2019 PIANO/MO Thanks and General Discussion

[vinteuil]

Hi everyone! I hope you enjoyed playing PIANO and I look forward to hearing your feedback. Discuss away below!

We tried very hard to make this tournament "controlled" (length, difficulty) while still having it be very flavorful. Otherwise, there was no single guiding principle, since we had a huge variety of approaches and interests. I hope that the result was a diverse set with something for most everyone.

Now for the fun part! We had a big team, with a lot of people making a big impact on the set, so here's a gigantic list of thank-yous:

I don't want to bury the lede, so: the people I most want you to get excited about from this set are Wonyoung Jang, Michael Kearney, and Derek So.

Goddamn, can Kearney just write all the classics in quiz bowl from now on?

I want the Derekverse to get its own tournament at some point

• Michael's questions were fresh, conscientiously-clued from both scholarly and quizbowl perspectives, and had beautiful prose. Practically no edits needed. Since when do I like reading mythology questions??
• Derek's questions provide (for me at least) a wonderful proof-of-concept for "other history," and bring this refreshing sense of boundary-less knowledge to the other distributions as well.
• Wonyoung is not only a technically accomplished question writer (who rightly prides himself on an astounding ability to write a good question on most any topic very very quickly), but also full of great ideas and an incredible work ethic.

All three of these guys (especially Wonyoung) really stepped up, writing whatever needed to be written after they were done with their claims, constantly helping to (re-)edit, packetize, and proofread, and keeping things light with a great sense of humor. You'd be lucky to have any of them on your writing team.

Our other less-experienced writers, Michael Borecki and John Marvin, were also very receptive to feedback and produced some really great questions. John's knowledge of some areas poorly covered by QB to date can be quite valuable.

He's more of a known quantity, but don't sleep on Jason Golfinos! I have no idea where he's able to find hilarious leadins for all of his questions, but that place also is full of Real, Important facts and scholarship—an impressive balancing act. And when he's on, Jason can power your set production like the Energizer bunny.

Sam and Shan were not only patient with the way I handled the mirror situation, but also wrote deeply interesting and cool questions in every category. (Sam wrote all of the economics and I learned a ton—Shan is right when he says that Sam has a true gift for communicating concepts and why they might be interesting or important.)

You shouldn't be shocked to hear that Matt Jackson was a phenomenal steadying hand, source of ideas and feedback, and general presence; at one point, I offered him co-head-editor credit for the amount of direction he did while I was busy with BHSAT. Matt wrote all of the set's psychology as well as real-ass, witty questions all over the map.

You also already know that Adam Silverman is one of the best science writers and editors in the game. You may have heard this too, but it's worth reiterating: Adam is organized as all hell. He will get his stuff done early, polish it, help out around the set, keep polishing, and help out some more. It's unbelievable.

As I posted in the announcement, a huge thanks to Joey Goldman and Will H-M for stepping up to do first-eyes editing on philosophy and literature (respectively). They both pinch-hit a few questions and offered valuable feedback on others (especially Will). Stephen Eltinge and Adam Fine did similar work helping to polish the science and threw in a few questions of their own. And Moses Kitakule also helped fill in with a few great questions during crunch time.

Finally, because I like these kind of stats, you might be interested to know that I wrote the most questions for the set (17.5%), followed by Adam Silverman (17%), and then Matt, Derek, Jason, John, and Shan with around 10% each; Wonyoung and Michael's totals at around 5% each shouldn't mislead you, since their detailed reading, idea brainstorming, and editors-chat presence had a big impact all over the set.

[a bird]

I really enjoyed the science in this set. Here are a few questions and comments:

I thought the physics covered a lot of important topics, except for a lack of material from quantum mechanics courses (at least in the first 13 packets). The set included 1/1 classroom E&M; I thought this was great, and I think quantum deserves the same treatment.*

I liked the chem, but it seemed to skewed towards "organic chemistry bioengineers find useful." I didn't really mind this, buy I'm curious about the breakdown for subtopics within chemistry. I also enjoyed the chemical thermodynamics questions, which I assume were classified as chemistry.

I didn't do particularly well on the ecology, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. What fraction of the bio questions were ecology?

*The Helium atom is a good atomic physics topic, so it almost fills this role, but it's really quantum mechanics applied to chemistry. Similarly the DFT question was good, but it's about applying quantum mechanics to chemistry, materials science, etc. rather than a core part of the theory.

[adamsil]

I really enjoyed the science in this set. Here are a few questions and comments:

I thought the physics covered a lot of important topics, except for a lack of material from quantum mechanics courses (at least in the first 13 packets). The set included 1/1 classroom E&M; I thought this was great, and I think quantum deserves the same treatment.*

I liked the chem, but it seemed to skewed towards "organic chemistry bioengineers find useful." I didn't really mind this, buy I'm curious about the breakdown for subtopics within chemistry. I also enjoyed the chemical thermodynamics questions, which I assume were classified as chemistry.

I didn't do particularly well on the ecology, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. What fraction of the bio questions were ecology?

*The Helium atom is a good atomic physics topic, so it almost fills this role, but it's really quantum mechanics applied to chemistry. Similarly the DFT question was good, but it's about applying quantum mechanics to chemistry, materials science, etc. rather than a core part of the theory.

Thank you for your feedback and I'm glad you generally enjoyed the set. I largely agree with your points about subdistributions. Quantum was aimed to be 4/4, which I filled with Feynman (path integrals only), Ising, helium atoms, and Josephson junction tossups. In retrospect, I think that only the first of these really hit a pure "quantum" feel, since Ising is closer to stat mech, Josephson is close to emag, and the helium tossup kept drifting closer and closer to chemistry the longer I edited it. (DFT was considered "computational" chemistry).

Thermodynamics was split about half and half between chemistry and physics. In general, there was likely a bit too much thermo in the set, though it was a conscious decision to keep some of these lines blurry provided that chemical physics got represented by an equal number of questions as physical chemistry (same with biochemistry and chemical biology, which I classified as biology and chemistry respectively).

Besides that, I did deliberately keep the number of organic chemistry tossups low in this set. The ones that were in the set had a lot of chemical biology clues (alkynes, aldol condensations). There were no synthetic organic chemistry tossups in this set, and that was a conscious decision, made largely out of fatigue for how QB has asked synthetic organic chemistry in the past (i.e., pick functional group, list named reactions pulled from Wikipedia list). I wanted to introduce more inorganic subjects that have been less explored. (I did aim for the _acidity_ tossup to sneak in clues about physical and mechanistic organic chemistry which are relatively under-represented, though I do wonder how well it played in practice).

The original distribution for the chemistry was aimed at 2/2 inorganic, 3/3 organic, 3/3 physical, 3/3 analytical, and 4/4 other/practical (e.g., the tossups on elements and compounds). I am not sure this was perfectly maintained throughout as many questions wind up cross-disciplinary. I was lambasted for an organic-heavy distribution at CO a few years ago and I am happy to hear complaints that this is inappropriate too-- a public discussion of how science categories should be subdistributed could be very helpful, since right now it winds up almost exclusively an editor's prerogative.

There were 3/3 ecology questions in the set (the tossups were primary productivity, population size, fisheries), which I do strongly believe is the appropriate amount of a biology distribution to dedicate to a subject that generally receives short shrift in quizbowl but is extremely commonly studied academically. These are very difficult topics to write well, and Shan nailed them.

Edit: I also would greatly appreciate feedback from people on the increased amount of engineering content in the set's Other Science (2/2, subdivided one each for Chem/BioE, IE, MechE, and EE; NAND gates, 3D printing, microfluidics bonus, design of experiments bonus) as well as the general success of the large "applied math" distribution, which Shan, Jacob, and I all contributed to, largely at the expense of "pure math."

[Mnemosyne]

I enjoyed the tournament. Thanks everyone for writing it. Our team had four decent but not elite college players, and it seemed like we all powered things we knew well and didn't power the things we didn't know well. Hardly any tossups went dead (<1 per round), but we also played some really good opponents. Some of the hard parts of bonuses were crazy (multiple world theatre questions we were clueless about?), but that's expected at a tournament like this.

[CPiGuy]

I enjoyed this tournament, though I think it was harder than the intended difficulty, with the notable exception of the easy parts of bonuses. I think the editors could have made the easy parts of bonuses in general harder to distinguish between the lower end of the field more; as it stood, in my team's games against teams of similar skill, it felt like almost every bonus was 10'd.

Edit to add: this tournament felt like it had almost 1/1 econ per packet, which really, really sucked. I applaud expanding the social science distribution to 2/2, but you should use that to ask about other underasked social science like linguistics, of which i heard like 2/2 over 12 rounds, rather than just asking about lots of boring econ things (I might be biased by my general hatred of economics, but I really don't think there's enough there to justify giving it 1/1).

Thanks to the editors and writers!

[Carlos Be]

There were a few trends at this tournament that I thought I'd point out:

1. A lot of the world lit answer-lines were countries. There's nothing wrong with country tossups, but at a tournament as hard as this one it'd certainly have been possible to tossup a few world authors or works.

2. There were a good amount of "superlative" clues, by which I mean vague clues that are made unique by adding "the longest aqueduct" or "the oldest (whatever)" or "the most-painted subject." I find it incredibly difficult to buzz on these types of clues, since it is hard to confidently rule out the possibility that something I haven't heard of actually beats out the thing I know.

3. I never thought I'd say this, but traditional western painting seemed quite underrepresented in the distribution. While I love world art and insular art, surely there's room for basic Renaissance artists.

4. The literature seemed quite heavy on secondary sources, particularly "pure" secondary source clues that don't give any information at all about the text itself— things like "x translates this language", "y wrote a book on this author", "some random lancet article references the title of this play", etc. When it wasn't clueing secondary sources, I thought the lit clues were pretty interesting in general. In particular, the quote "I know what stillness is" struck me as a particularly good clue choice.

[Nabonidus]

"some random lancet article references the title of this play"

I can look at some of the other things later (after I finish studying for my midterm tomorrow) but that article is notable in this specific context because it introduced the concept of "gaslighting".

[CPiGuy]

I never thought I'd say this, but traditional western painting seemed quite underrepresented in the distribution. While I love world art and insular art, surely there's room for basic Renaissance artists.

My teammate, who was a painting player, observed this (and was not particularly happy about it).

Also -- I think I heard three math TUs in 12 rounds? it's disappointing to have not even got like 0.5/0.5 math.

[Sam]

EDIT: See Jacob's more concise post below.

[vinteuil]

Edit to add: this tournament felt like it had almost 1/1 econ per packet, which really, really sucked. I applaud expanding the social science distribution to 2/2

1/1 Economics and Psychology
...
1/1 Other religion and other social science

As in, exactly .5/.5 econ (and .5/.5 psych and .5/.5 other social science).

[Muriel Axon]

There were 3/3 ecology questions in the set (the tossups were primary productivity, population size, fisheries), which I do strongly believe is the appropriate amount of a biology distribution to dedicate to a subject that generally receives short shrift in quizbowl but is extremely commonly studied academically. These are very difficult topics to write well, and Shan nailed them.

(Thanks, Adam!) I'm not going to pre-emptively justify having 3/3 EEB (ecology / evolution / behavior) content, although I'll note that that number was decided by someone else! I want to expand a bit on subdistribution within this 3/3, just because it may be helpful for others who have to write EEB questions but don't know how to allocate the space. I chose to have:

• one population OR community ecology question (here: the competition bonus, which is core pop/comm material)
• one community OR ecosystem ecology question (here: the primary productivity TU, which is core ecosystem ecology)
• one microevolution, i.e. below the species level question (here: the population size TU, which draws entirely from population and quantitative genetics)
• one macroevolution, i.e. above the species level question (here: the bonus on the latitudinal diversity gradient, which includes macroevolution and macroecology)
• one behavior question (here: the bird reproduction bonus, which also draws heavily on life history theory)
• one wild card (here: the fisheries TU, which is kind of applied population ecology and is important enough that many large research universities have departments with 'fisheries' in the name)

The wild card slot may also be useful for incorporating organismal biology of a sort that doesn't belong elsewhere in the set. We tried to make sure a variety of organisms (vertebrates, invertebrates, plants/fungi, microbes) and approaches (physiology, remote sensing, modeling, etc.) were included. I don't think it's necessary to be as strict about these requirements, but one might want to avoid a situation where all EEB and EEB-adjacent questions are on large animals, or on plants.

The soil fertility bonus (in earth science), methane TU (in earth science), and the self-incompatibility bonus (in bio) also touch on EEB-type ideas in one way or another. In any case, I hope this helps anyone else who needs to fill out this oft-neglected part of the distribution.

[cwasims]

I thought the higher amounts of econ and psych in this set were really great. I appreciated that there were fewer social science questions that were "x author wrote a book about y aspect of this field" or similar, which I find really uninteresting, and that there were far more that rewarded real-world engagement with the subject matter.
The history was also very good - I enjoyed the slave trade tossup in particular. Although it wasn't all history, the extra CanCon in this set was very much appreciated by everyone at the Toronto mirror, I think.
I did find the Western fine arts (classical music and painting) a bit sparse, I have to say. I think if people really want to ask substantially more about world art, then arts should really get another 0.5/0.5 or so to cover those topics without unreasonably limiting the number on the core Western canon, which is what I imagine most QBers spend more of them time engaging with. At some level I really do find it a bit much to have 4 lit tossups per pack and certainly cover pretty much every era and genre in substantial depth throughout the set while only having quite a bare-bones Western art distribution that barely covers the major genres and eras after 9 packets.
Overall a great experience - thanks to the editors!
[Edited for clarity]

[vinteuil]

People posting about "core Western painting" here: are you not including tossups like Book of Kells and Pompeii? (i.e. topics covered in any reasonably thorough Western art survey. I obviously have a very strong opinion on this, so I might as well tip my hand here...)

EDIT: Also, Western "Classical" music was 11/9, making for almost 3/4 of the tossups and about 2/3 of the bonuses (plus 1/1 tiebreakers!). That seems perfectly reasonable to me given that opera and ballet were each asked about separately in addition.

[Abdon Ubidia]

Our team was pretty out of our league playing this set, but I just wanted to give my comments as someone less familiar with really hard quizbowl. A lot of categories seemed like they came up a lot, for example stuff like theology and Eastern thought seemed a bit overrepresented in the thought distribution and the 1 econ question per packet felt like a bit much. However, these questions were on the whole enjoyable to listen to even when we didn't know the answer, which was pretty crucial when lots of the questions go late. Especially for the literature, the questions were interesting to listen to and seemed to assert their own importances. Overall, I'd like to commend the writing and editing team on this set.

[Noble Rot]

Speaking as a reader rather than someone who played the set, I wanted to commend the editors on the way they split up longer molecule names and other difficult scienctific names/concepts - I hope that is a trend that future sets adopt, as it makes it much easier for readers who aren't as familiar with those kinds of words.

A small criticism, however, was that pronunciation guides seemed somewhat sparse (though I could be remembering wrong) and uneven in what was given a guide and what wasn't. Also, just a minor note, I noticed that minor grammatical errors (wrong words, repeated words, etc.) increased in the later packets compared to the earlier packets, but overall I still think this was a pretty readable set, which is great for something at this level of difficulty.

[vinteuil]

Also -- I think I heard three math TUs in 12 rounds? it's disappointing to have not even got like 0.5/0.5 math.

Has anybody ever done this amount for a non-high school set? I believe that in the past .5/.5 has been proposed as a theoretical upper bound. (We had 5/5 pure and applied math, of which I wrote the 3/3 pure math.)

[Bhagwan Shammbhagwan]

As another high schooler who played this set, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While it was extremely challenging, I still enjoyed hearing tossups on topics I've never even heard of.

People posting about "core Western painting" here: are you not including tossups like Book of Kells and Pompeii? (i.e. topics covered in any reasonably thorough Western art survey. I obviously have a very strong opinion on this, so I might as well tip my hand here...)

I think that people were more upset that there were less questions on traditional western painting when compared to other art forms (sculpture, film, other crafts). Since we only played seven rounds yesterday, this was probably more pronounced since most of the traditional paintings I found (Morris, Titian, camouflage, Pompeii, Kabuki actors, and others) ended up in the latter 8 packets while the first seven only had two traditional painting toss-ups (Delacroix and Bologna).

[ErikC]

I'll have to see the packets again to have a fully formed take on the history, but I thought most of it was a very interesting way to increase difficulty. The execution of these ideas also mostly worked out pretty well.

Something I noticed (which likely comes from the same writer working on most of one part of the distro) is that many topics were clued in very similar ways across the packets we played. It's hard to come up with examples without seeing the questions again, but it often felt like most history questions were approached from the same script of when to use archaeological/artifact clues before using more traditional quiz bowly clues. This isn't necessarily bad, but it did seem to favour a certain style of learning history over another. The American history, in comparison, was a bit less uniform, and I really liked how it engaged the history of different ethnic groups while avoiding the standard tropes that tend to make questions transparent.

I really appreciated the extra and very well-done ecology tossups, and the soc sci, besides one tossup, seemed to avoid most of the issues in narrowing in on a specific answerline that I've seen people point out before.

The fine arts were no surprise - fun world art topics, particularly the music, that had enough space to really cover lots of different places and cultures. I understand players that don't like this approach, but I think it's a really good step towards a better game.

[vinteuil]

As another high schooler who played this set, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While it was extremely challenging, I still enjoyed hearing tossups on topics I've never even heard of.

People posting about "core Western painting" here: are you not including tossups like Book of Kells and Pompeii? (i.e. topics covered in any reasonably thorough Western art survey. I obviously have a very strong opinion on this, so I might as well tip my hand here...)

I think that people were more upset that there were less questions on traditional western painting when compared to other art forms (sculpture, film, other crafts). Since we only played seven rounds yesterday, this was probably more pronounced since most of the traditional paintings I found (Morris, Titian, camouflage, Pompeii, Kabuki actors, and others) ended up in the latter 8 packets while the first seven only had two traditional painting toss-ups (Delacroix and Bologna).

This is a good point! (foiled again by packetization) We’ll rearrange things a bit.

[warum]

I agree with Erik - I really enjoyed the ecology questions and the balance among music questions between European classical and "world."

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

This set was probably my favorite that I've played this year, and it left me with a ton of things I'm excited to learn about, which is what sets should do. As mentioned in the intro post, Jason's history leadins (and questions in general) were consistently engaging, even when the material he was writing about is not traditionally written about terribly interestingly in quiz bowl (see: Battle of Pavia). This tournament's breaking of category boundaries, while it made it a bit difficult to track the distribution, was a highly refreshing trend that allowed questions about things that are frequently learned together but that QB distributions separate for no good reason (see: Cognitive). I did notice that there seemed to be quite a lot of "this material" (in art) and "this country" (in a lot of categories) answerlines, which there's nothing inherently wrong with, but which can be jarring to some players. Another general comment I had is that quite a lot of bonuses seemed to be very easy 20s and very, very difficult 30s, which may have been in this tournament's difficulty philosophy, but which in my opinion is not a great way of judging gradations of knowledge the way bonuses are supposed to do. Another issue one of my teammates noticed was that a few major myth systems (Finnic, Welsh) simply didn't come up (if questions about this are in packets or bonuses we didn't play, apologies in advance). The CE in this set seemed a bit too (North) American-focused to me, but again, I'm happy to be corrected on this if there are some questions on non-North American CE that I'm missing. My teammates and I felt that literature was consistently the best category in this set, so extra props to people who wrote that. To my mind, the inclusion of more Eastern philosophy and non-Western art were both long overdue and unambiguously positive developments. In general, this kind of exploration of what a set can be or do is best done without the stakes of a national tournament, but at nationals difficulty, so a pre-nats open is the best place to do it. I'll post more specific feedback once I have my notebook and some time to do so.

[vinteuil]

Another issue one of my teammates noticed was that a few major myth systems (Finnic, Welsh) simply didn't come up (if questions about this are in packets or bonuses we didn't play, apologies in advance).

Indeed, neither came up (although the Kalevala was namechecked as "fakelore"!). I think it's worth a discussion (perhaps not here) of how many European myth systems really have to come up in a given set; obviously, this set's writers have a particular set of beliefs about mythology questions in general, but we didn't feel the need to "represent" every minor tradition, even if it's a staple in quizbowl.

[John Ketzkorn]

While I thought this set was very interesting, and I commend all the writers for taking the time to help put together this novel-length set, I think there was far too many country and language tossups (not that they're inherently bad, but this felt lazy). I counted 18 non-history country and language tossups in the first 10 rounds. It became annoying to hear country tossups even when they were in history as a result of this.


The visual arts had some interesting ideas, but seemed to be bias towards pre-1900 art. Could I see the art sub-distribution or some info telling me I'm wrong on how much post-1900 visual art art there was?

[vinteuil]

While I thought this set was very interesting, and I commend all the writers for taking the time to help put together this novel-length set, I think there was far too many country and language tossups (not that they're inherently bad, but this felt lazy). I counted 18 non-history country and language tossups in the first 10 rounds. It became annoying to hear country tossups even when they were in history as a result of this.

As you pointed out in the other thread, some of these (though by no means all) were deliberately chosen to reduce the number of hard answerlines—e.g. Polish for Stanislaw Lem. Others were chosen because I find endless tossups on texts and authors (what could be "lazier"?) even more fatiguing than countries and languages.

The visual arts had some interesting ideas, but seemed to be bias towards pre-1900 art. Could I see the art sub-distribution or some info telling me I'm wrong on how much post-1900 visual art art there was?

It's hard to quantify the exact split, since many of our common links (wood, miniatures, "Morris") included some or mostly post-1900 material. Aside from those, the visual arts had tossups on flying lovers in Chagall and camouflage; you got bonuses on Josep Sert, Prouns, Norval Morisseau, Tarsila do Amaral, Julio Gonzalez, Ana Mendieta, and Palestinian art (plus material on Jasper Johns and New Yorker cartoons in the Egyptian art bonus). That's something like half (!) of the bonuses and a quarter of the tossups.

EDIT: I will, however, swap around some of the tossups so that we don't have three 20th-century art tossups in consecutive, later rounds!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I hereby announce the formation of the Lazy Literature Question Society, dedicated to the promotion of basic, in-depth tossups on single works and authors which a lot of people in the field have read. As I am thoroughly unqualified to head such an organization for a large number of reasons, we are currently searching for a president - please PM me to inquire.

[vinteuil]

I hereby announce the formation of the Lazy Literature Question Society, dedicated to the promotion of basic, in-depth tossups on single works and authors which a lot of people in the field have read. As I am thoroughly unqualified to head such an organization for a large number of reasons, we are currently searching for a president - please PM me to inquire.

Sounds like it should merge with the Society for Choosing to Ignore the Purposeful Distancing Intended by the Use of Scarequotes!

[excessive dismemberment]

This set was overall much more enjoyable than I expected. A lot of the questions were on really interesting subjects. I enjoyed the increase in world art content for what it's worth, but I also don't know much art in general so most of my views on art questions are just whether or not they sound cool.
I do have the same "complaint" as others that there seemed to be a *lot* of lit tossups on "this country" and others have worded that complaint better than I can.
I felt like a lot of the bonuses were easy to 10 and nearly impossible to 30. Part of that might be my team not being strong, but I think the stats show that this is fairly accurate.
Also, maybe I'm wrong, but it felt like no matter what team we were playing, most of the science questions went to nearly the end of the question. That is, even more than in other categories. Maybe that was a product of other teams playing against us (3 non-science players), but I think there's a bit more to it. The history also seemed a bit hard, and generally the literature seemed like it was easier than the history and science.
I would have liked to have heard more myth, and would be interested to know how many of the "religious texts, myth, and legends" actually went to myth, and how many were on "religious texts". I feel like religious texts are in some ways a very different category from myth.

[vinteuil]

I would have liked to have heard more myth, and would be interested to know how many of the "religious texts, myth, and legends" actually went to myth, and how many were on "religious texts". I feel like religious texts are in some ways a very different category from myth.

We ended up with .5/.5 on "legends," which included things like the "pillars" tossup (hagiography being a kind of mythology).

[csheep]

I enjoyed this tournament! We went 1-9 and generally put up some pretty mediocre stats, but I at least had a pretty good time in the process. I thought the questions were interesting and fair in the (limited) categories I'm familiar with (a narrow subdistribution of lit and music; "China stuff").

Primarily for literature: Contrary to some other sentiments, I liked the usage of secondary sources. I thought the placement was judicious and generally highlighted important aspects of the works in question, by placing them in context/connection to other works/the broader society. This could easily have been executed poorly if the secondary sources chosen felt random and disjointed, but this was not the case here. I strongly enjoyed the sprinkling of clues on translation/translators, since I experience the overwhelming majority of world literature via translation and think translation is a key, but often underestimated, part of the production and consumption of literature.

I also enjoyed what felt like a slightly higher percentage of "general knowledge"-type questions, as the answerlines chosen all felt like important real-world topics and the questions did a good job of highlighting said real-world importance.

The directed prompts were good. I'd caution against abusing directed prompts to make overly complicated answerlines. Nothing spring to mind here outside of the "duels" question - I was prompted on "duels" and did come up with swords, but would've felt a bit miffed had I gotten it wrong since that felt overly-specific as an answerline.

I'm surprised to learn econ was only .5/5. - it felt way closer to 1/1!

[The Story of a Head That Fell Off]

This was definitely one of my favorite sets this year alongside Sun God.

There feels like a noticeable amount of statistics, which is great because it does not get enough love and also keeps me on my toes - it was satisfying getting the R tossup based on things actually done in class. The world lit felt canonical but careful enough not to sound old and stale.

One thing I noticed, especially in the arts, is that as promised there is a lot of world art, which were fun to hear and play. However, outside of the world art distro, the art (esp. visual) seems to have been less uniform in distribution of geography and time period. We only played the first ten packets, so that it may be that the packet randomization unfortunately made it seem unbalanced, but I feel like I heard very little British/American or contemporary/modern visual arts, and a lot of pre-1900s European art (both painters that we heard were Delacroix and Caillebotte, which while drastically different were are still both pretty famous 1800s French painters).

And I might be mistaken, or it might be an unfortunate result of randomization, but I remember literally zero photography questions from the 10 packets we played.

This has been a very challenging but still fun set, and thank you all for working so hard on it.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

Kudos to ASil for his work on the science. The clue selection, difficulty selection, and creativity were excellent throughout the set (there were multiple tossups where my immediate response was "man that was a fucking great idea")

I would also like to praise the tournament for for strictly tossing up answerlines easier than Stanislaw Lem, no exceptions. I must praise the many tossups I heard where I thought "oh thank goodness this individual author was easier than Stanislaw Lem" for otherwise I may have fainted

[vinteuil]

And I might be mistaken, or it might be an unfortunate result of randomization, but I remember literally zero photography questions from the 10 packets we played.

This is my single biggest regret from this tournament—a bad mistake that I thought I'd put something in the answerline spreadsheet to prevent!

[touchpack]

The science in this tournament was really excellent--best I've played since Crime for sure, thanks to Adam and everyone else involved for putting this on. When I'm less tired I'll make another post elaborating about some of the things I think the tournament did exceptionally well.

[Panayot Hitov]

I greatly enjoyed this tournament. Specifically, I found the religion to be really, really good. I'm guessing this was John Marvin, mostly, so thanks, John! Your world music was also very, very good. Super interesting questions, and a great job breaking out of the prison of the canon that the subjects unvalued by quizbowl get so often put in. Speaking of which, the film was generally pretty good - I really loved the "O'Neill" film tossup. The history was awesome as well- I really liked Jason's questions, especially the one on dockworkers.

[Wartortullian]

Agreeing with Billy here. I thought a lot of science did a good job of rewarding real knowledge and challenging a very strong field while still remaining accessible. I'll make a full post on physics and associated things tomorrow night.

In general, I felt this was an excellent set, and I'd like to applaud the writers for coming up with interesting and creative content in pretty much every part of the distro. I'd also like to thank the staff at the UMN site for putting on a well-run and extremely fun tournament.

[Mike Bentley]

Another issue one of my teammates noticed was that a few major myth systems (Finnic, Welsh) simply didn't come up (if questions about this are in packets or bonuses we didn't play, apologies in advance).

Indeed, neither came up (although the Kalevala was namechecked as "fakelore"!). I think it's worth a discussion (perhaps not here) of how many European myth systems really have to come up in a given set; obviously, this set's writers have a particular set of beliefs about mythology questions in general, but we didn't feel the need to "represent" every minor tradition, even if it's a staple in quizbowl.

I agree that these myth systems have traditionally been over-represented in quizbowl. I'd be okay not hearing another Finnish myth tossup for another 10 years. I strongly support the trend of moving away from mythology as it was once written belief as outlined in this and some other recent tournaments.

Overall, I really liked this set. If you told me ahead of time (which you probably did but I didn't pay close attention to the announcement) that there'd be a lot more world and ancient art I probably wouldn't be very excited. But I thought it was well-executed and I was able to buzz on several things I hadn't heard come up too often in quizbowl.

I also generally like the general knowledge and current events in this tournament. I'd need to go back and check for specifics, but there was relatively little "here's some funny things a politician said on Twitter" or "here's a list of political parties in a foreign country" and much more about, how, say FEMA is discriminating against poor people.

[ryanrosenberg]

I really enjoyed this set. The history/thought/other ac was very interesting and broadened the scope of what you might ask about in a given category in a well-done way. I think both this tournament and Spartan Housewrite should be taken as an indication that adventurous editors can pull off distributional changes that liven up a tournament without sacrificing playability or academic rigor.

[theMoMA]

In contrast to some of the people above, much of this set just didn't land with me. Coming into this tournament, I was well aware of the fact that the countries of the world each have a unique literature, geography, artistic culture, and religious tradition. I was well aware of the fact that cities and languages too were connected to these cultural features in meaningful ways. Leaving this tournament, I was just as aware of these facts as before, despite the presence of several questions in each round to serve as reminders. Many of these questions were interesting, and I'd say some were even inspired. I would have gladly played those, and half again as many others, and not registered a complaint. But there were so many, and many of them were so similar in structure, that I didn't come away thinking that the tournament had found a successful way to ask about fairly difficult material in an interesting and new way. Instead, I found myself thinking that the editors had decided to find pretty good clues to fill up a well-worn question structure (a list of mostly unrelated things residing within a top-level category that point uniquely to one language or country) as a way to avoid connecting difficult material in a meaningful way to something other than geography.

I'll take Jakob Burckhardt as an example. Say, as a writer, you come across a very juicy and interesting Burckhardt clue. You start to think of the ways that you could work that clue into a tossup. You might think of a historical or intellectual narrative or conversation into which the clue slots, such as the Renaissance, the European tradition of art history, historical writing about a particular artist or city or country, etc. You might consider the other things that Burckhardt did, perhaps before, after, or during the events that the clue entails, which might provide context for why the clue is interesting or important. Or you might think, "Who is another historian who happened to have lived within the same arbitrary map lines as Jakob Burckhardt?" I think the former approach tends to produce more interesting questions, because it showcases your juicy clues and situates them so that players can connect them meaningfully to other material in a way that is often fun and memorable. By contrast, putting your best clues alongside clues related only by geography doesn't connect your clue to anything other than the fact that in Switzerland, as in every other country, some people grow up to become historians. There is nothing unfair about making people identify a group of disparate Swiss people as Swiss, of course; all I'm saying is that it doesn't do much for me.

At this tournament, I found myself wishing for more of the questions in the vein of "dockworkers" and "shipping containers" and "labor supply"; appreciating the tossups on interesting themes and trends that happened to have countries or languages as their answers, such as the question on tensions in Fiji or Muslims in the United States; and dutifully awaiting each round's tossup on the fact that yet another country indeed has had various significant religious scholars or artists within its borders. Given the care with which the writers and editors of this tournament selected its clues, I wish they would have presented those clues in a more interesting way, and not relied so much on bundling them together with arbitrary geographic ties.

[vinteuil]

I'll take Jakob Burckhardt as an example. Say, as a writer, you come across a very juicy and interesting Burckhardt clue. You start to think of the ways that you could work that clue into a tossup. You might think of a historical or intellectual narrative or conversation into which the clue slots, such as the Renaissance, the European tradition of art history, historical writing about a particular artist or city or country, etc. You might consider the other things that Burckhardt did, perhaps before, after, or during the events that the clue entails, which might provide context for why the clue is interesting or important. Or you might think, "Who is another historian who happened to have lived within the same arbitrary map lines as Jakob Burckhardt?" I think the former approach tends to produce more interesting questions, because it showcases your juicy clues and situates them so that players can connect them meaningfully to other material in a way that is often fun and memorable. By contrast, putting your best clues alongside clues related only by geography doesn't connect your clue to anything other than the fact that in Switzerland, as in every other country, some people grow up to become historians. There is nothing unfair about making people identify a group of disparate Swiss people as Swiss, of course; all I'm saying is that it doesn't do much for me.

But what if you have interesting clues on both St. Gall and Burckhardt lying around

(This post is very well-taken, and I appreciate the detailed analysis!)

[ErikC]

I'm going to go at-bat for this set here.

I think Andrew makes a fine argument when he calls that Switzerland tossup less unified then the Muslims-in-the-US tossup, which I'm pretty sure everyone liked. But I think its both a value judgement to say that its better to be unified like that and debatable whether "Swiss historians" are not a theme itself.

From a gameplay prespective, many times the questions that people praise rightfully for being an interesting new perspective on something can also be hard to tackle at game time for the other people playing the question. This is almost never an issue when you're saying "this country", but tossing up "the creation of the world" for the first time is going to throw off a few people. For less experienced players playing a truly hard tournament for the first time, tossups that require less "figuring out" really help (I remember doing better on "this country" when I first started playing).

Map lines are hardly arbitrary, as well. I think that's a bad argument against connecting several things in a tossup like Swiss historians. Outside of perhaps science, every discipline is influenced by the culture one grows up in (do you think people studying American history outside of the U.S. are going to have the same experience?). These two historians being Swiss is not an arbitrary link at all.

I think the desire for novelty can come from playing for so long. Tossups with novelty can be hard, or transparent, or flawed in another way that makes the set less enjoyable. I think PIANO had the right amount of great answerlines (handaxes) with safer ones that still required good knowledge and introduced me to new things (time to learn some art historians!).

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

For this particular example (Notker the Stammerer and Jacob Burckhardt in the same question), Andrew strikes me as being more correct. These are people who lived nearly a millennium apart, one of whom (Notker) is not terribly notably Swiss; it's difficult to speak of a separately Swiss culture in an era when it and all of its neighboring countries were Carolingian territories. Getting from knowing the question is talking about Notker to knowing the answer, a process that should be as simple as possible, requires a) knowing that he was nicknamed "the Monk of St. Gall" and b) knowing that St. Gall is in Switzerland, neither of which can be taken for granted enough for name-dropping him to be an effective clue. I thought the question was well-calibrated for difficulty, but two people being from what is now the same country does not necessarily mean they're from a unified culture or that that fact is meaningful (it sometimes, if not usually, is! Just not in this case).

[theMoMA]

Erik is correct to say that I'm merely offering a value judgment. With a few exceptions, the only persistent one of which was certain questions like the "masks" tossup that seemed pretty obviously to be driving straight at the answer from the get go, I thought this was an admirable set from a technical standpoint that reflected, as I said, the obvious care with which its writers and editors picked their clues. Even in the most rote of the country common links, I never had the sense that the writers simply went to the "history of Benin" Wikipedia page and arranged a few of the blue-linked names by their apparent significance; it was clear that the writers either had an existing interest in the country in question, or had taken the time to learn what might be significant about it. The clues also had the classic Reedian feel of being well researched and grounded in scholarship, and while I might appreciate seeing a bit more departure from that approach on stylistic grounds at times, as man cannot live on monographs alone, I think it is a very successful way to write questions that reward study of things beyond the quizbowl archive.

My criticism was more an attempt to intervene in the discourse before too many people get in their heads that a large chunk of a tournament's humanities should be on the broad subject of history, religion, arts, or literature in a particular country. I freely admit that the reason for this intervention is because I don't enjoy hearing large chunks of these questions, because they're not to my taste for the reasons I explained. And to clarify, it's not that I don't countenance them at all, but that I thought that there were too many of them here.

Moving along to Erik's second avenue of response, I think he has a point when he says that geography is more important than I credited. Perhaps in my haste to characterize these questions I didn't fully expound on a positive theory of what makes a successful question. My sense is that the best questions ask about topics that are important and interesting for the reasons that they are important and interesting.

I recall a few years ago that there was a literature tournament that had several questions on letters, with clues in the vein of "one author whose last name started with this letter." There was absolutely nothing wrong with these questions from a technical standpoint; anyone who is familiar enough with a work to identify its author can also identify the letter that author's name starts with, and the writers of that tournament did a good job making sure that the clues were arranged in proper order. But I didn't enjoy playing them because the content of the clues seemed entirely divorced from the structure of the question in a way that seemed jarringly arbitrary and did not speak to the reasons for finding those authors interesting or important. Those questions make me think something along the lines of "you're trying to tell me this is an important author, and yet the only concept you can connect her to is the letter 'J'??"

If, by contrast, a trash writer decided to write a tossup on people whose first names started with 'K', and it turned out the reason that they were doing so was to highlight the fact that Roger Clemens gauchely gave all his kids 'K' names because he was a big strikeout guy, and the question was well executed and not transparent, I would be delighted. The clues and the answer in that hypothetical question would not be arbitrary, but would reflect the reasons that the letter 'K', which is usually just as dull as any other letter, was funny in this context.

To bring this back around to Nottker and Burckhardt, if the fact of their Swissness is important, then I think the reasons for that importance should feature in the question. If their Swissness is not important enough to feature, then surely there is some more interesting way of presenting the material.

(I admit again that this is not a question of technical soundness or fairness; there is nothing unfair about asking someone to know where St. Gall is, even if the clue is about a resident who lived there long before Switzerland was a country, so long as the clue is specific enough to pick out Switzerland from among other possible answers; and there is nothing technically unsound about requiring a player to know what modern-day country Nottker was from, even if that requires a few steps of reasoning as Jakob has set out above, so long as you account for the ease or difficulty of doing so and place the clue accordingly and disambiguate as necessary.)

[Ike]

I recall a few years ago that there was a literature tournament that had several questions on letters, with clues in the vein of "one author whose last name started with this letter." There was absolutely nothing wrong with these questions from a technical standpoint; anyone who is familiar enough with a work to identify its author can also identify the letter that author's name starts with, and the writers of that tournament did a good job making sure that the clues were arranged in proper order. But I didn't enjoy playing them because the content of the clues seemed entirely divorced from the structure of the question in a way that seemed jarringly arbitrary and did not speak to the reasons for finding those authors interesting or important. Those questions make me think something along the lines of "you're trying to tell me this is an important author, and yet the only concept you can connect her to is the letter 'J'??"

If, by contrast, a trash writer decided to write a tossup on people whose first names started with 'K', and it turned out the reason that they were doing so was to highlight the fact that Roger Clemens gauchely gave all his kids 'K' names because he was a big strikeout guy, and the question was well executed and not transparent, I would be delighted. The clues and the answer in that hypothetical question would not be arbitrary, but would reflect the reasons that the letter 'K', which is usually just as dull as any other letter, was funny in this context.

I agree with this point. I read through a lot of the set and I agree with Andrew Hart's criticism. I think a lot of the clues in PIANO were very good, I found them personally I exciting, and I would have loved playing the set. But contra Andrew Hart, I think some of his criticisms of the set could be leveled against playability.

One example would be the tossup on wood. The leadin discusses Michael Baxandall's book The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, but it references an argument about the "period eye" and client-artist relationship that Baxandall introduced and developed in another book and adapts for his book -- so I would have probably negged with "paint" since the book that introduced the concept is ~Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy~. Of course, I could have posted in the errata or question specific discussion thread about this tossup, but I think it highlights a trend in this tournament, which is that several of the clues in tossups felt like they were written from a "I have chosen an answerline, let's try to graft these clues onto the structure of the tossup" approach. As a result the tossup has this weird layer of indirection, where not only do you have to know of Baxandall's key ideas, you have to be able to pick out the book the question writer is thinking of.

I think another good example of this is the "wanderer" tossup. I knew that Oscar Wilde adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth after he was released from prison, but you also have to know Melmoth is a reference to Charles Maturin's book Melmoth the Wanderer, and you also had to parse out what the question wanted from how it was written: "The surname of a character who does this title action was adopted by Oscar Wilde after leaving Reading Gaol." Figuring out not the tossup was talking about "Sebastian" or "Melmoth" and then knowing "ah, it's from Melmoth the Wanderer" is all a pretty tall order.

All of this is to say that while I understand the point of having easier answerlines, there's some amount of playability that's sacrificed in parts of the question that aren't the giveaway. Perhaps these examples could have been smoothed over with a bit more thought, but I almost feel like filtering out the material of say, the "wanderer" tossup into two separate questions -- one hard on "Melmoth the Wanderer" and one on Wordsworth feels more thematically unified, especially since the two types of wandering aren't related to each other at all.

I also think this tournament didn't do a great job with explaining why I should care about a particular secondary scholar. Again, to complain about Baxandall one more time, I don't think saying "A 1980 study of artists who worked with this material includes influential chapters on “Conditions of Trade” and “The Period Eye,” and was written by Michael Baxandall" tells me why should I care about him. To me, this is the quizbowl equivalent of Obi-Wan and Anakin discussing battles in an elevator that you can't possibly give a shit about. Instead of saying he is influential, the question should try to convince the player he is influential. If I were writing this tossup, I would say "A 1980 study of sculptors who worked with this material discusses how they would negotiate 'conditions of trade' with their financiers as part of an economic 'client-patron' relationship whose existence was theorized by Michael Baxandall." so that players learn why they should care about Baxandall.

[vinteuil]

If I were writing this tossup, I would say "A 1980 study of sculptors who worked with this material discusses how they would negotiate 'conditions of trade' with their financiers as part of an economic 'client-patron' relationship whose existence was theorized by Michael Baxandall." so that players learn why they should care about Baxandall.

I can't say I understand how this does anything more than drastically narrow down the range of possible materials, given that the clues already tell you "this is very early for people to be thinking about the marketplace into English-language art history." It's not like "economic 'client-patron' relationship" evokes any historical particulars; I agree that there are more obviously "interesting" things to say about Baxandall (goodness knows I've clued some in the past!), but this seems to me to just be wordier and no more helpful. (I would hate to see "interesting clues" equated with "longer sentences that simply include more nonspecific connective tissue.")

That said, I meant to include something along the lines of "recycled his earlier chapter titles" in this clue (not sure what happened), and Ike is of course right that without that, you'd just have to know the date to differentiate.

[Excelsior (smack)]

I thoroughly enjoyed this tournament. I was very fond of the science, though much of it was too real for me. But my favorite part of the tournament was by far the economics content. I wholeheartedly endorse Jacob's praise for Sam's writing, and I wish all tournaments had econ like this one.

Many thanks to all involved for producing this set.

[touchpack]

Alright, here's some more details on things I think this tournament's science did exceptionally well.

1. Topic selection

Topic selection (for both answerlines and clues) is, in my opinion, the single most important piece to get right to produce a successful set, in any category. Borrowing some language from Eric describing his philosophy for Lederberg, this tournament's topic selection did a phenomenal job of rewarding science knowledge both as it is taught in the academy and practiced in the laboratory. Importantly, the tournament also did a great job of avoiding topics that are currently trendy (no matter how important something is in real life, if it becomes a buzzer race because it's come up 8 times in the past year, it's bad topic selection).

2. Inventiveness

In terms of my favorite questions, I always oppose overly imaginative answerlines for the sake of having overly imaginative answerlines, and the most impressive feats to me are when a hard tournament approaches a well-worn topic with new, exciting clues. Billy's T cell tossup at the last CO did this for me. I've always been a proponent of putting more recent biotechnology trends into bio distributions, and this is exactly the way to do it--mixing incredibly important contemporary science about CAR-T cells and cancer immunotherapy into an absolutely gettable answer-line. This was a tossup that I wish I had written. (Even if people apparently didn't convert it on the giveaway? It's probably substantially easier now after Novartis' Kymriah approval, idk)

Adam can walk the walk that he's talked here, especially in the chemistry: the questions on paramagnetism, mercury (with the delightful pronoun "this liquid"), and enthalpy of mixing were utterly fantastic questions that I wish I had written. (but I'll settle for just getting good buzzes on them) Off the top of my head, the balance and hCG tossups in biology also fit this mold well. It's tossups like these that keep me coming out and playing these hard open tournaments.

3. Ecology/Evolutionary biology

This tournament was a fantastic model for what ecology content in tournament should look like, thanks Shan for working on it! Both its abundance relative to other biology questions (20%, I know I usually do more like 10-15%, but that's because I don't know as much about ecology and have a tendency to get lazy) and the distribution of topics throughout various subfields were very well done, and I especially enjoyed how the set pushed the boundaries of the canon (fisheries!) while keeping things grounded in what undergraduates in the field (or pre-med students taking their 1-2 ecology classes) are likely to learn (population size, net primary productivity). I can't remember the bonuses right now but I think they were also similarly well executed.

4. Applied Knowledge Bonuses

The applied/semi-computational bonuses in the physics were executed especially well: they hit the magic goldilocks zone where they were just easy enough to figure out and do within 5 seconds, but hard enough that you really needed to have real knowledge of the field to have a chance on them. The ones that immediately come to mind as especially great bonuses to me were the Casimir effect bonus and the "can you calculate a partition function" bonus--these bonuses are a blast to play and every tournament should have a couple physics questions like them.

[Wartortullian]

Seeing Billy's post reminded me that my comments on the physics were long overdue, so here goes.

In general, the physics in this set was extremely well done. Individual sub-disciplines were well-balanced, plenty of novel-yet-still-convertible things came up, I felt like most of my buzzes came from real knowledge rather than fraud or stock clues, and virtually every physics question in the set was just interesting (the same goes for other categories, but I'm most qualified to comment on this one).

I agree that the computational bonus parts were convertible and did a good job of testing actual engagement with physics. In addition to the bonuses that Billy pointed out, I'd like to express my appreciation for the "Poisson bracket with the Hamiltonian" answerline, which I felt was particularly well-chosen.

Furthermore, I thought that the set did an excellent job of cluing current research in a way that was challenging, yet still convertible. The Josephson junction tossup did this particularly well, IMO. In the entire tournament, I never got the impression of "I needed a leadin so here's a random paper that Google Scholar turned up" that plagues so many other hard sets.

My one complaint about the physics is that the fusion TU was a bit too easy, especially the leadin. However, one difficulty control issue in an entire set is nothing to write home about, and in general, the difficulty was extremely spot-on.

[Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Dreams]

After having gone through the science of this set in detail, I claim that this set has the best science of any set written.

[adamsil]

Thank you for your very kind words, Billy, Matt, and Geoffrey.

In the entire tournament, I never got the impression of "I needed a leadin so here's a random paper that Google Scholar turned up" that plagues so many other hard sets.

This is something that I am very glad worked out, as it was an explicit goal of mine when writing to clue only important and broadly interesting contemporary papers. (I even replaced the alkyne leadin between mirrors, from a pretty standard Frances Arnold Science paper where evolved cytochrome P450s do <insert wild chemistry> to Michelle Chang's work on nsAA alkyne biosynthesis that finally got published in March! )

[Auroni]

This was my favorite of the pre-nationals sets that I have ever played. Uniquely among sets fitting this niche, it felt as if the tossup answers were extremely carefully and meticulously selected so that a pretty wide swathe of active college teams could play without ever feeling overwhelmed by a density of answers that they had never heard of. Looking at these questions, we as a community should step back and appreciate how far we have come since 10 years ago, when even the very best teams could hear several tossups a tournament that left them feeling this way. This set really felt like it served the ideal pre-nats role of providing a smooth transition from "regular difficulty" to "nationals difficulty," particularly if this year's ACF Regionals and Nationals sets are to be used as benchmarks. And it did all this while serving up the intellectual rigor, the plethora of interesting content, and the groundbreaking questions that we've come to expect of good tournaments of this day and age. And it did so with a writing and editing team that included lots of fresh faces!

That said, I do have some criticisms, in increasing order of severity:

- Among the 40 literature tossups that my site played, 8 were on works, which seemed like an uncommonly low proportion.

- Relatedly, there seemed to be an uncommonly high number of tossups on countries and languages (25, across the same number of packets), Now country/language tossups are often the ideal vehicles with which to incorporate content that could not be asked otherwise, and many questions in this tournament did indeed exploit this for the intended effect, but the preponderance of these questions started to sort of wear on the audience. Additionally, some of these questions, like the tossups on Switzerland, Russian poets (mostly Mayakovsky, from what I could tell), and Polish authors (nearly/all Lem), it felt as if the clues highlighted nothing inherent about the cultures of those countries, but rather connected unrelated people who happened to live/be born in places located in those modern-day countries. These questions could have just been profitably about Burckhardt, Lem, and Mayakovsky without much of a hit to overall tossup accessibility.

- My last point is a long-overdue and somewhat unfair comment on a trend that I've noticed over several years in Jacob's writing. (It's somewhat unfair because Jacob's massive improvement as a writer/editor made it so that it was the least prevalent in this set, and the instances of it that did come up were not strictly restricted to his questions). Jacob's well-known desire to clue actually-read and engaged-with scholarship comes from a great place, represents an admirable innovation to our game, and was ably exploited to great effect throughout this set. But, I'd like to draw attention to the following clues (from the 10 packets that we played, for consistency's sake), which, I think, were less successful attempts to realize this goal:

This opera was the subject of Susan McClary’s only monograph on a single work.

Stephen Collins examined the arguments about this doctrine in a monograph titled for this kind of Persons.

Much of the religious history of this place was first surveyed by Katherine Routledge

A monograph on Discourse in these places was written by Harvard professor Courtney Cazden

This object is the subject of Andy Orchard’s book Pride and Prodigies.

(the above five forming an unfortunate confluence in packet 5)

The “gender” of these thing is analyzed in a 1988 book by Marilyn Strathern.

Now I have no doubt that each of these works is important, or that people might have even known about them, buzzed, and gotten points. However, as written, these kinds of clues are not very interesting, and in fact run counter to an important way in which which people experience the game. Even when people are unfamiliar with, for instance, specific lines of poetry, specific historical incidents, or particular quotes by thinkers, they are using the contextual information provided by those clues to narrow down the field of possible answers to, ie, modernist poets, figures in Anglo-Saxon England, or works of early 20th century analytical philosophy. This winnowing processes essentially provides a "parallel track" of arriving at the answer that complements the knowing of the specific clues, which I firmly believe adds a great deal of richness and depth to our game. The clues that I've listed above don't really describe the theses/arguments of the works in question, and are not particularly helpful if you haven't heard of the names of those scholars, which I suspect that very few people in the entire audience (even specialists in the respective categories) will have. The first clue that I have highlighted felt particularly weak, because, it's not as if Susan McClary is so overwhelmingly well known that it's self evident why her "only monograph on a single work" bears any particular significance as a clue unto itself. I think the questions that those clues are taken from could have been greatly improved by describing some of the arguments put forth by those scholars, or by cutting these clues if such descriptions were not possible. But, I want to reiterate, that this issue affected only a small minority of the scholarship clues in this set, which as a whole were very interesting, delightful, and certainly context-ful.