicle.

The flip-side of under-penetration in the lowest and highest household income ranges is then over-penetration in the middle income ranges: many more vehicles are sold into the middle part of the market than one might expect given the number of households in those income ranges.

What lessons, if any, does the market for cars and trucks have for the rental housing market?

At the top of the market truly expensive luxury apartments are as rare as exotic supercars, at least in Howard County. Just as wealthy families have the option of buying multiple lower-priced vehicles rather than one super-expensive vehicle, wealthy families in Howard have an alternative to renting expensive apartments, namely purchasing expensive single-family homes on large lots. For example, a household that could spend $5,000-6,000 or even more in monthly rent could just as easily purchase a house worth $1-2 million somewhere in west Howard.

(However, that’s not to say that there is no market at all for expensive apartments in Howard County: If listings at Apartments.com are any indication, there appears to be strong demand relative to supply for large 3-bedroom apartments at the Metropolitan development next to the Mall at Columbia. That demand will presumably be tested as more luxury apartment buildings open in downtown Columbia.)

The more interesting comparison in the context of affordable housing discussions is what happens at the lower ends of the vehicle and housing markets. There are at least three possible approaches to serve lower-income households looking for transportation services:

The first is for manufacturers to make and sell lower-priced new vehicles. For an example of what’s possible, a typical model of the manufactured-in-India Maruti Suzuki Alto hatchback sells for the equivalent of about $5,000 in that country, two to three times less than the Nissan Versa, apparently the lowest-price car currently available in the US market. Based on the affordability guideline above, such a vehicle would be affordable to a household with annual income of $10,000.

However, US and state government standards for vehicle safety, emissions, etc., make new vehicles more expensive than they otherwise might be. Government decisions also distort the new vehicle market in other ways: Relatively low taxes on gasoline in effect subsidize the sales of larger more expensive vehicles, while land use and highway construction policies that encourage sprawl also discourage the use of smaller under-powered vehicles like the Alto that are more suited to city driving.

The result is that lower-income households wanting a personal vehicle turn to the used vehicle market, where they can pay lower prices in exchange for accepting a vehicle with perhaps significant wear and tear. (As a comparison, a quick spot check of Howard County used vehicle dealers finds the lowest-price options are in the $6,000-$8,000 range, all vehicles with over 100,000 miles. A quick check of craigslist.org finds several vehicles in the $3,000-$6,000 range, typically with even higher mileage.)

Finally, lower-income households who can’t afford personal vehicles rely primarily on public transit, which in a Howard County context means buses.

The perceived housing equivalent of public transit is public housing for which renters are directly subsidized, for example, the relatively new Monarch Mills development in Columbia or the renovated Forest Ridge apartments (shown above, left), also in Columbia. Such housing is often stigmatized (e.g. as “the projects”) and in suburbs like Howard County new public housing construction is typically strenuously opposed by nearby homeowners.

The housing equivalent of used vehicles are older apartments (or, in some cases, single-family houses) that have deteriorated to the point where they can no longer command typical market rents—what in extreme cases is pejoratively called “slum housing.” However, unlike vehicles, which have no real value once they reach a certain point of decay, deteriorated apartment complexes have an intrinsic value due to land and location. In an economically vibrant area like Howard County they will likely be replaced with new construction or heavily renovated, at which point they will no longer be affordable to their former tenants.

Finally, the housing equivalent of low-priced new vehicles is low-priced new (or renovated) housing designed to be profitable for its developers with at most indirect subsidization (for example, housing for which the developer gets tax credits, analogous to the tax credits provided for electric vehicles). Profitability here depends on at least two factors:

First, developers may incur certain costs directly as a result of government laws and regulations. For example, requirements to go through an extended legal process for approvals (e.g., the 16-step process required for development in downtown Columbia) impose direct costs on developers as well as indirect costs, for example to fight legal action by development opponents or to gain their assent by paying for community amenities or reducing the scope of a project.

Second, government action (or inaction) distorts the market in various ways that make it more difficult to profitably offer lower-priced housing. For example, zoning regulations that allow only single-family homes, or government’s declining to offer water and sewer service in certain areas, reduce the ability of developers to offer lower-priced multi-unit housing in areas that otherwise might be a good fit for it.

So, what’s the take away from all this? First, the claims about Howard County needing 5,000 more affordable housing units need to be understood in the context of the assumptions behind this number. Change the assumptions and the number will change. (For example, it would be smaller if we relax the criteria for affordability.)

Second, the penetration rate analysis used in conjunction with calculating this number itself has a major problem: it implicitly assumes that all income ranges should have a 100% penetration rate for a given type of good, and that any deviation from that figure indicates a problem. But as we saw from the example of the market for clothing, such deviations might just be the result of people’s preferences, relatively undistorted by any other factors.

However, the fundamental point remains: It is possible for markets in some goods to do a better job in serving lower-income households than they do. The market for clothing does a better job in serving lower-income households than the market for vehicles, and the market for vehicles does a better job in serving lower-income household than the market for housing.

There’s therefore a lot of opportunity to improve how the housing market works for lower-income households. Since government is to a large degree responsible for the problems in the housing market, government is equally accountable for addressing those problems.

As discussed above, this need not involve directly subsidizing lower-income households or the housing developments that serve them. There’s also ample scope for reducing the market distortions caused by government action (or, in some case, inaction) in the areas of planning and zoning, provision of essential services, school redistricting, and the like. Anyone who claims to care about housing affordability in Howard County needs to look at all the possible options on the table to make it possible for lower-income income households to lead productive lives as our fellow residents of the county.

That’s all for now. My apologies for the long delay in getting this post out. In addition to my usual work and family duties, I also now want to spend more time revising posts from this newsletter for publication on my main Civility and Truth website, plus I have other unrelated projects I want to work on. The upshot is that I will be posting here much less frequently than my already infrequent schedule. In the meantime, thank you again for your interest and attention.

UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.

“What do you think we need to do to elevate Maryland?” That’s the last question that co-hosts Candace Dodson Reed and Tom Coale typically ask their guests on the Elevate Maryland podcast. I’m not important enough to be invited on the show, but I can tell you what my answer would be: To “elevate” Maryland will require “elevating” Baltimore, because Baltimore’s success (or failure) will ultimately drive Maryland’s success (or failure).

A few days ago I had to go into Washington, DC, for business. As I drove in through northeast DC, I was struck by the newly-constructed and under-construction apartment buildings, the new stores along H Street (including a Whole Foods Market), and the new streetcar line that begins at Union Station and runs through this section of the city.

These are the physical manifestations of a meteoric rise in DC’s economic fortunes, as shown in the above graph that I created for an earlier post. In less than 25 years DC has gone from having median household income well below the national median to having close to (and in the latest statistics, exceeding) the median household income of Maryland, itself the state with the highest median household income.

DC’s good fortune has in turn maintained and lifted the economic fortunes of the various jurisdictions of northern Virginia, with Loudoun County pulling away from Howard County in terms of median household income, Stafford County advancing into a tie with Howard County, and Fairfax County continuing to outpace Montgomery County. (See another earlier post for details.)

The difference between Washington, DC, and Baltimore is that DC, like New York City or Los Angeles, is an “indispensable city.” As the center of national political power it will continue to attract attention, migration, and (as a consequence) investment from the rest of the country. Baltimore, like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh (to give but two nearby examples), is in no way indispensable. It is a regional center whose economic and other status ultimately depends only on the region that it serves. Put bluntly, if Maryland doesn’t care about Baltimore then no one else will either.

I’d add that Howard County isn’t an “indispensable county.” If Baltimore declines in its fortunes and that decline drags down its suburbs economically and otherwise, there’s always Loudoun County for people and/or companies to move to, or Fairfax, or Stafford, or Prince William, or any number of places far enough away so that Baltimore is just a place you might occasionally hear about on the evening news.

If elevating Maryland requires elevating Baltimore, then the question becomes “What do you think we need to do to elevate Baltimore?” I make no claim to being an expert, but I’ll go back to my earlier argument that the primary focus should be on reducing crime and improving policing. To repeat what I wrote previously:

Reducing crime is fundamental because ensuring the security of its citizens is the first and foremost task of any government. Improving policing is fundamental because we expect our governments to go about the task of ensuring citizens’ security in a way that embodies the ideals of a liberal democracy, as opposed to resembling the practices of a police state, an occupation force, or a paramilitary group.

No one should have to live in an environment marked by constant criminal violence. In addition to its effects on individuals, it has a corrosive affect on the neighborhoods and cities in which it occurs. Efforts to build communities and promote their economic development cannot be expected to succeed in the absence of adequate security for their inhabitants.

Let’s go back to my earlier comparison between Baltimore and Washington, DC. Young people and people who’ve recently moved here may not realize it, but there was a time when DC was seen as a city overwhelmed by violent crime. As shown in the graph above, in the early 1990s DC had a murder rate about twice that of Baltimore and well over ten times that of the nation as a whole.

Since then the DC murder rate has dropped to a level comparable to that of New York, a city heralded for its reductions in crime, while Baltimore’s murder rate has (in years not shown in the graph above) grown to a level higher than that in the early 1990s. (According to FBI statistics, in 2018 Baltimore had 309 murders in a population of 605,436, for a murder rate of just over 51 per 100,000 people.)

The murder rate is often seen as a reliable marker of the amount of crime in a city, murder being the crime that is least likely to go unreported. By this measure Baltimore is seen as a lawless city, almost (but not quite) as lawless as DC was during its worst days.

To rephrase the “elevate” question once again, “What do you think we need to do to reduce crime in Baltimore?” As I wrote above, I’m not an expert in this area, so I don’t have any detailed recommendations. I think it’s fairly clear what won’t work though, namely trying to wage a literal “war on crime.”

I’d rather look to principles of policing that are almost two hundred years old, laid down when the first professional police force in England, the Metropolitan Police of London, was established under the supervision of Conservative Home Secretary Robert Peel. (More recently “Peel’s principles” were popularized by William Bratton, former police chief of New York and Los Angeles. Bratton also for a time served as a consultant to the Baltimore police force, but I don’t know what influence he had, if any.)

The very first principle is that the goal of a police force is “to prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment [emphasis added].” In other words, there’s no “war” called for here.

The very next principle is that the police should “recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.” That gets into the topic of this section, and a focus of my earlier post:

How can police forces (and, by extension, those who oversee them), reduce the frequency with which police officer kill unarmed members of the general public, especially unarmed African Americans, and especially unarmed African American men? Just as the murder rate is a key indicator for the crime rate in general, the frequency of such killings serves as a indicator of general levels of police violence, brutality, and corruption.

Why is this reducing the number of people killed by police important? There are some people who point out that the chances of an unarmed African American man being killed by police are extremely low, and far less than being murdered by someone else. Based on my analysis, this claim is correct. But in my opinion that’s ultimately beside the point. The chances of an American being killed by radical Islamic terrorists are also extremely low (lower, in fact), yet since 9/11 the US has spent billions if not trillions of dollars in an effort to combat this threat.

The fact is that even a relatively low rate of police killing unarmed African Americans results in an almost weekly stream of such stories, and that in turn drives their perception of police and their willingness to cooperate in the attempts by police to reduce crime. To quote James Smith, the neighbor of Atatiana Jefferson whose concern for her safety resulted in a police officer shooting her in her home: “They tell you if you see something, say something . . . but if it causes someone to lose their life, it makes you not want to do that.”

Or as the third principle of policing puts it, the police should “recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.” The number of police officers is very small in comparison to the population at large. If the people affected by crime fear cooperating with police then “securing observance of laws” becomes a difficult if not impossible task.

So now we come to the next question, “What do you think we need to do to reduce killings of unarmed people, especially African American people, by police?” Again, being no expert I will defer to others to make their case. One of the more interesting ones I found was in a Twitter thread by Samuel Sinyangwe, one of the Black Lives Matter activists who founded Campaign Zero. Both the goal and the approach of Campaign Zero are summarized on their website: “We can live in a world where the police don’t kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability [emphasis in the original].”

What I found interesting about Sinyangwe’s thread is that he is apparently willing to go where research leads him, including against some common notions about what will work. For example, although “body cams” are number 6 on the list of items highlighted on the Campaign Zero website (see the above graphic), Sinyangwe begins his thread by claiming that “the most discussed ‘solutions’ to police violence have no evidence of effectiveness. For example, Body cams don’t reduce police violence.”

This makes sense to me. For one thing, police can always turn them off. For another, many if not most situations in which police use deadly force are going to be difficult to judge in an unambiguous manner, and even after watching body cam videos prosecutors, judges, juries, and the general public alike are likely to give police the benefit of the doubt even in situations when they arguably do not deserve it.

Sinyangwe continues to debunk by-now-conventional wisdom in his second point: “There is no evidence that better police training programs or ‘implicit bias’ training changes police behavior.” Note that this contradicts item 7 on the nominal Campaign Zero list. In particular, the claimed ineffectiveness of implicit bias training, and by extension the claimed ineffectiveness of the “implicit association test” or IAT popular among employers and in other contexts, echoes a point I’ve seen made by others in a more general context: what really matters is not what people think and believe, it’s what the incentives are that drive their behavior.

Or to put it another way, if one takes the concept of “structural racism” seriously, then the emphasis should be on the “structural” rather than the “racism,” at least in the sense of racist attitudes that might be held by individual people, or in this case by individual police officers. We need to look at the broader set of conditions under which police operate, and change those conditions in a way that will promote changes in behavior.

The name “Campaign Zero” implies that the goal is to totally eliminate police killings of unarmed people. It’s certainly a laudable goal. Is it a realistic one? Or should we simply accept the current rate of killings as an inevitable accompaniment to police doing their job?

Rather than look to the policing situation in other countries, I thought it would be interesting to compare this to another challenge, namely reducing as much as possible commercial airplane crashes and the attendant loss of life. At one time flying commercial airlines was relatively dangerous—likely not as dangerous as driving a car (I haven’t looked up the statistics on this), but certainly air crashes were relatively frequently in the news.

However, as can be seen in the graph above from the Aviation Safety Network, the last forty years have seen a dramatic reduction in the rate of airline crashes, by about an order of magnitude. (The graph expresses this in terms of accidents per million flights. Since airplane crashes tend to happen on takeoff or landing, with accidents during the rest of the flight very uncommon, this is probably a better indicator than crashes per passenger-miles.)

This improvement was the result of a concerted and continuing focus on determining why air crashes occurred and then seeking to eliminate as much as possible the underlying root causes, whatever they might be. The campaign was carried out under the auspices of government agencies (including FAA, NASA, and the NTSB) with the cooperation of airlines, airplane manufacturers, and pilots and the pilots’ union.

We can imagine a similar officially-sponsored and supported campaign focused on driving to zero the number of police killings. However the two situations are different in the ways incentives are aligned (or not aligned, as the case may be).

For example, air crashes typically result in the deaths of both pilots and passengers, so pilots have just as much incentive to avoid crashes as passengers. However in police killings there is a conflict between officers’ desires to protect themselves from harm and the interests of those whom they encounter in preserving their own lives. Incenting officers to be less ready to resort to deadly force will be easier if other measures are seen to make policing less risky.

Airline pilots and police officers are also both unionized, and like other unions pilot and police unions are incented to put the private interests of their own members before the interests of others, including the general public. In the case of airline crashes the pilots’ union was and is concerned that pilots not be unfairly blamed for crashes in which pilot error, even if present, was but one factor among many in causing a crash. Similarly, police unions may be more or less resistant to measures to reduce police killings depending on the extent to which those measure focus on the immediate behavior of officers as opposed to larger organizational issues.

Finally, and perhaps most important, social, economic, and political elites had a major interest in improving air safety, since especially prior to cheap airfares they were much more likely to travel by air than typical people. However, from the perspectives of elites the killing by police of unarmed people is a problem that happens to someone else, and rarely if ever to them, and thus they have no direct interest in addressing it. Crime levels in general can affect them, but again they have ways of removing themselves from the problem, ways that are not available to ordinary people. Even political elites may not have a direct interest in solving the issue, if their electoral success doesn’t depend on addressing it.

So, to recap: I think the fate of Maryland is tied to the fate of Baltimore, the fate of Baltimore is tied to the success (or lack thereof) in reducing crime to levels comparable to those of cities like DC and New York, reducing crime in Baltimore will depend on policing that promotes cooperation in that portion of the public that has the most interactions with police, and that in turn requires addressing the problem of police killings and police violence in general.

While activists can promote new visions of how policing can be improved, as the Campaign Zero activists have done, in the end only elites, and in particular political elites—including those who populate the guest lists for the Elevate Maryland podcasts—are in a position to do what needs to be done to create an effective and responsible police force in Baltimore. Time will tell whether they are up to the task.

UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.

I’m back again with more population density maps, this time for Ellicott City—or, more precisely, the Ellicott City Census Designated Place or CDP.

The map above shows population density variations as of the 2010 census for the various census block groups that are wholly or mostly within the Ellicott City CDP. There are 34 such census block groups, compared to 54 census block groups for Columbia or 154 census block groups within the county, with Ellicott City thus accounting for about a fifth of Howard County. (The 2010 population of 64,245 for these census block groups is also almost a fifth of the county’s total 2010 population.)

The main take-away from the map above is that most of Ellicott City has pretty much the same population density: it has less multi-unit housing than Columbia, and fewer large lots with single-family homes than western Howard County. (The major exception is the area east of US 29 between US 40 and I-70, which contains a number of apartment complexes.)

This is confirmed by the histogram above, which shows the distribution of density among the various Ellicott City census block groups in 2010. Most of the CDP was between 1,000 to 4,000 people per square mile, with only two census block groups out of 34 having higher density. The overall population density for Ellicott City in 2010 was 2,234 people per square mile, about a third less than the overall population density for Columbia.

The next map shows changes in population density in Ellicott City between the 2010 census and the 2017 American Community Survey 5-year estimates (which reflect surveys done in 2013 through 2017). Even over this relatively short period we can see a significant decrease in density in the area between US 40 and I-70 west of Rogers Avenue (which includes a good chunk of Patapsco State Park).

There was also almost a doubling of population density in the area north of old Ellicott City and south of US 40. I don’t know if the latter is due to new development or to changes in household size. However it’s worth noting that based on the 2010 population density map compared to the map for 2013-2017 immediately above, that area was originally less densely populated than most of Ellicott City, and whatever changes occurred brought it up to a “typical” density for the area.