We Need to Make Up Our Minds About Trash

[Tippy Martinez]

Having a topic like trash be included in a regular tournament, but be less than 1/1, does not make sense.

Either decide that regular academic tournaments don't need trash, and be done with that, or make trash 1/1 of the distribution. This weird middle ground where trash pops up once every couple of rounds is not fun and not conducive to a fair quiz bowl experience.

[Cheynem]

I assume by saying "regular" tournament, Connor is talking about tournaments billed as regular tournaments during the season. I don't particularly care what opens or open level tournaments do, so I'll leave those aside. In terms of those regular tournaments though, I would have to agree. I can think of good reasons to make tournaments without any trash (certainly, tournaments like Regs and Nats shouldn't have any) and good reasons to make trash 1/1 at some tournaments (I think ACF Fall should have 1/1 trash). But I would agree that having it be lumped in with other categories as a catch-all "Other" is kind of bad. It makes trash even more variable, and I would guess it probably also makes it far more likely to fall under the whims of "what popular culture do the editors like."

[Zealots of Stockholm]

Having a topic like trash be included in a regular tournament, but be less than 1/1, does not make sense.

Either decide that regular academic tournaments don't need trash, and be done with that, or make trash 1/1 of the distribution. This weird middle ground where trash pops up once every couple of rounds is not fun and not conducive to a fair quiz bowl experience.

I cosign this and think we should lean on the side of no trash, if only for the fact that a housewritten set with a small number of writers usually doesn't do a good job of subdistributing trash/not writing on "pet topics" even if trash is given a full 1/1.

[Halinaxus]

I completely agree with Mike and Connor.

In addition, I would like to note the effect including trash in the "other" distribution has on the other subjects often present in it; namely, geography and current events. Every trash question submitted under the "other" umbrella pushes out a geography or current events question that would otherwise have been in the set, resulting in even less coverage of subjects that are already marginalized quite a bit in college quiz bowl, even though trash and geo/ce aren't related anywhere near as much as other subcategories that appear in the same category (say, religion and mythology).

I feel like there is this misconception that trash and geo/ce are very similar (and thus interchangeable) subjects, which is not true. Trash and geo/ce might be more related than physics and painting, but they are definitely not interchangeable. I once filled out a category poll that lumped trash, geo, and ce into the same ranking, and I remember very awkwardly trying to combine my trash and geo/ce rankings, between which there was zero player overlap (even in a relatively small high school circuit like Minnesota).

[gyre and gimble]

I'm not really involved with writing or editing anymore, but I would like to suggest to future writers the idea of a regular, consistent 1/1 trash distribution that is reserved for things that are considered "higher culture." (Accordingly, it probably shouldn't be considered "trash.")

What that means is to be debated, or explored over time by editors and writers, but the typical examples would be stuff like critically important film, television, music, video games, etc. The key would be exclusively using clues that approach the topics "critically," i.e. on their merits, content, and influence, as opposed to presenting trivial details as might otherwise happen in a trash question (e.g., "this song was used in a Taco Bell commercial in 2007," "this film's star was in an SNL skit that parodied it by doing X"). This criterion would guide what topics can go in this category and what should be left out.

It seems to me that quizbowl players, and people in general, likely engage in these aspects of popular culture that are currently reserved for the "trash" category in many of the same ways that they might engage in academic topics they learn about outside of school. And I suspect that in many years' time, these things would become reified as topics of study in academic institutions, if they are not already. I don't see why we should exclude them now.

[Asterias Wrathbunny]

I'm not really involved with writing or editing anymore, but I would like to suggest to future writers the idea of a regular, consistent 1/1 trash distribution that is reserved for things that are considered "higher culture." (Accordingly, it probably shouldn't be considered "trash.")

What that means is to be debated, or explored over time by editors and writers, but the typical examples would be stuff like critically important film, television, music, video games, etc. The key would be exclusively using clues that approach the topics "critically," i.e. on their merits, content, and influence, as opposed to presenting trivial details as might otherwise happen in a trash question (e.g., "this song was used in a Taco Bell commercial in 2007," "this film's star was in an SNL skit that parodied it by doing X"). This criterion would guide what topics can go in this category and what should be left out.

It seems to me that quizbowl players, and people in general, likely engage in these aspects of popular culture that are currently reserved for the "trash" category in many of the same ways that they might engage in academic topics they learn about outside of school. And I suspect that in many years' time, these things would become reified as topics of study in academic institutions, if they are not already. I don't see why we should exclude them now.

I also think it'd be cool to try to codify a "higher culture" canon, but I'm not sure competitive college quizbowl is the venue for it. Film is the exception to the list of media because film studies is established academic discipline. The various film studies textbooks I've looked at are able to explain why certain films are considered the best and most influential, and even though criticisms of these 'top films lists' exist, players are at least able to study the subject and writers are able to produce questions from sources within that field.

However, if we take popular music for example, there is no corresponding academic field nearly as established as film studies, so (I believe) writers will attempt to use magazines like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork or online scoring sites like RateYourMusic and Metacritic to determine what is 'higher' or 'important' music, and these sources are just not up to the same standards as those used for the rest of the canon. Even if one day higher popular music becomes legitimized by some academic discipline, I don't think writers can use these shabby sources in place of that for now. However, I do think a "higher culture" canon would be great for certain trash tournaments, because as you note, this is an area of interest for a lot of quizbowl players.

[Ben Dillon]

However, if we take popular music for example, there is no corresponding academic field nearly as established as film studies, so (I believe) writers will attempt to use magazines like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork or online scoring sites like RateYourMusic and Metacritic to determine what is 'higher' or 'important' music, and these sources are just not up to the same standards as those used for the rest of the canon. Even if one day higher popular music becomes legitimized by some academic discipline, I don't think writers can use these shabby sources in place of that for now. However, I do think a "higher culture" canon would be great for certain trash tournaments, because as you note, this is an area of interest for a lot of quizbowl players.

I'd be interested in seeing how a tossup on Bob Dylan would be written now versus before he won the Nobel in Literature. I doubt there would be any difference in the clues that were not based on his biography. To me they would all sound as if they were trash-based, e.g. song lyrics and concert venues.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

However, if we take popular music for example, there is no corresponding academic field nearly as established as film studies, so (I believe) writers will attempt to use magazines like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork or online scoring sites like RateYourMusic and Metacritic to determine what is 'higher' or 'important' music, and these sources are just not up to the same standards as those used for the rest of the canon. Even if one day higher popular music becomes legitimized by some academic discipline, I don't think writers can use these shabby sources in place of that for now. However, I do think a "higher culture" canon would be great for certain trash tournaments, because as you note, this is an area of interest for a lot of quizbowl players.

This would definitely be news to the dozens of people I know and have met personally who do work in popular music studies--who speak at every music conference I've ever been to, are members of currently the most sought-after sub-discipline in musicology job searches, have multiple peer-reviewed journals and book series entirely devoted to their subject at the most prestigious university presses, and publish regularly in every other major music academic journal that isn't restricted by country or time period.

[Cheynem]

My general feelings about trash in tournaments is that it:

a. should be well-written
b. well distributed
c. avoid hitting simply the authors and editors' favorite things (or perhaps more accurately, at least try and vary the favorite things being asked about)

Something like what Stephen is proposing would in my opinion work okay in tournaments that do not have trash. I suspect you would end up with a lot of the same answerlines or some answerlines do jour, particularly in the TV or video games distro, but I think it could work.

For tournaments that actually do have trash, I wouldn't like to see things be so restricted.

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Over the past three years, I've edited Pop Culture for ACF Fall 2019, Winter 2020, and Regionals 2022. I have a few comments about pop culture as a whole at the college level.

I like pop culture questions. I think they provide a much-needed breather from tough academic content. I also think they're useful for keeping newer teams engaged and interested in quiz bowl. I remember at Iowa, to get people interested in writing packet subs, we would do fun packets together, mostly on pop culture or memes from the club. Quiz bowl can be pretty intimidating if you come in not knowing anything about the canon. But pop culture is a good way for people to be like "Hey, I do know some of this stuff" and keep coming back to practices and competitions.

ACF's Other category is weird. It's split between geography, current events, Other Academic, and pop culture. But the order isn't really set in stone. For instance, for Regionals, we did 5/5 CE, 5/5 Geography, 3/3 OAc, and 3/3 Pop Culture (geography is big here since I include a lot of cultural content there that could be OAc). Throw in the fact that a large part of these questions vary with submissions, packet order, feng shui within packets, and you can get a somewhat disjointed category across a set.

I think lower-difficulty tournaments like Fall should have more Pop Culture content in it. Tournaments like NAQT's SCT and ICT and stuff like the criminally underrated Boilermaker Novice are able to do 2/2 of Pop Culture because they had 24/24 questions in a packet. For an event like Fall, I think a solid .5/.5 of Pop Culture a packet would be nice, but would require a cut elsewhere, to which I have no good suggestion.

However, I don't think that ACF Regionals should have pop culture. I haven't made up my mind for Winter, but the case for Regionals is simple: its a qualifier for ACF Nationals and thus should be similar in content to Nationals. Since pop culture is not at Nationals, it shouldn't be at Regionals either. It doesn't make sense for a pop culture TU to determine a game that would determine a team's attendance at Nationals if that category isn't being tested at Nationals.

I like the idea of incorporating Winter's pop culture in a more academic sense into other categories...but pop culture is so small that I don't know what the best way to do that would be without some really ugly categories like 1.05/1.11 or something. I think you could clue a lot of more important "pop culture" moments in other categories. It's also an option to do this in one big Other Academic category. In NASAT 2021, I wrote a TU on Jim Morrison cluing his songwriting and literary influences.

I think its hard to define what is "academic" pop culture and what isn't. For instance, Jersey Shore is far from being the War and Peace of our time, but the show's rescue of MTV helped usher in reality TV in place of traditional filmed sitcoms. However, I think I could see the pitchforks and torches coming out of the shed if that was tagged under...any academic category really.

[L.H.O.O.Q.]

stuff like the criminally underrated Boilermaker Novice

I like the idea of incorporating Winter's pop culture in a more academic sense into other categories...but pop culture is so small that I don't know what the best way to do that would be without some really ugly categories like 1.05/1.11 or something. I think you could clue a lot of more important "pop culture" moments in other categories. It's also an option to do this in one big Other Academic category. In NASAT 2021, I wrote a TU on Jim Morrison cluing his songwriting and literary influences.

I noticed a variation on this a lot in 2022 NASAT - clues in academic disciplines that I recognized clearly as inspired by something the writer saw on Twitter. I view this as a good thing, because it guarantees a point of entry for a somewhat obscure clue.

Piggybacking off that point, I think that a sound way to get more people interested in quizbowl is to take pop culture more seriously and treat academic stuff less rigorously. I think Boilermaker Spring Novice demonstrates the viability of this: in that set, you'll find a literature bonus on stories that famous authors published as Tweets; a social science tossup on gamers; and a sadly-rejected, fantastic fine arts tossup on 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Those questions were written by Patrick Quion and Lalit Maharjan, whom I consider masters of the craft of the "trash academic" question.) These questions either invoke a pop-culture window into academia or examine pop culture through an academic lens.

My proposal, I suppose, is that a fractional "pop culture" distribution can potentially work if it's supplemented by a philosophy to allow pop culture into the academic distributions, such that the distribution feels large enough that it's welcome and not a sudden change of pace.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Maybe I don't know any trash I'm too much of a purist, but to me a dedicated pop culture distribution cuts into part of what makes mACF quizbowl unique. It's a competition focused on academic subject matter and "high culture," with ample distributional space to 1) treat these areas appropriately and 2) consistently reward players for learning more about these areas.

A tiny earmarked pop culture distribution, against a giant universe of possible pop culture topics, is more of a "relief" or "break" from these aspects of the game, rather than part of it. I can see why this relief can be appealing, but why not just make other parts of the set more entertaining instead? (Seriously, quizbowl writing probably could use a bit more humor.) There's plenty of precedent for including pop culture material in established parts of the distribution. The "does it look like a duck?" test is probably good enough for whether you're writing a straight trash question (as opposed to what Sarah is discussing) and the "I know it when I see it" test is probably good enough for telling when there's too much pop culture-esque content.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

These questions either invoke a pop-culture window into academia or examine pop culture through an academic lens.

Aren't a lot of sets doing this already? And increasingly so over the past 4ish years? 2001 has been in the art film distribution for over a decade (there were multiple prior examples when I tossed it up in BHSAT 2012 or 13), WAO II had a lit bonus themed around allusions in Kendrick Lamar songs, 2019 ACF Nats had a tossup on Pixar's computer graphics innovations in OSci, this year's NSC had an arts tossup on longstanding Las Vegas stage acts, Winter last weekend had a bonus part on Velvet Underground in Other Fine Arts...etc etc. You can agree or disagree with the approach as you will, or argue about the extent to which it should occur. But it seems unusual to present it as groundbreaking when it's well within the mainstream of accepted editorial practices these days to let select pop culture topics of academic relevance creep back in around the edges.

[Sam]

It seems to me that quizbowl players, and people in general, likely engage in these aspects of popular culture that are currently reserved for the "trash" category in many of the same ways that they might engage in academic topics they learn about outside of school. And I suspect that in many years' time, these things would become reified as topics of study in academic institutions, if they are not already. I don't see why we should exclude them now.

I prefer this spectrum of what "askable pop culture" topics are, based on how people engage with it, to the "non-academic/academic" framework. The issue with the latter is 1) academics write about literally everything, see John Lawrence's post or this Jersey Shore conference from 2011 and 2) if you try limiting yourself to "academic" clues it can quickly become impossible. A tossup from Illinois Open 2008:

4. Along with Carl Davis, this composer released an eight-movement oratorio named for his hometown in 1991, while he more recently released another oratorio called Ecce Cor Meum. His early work was heavily influenced by John Cage in the use of tape loops, while Howard Goodall credits this man's most famous collaborative group with saving Western music from atonalism, as well as bringing back the use of modulation. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 inspired this man to add a piccolo trumpet solo into a piece about his childhood in the suburbs. A fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he put on the cover of one of his recordings, this man also brought back the use of plagal cadences in works like "She's Leaving Home" and "And I Love Her". For 10 points, name this musician and writer of songs such as "Maybe I'm Amazed", "Yesterday", and "Hey Jude", the writing partner of John Lennon.
ANSWER: Paul McCartney

To give a sense of this tournament's difficulty, the next tossup begins "A character in this poem notes that he should have 'been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas.'" (The tossup after that one begins with a list of national parks in Hungary. 2008, ladies and gentlemen!) I don't think someone who was engaging with Paul McCartney's output the way they would engage with academic topics would spend a huge amount of time on his oratorio work. Compare that to the Kenrick Lamar bonus Matt Jackson mentioned:

5. While Kendrick Lamar’s most recent album is DAMN, To Pimp a Butterfly almost certainly has more literary
references. Answer the following about them. For 10 points each:
[10] Probably the most straightforward reference is with the track “King Kunta,” whose title refers to Kunta Kinte,
the protagonist of this novel by Alex Haley.
ANSWER: Roots
[10] Kendrick’s track “The Blacker the Berry” is the name of a 1929 novel by this African-American author, whose
fourth and fifth parts are titled for a “rent party” and a “pyrrhic victory.”
ANSWER: Wallace Thurman
[10] On the track “Complexion (A Zulu Love),” Rapsody raps “Color of your skin, color of your eyes / That’s the
real blues, baby, like you met Jay’s baby,” a possible reference to this author’s novel about Pecola Breedlove.
ANSWER: Toni Morrison (the novel is The Bluest Eye)

Here it's easy to imagine someone who really wanted to study Kendrick Lamar would learn about these "academic" topics; they're things that would be mentioned by music critics or that someone might look up after doing a close read of the lyrics. But they do require real engagement; you wouldn't get this just based on listening to the album in the car. (Obviously a lot of people could get these even without having heard the album. But that would still be rewarding engagement; it's not like Wallace Thurman's name is brought up all the time on Entertainment Tonight.)

This is all in the context of "pop culture inflected academic questions" or "pop culture questions in an Other Academic category;" for pure trash it's fine to ask about plot points from Jersey Shore.

[etotheipi]

I noticed a variation on this a lot in 2022 NASAT - clues in academic disciplines that I recognized clearly as inspired by something the writer saw on Twitter. I view this as a good thing, because it guarantees a point of entry for a somewhat obscure clue.

There are two ways this was done, I think, in NASAT 2022, and two ways it has been done in general. I don't like either of them, but one of them I believe to be significantly worse than the other.

The first, significantly-less-frequent method, is using Twitter as an actual substantive clue in a tossup, as in the last line of the Hilary Hahn classical music tossup from round 2:

This performer premiered six pieces by the 84-year-old Antón García Abril after
commissioning his piece "Third Sigh." "The Angry Birds of Kauai" by Jeff Myers won a
competition this musician ran to find the last track for one album. A piece written for
this musician opens with a section inspired by the address of the Curtis Institute of
Music that this performer attended from age 10. That composer imagined this musician
"racing in the Olympics" while writing that piece's fast movement "Fly Forward." This
musician commissioned many encores for the album In 27 Pieces. Jennifer Higdon
wrote a 2008 concerto for this musician, who plays an 1864 Vuilliaume (v'will-OME) copy
of the Cannone (can-OH-nay) played by Niccolò Paganini. For 10 points, name this threetime Grammy-winning American virtuoso who uses the handle @violincase on her
social media.
ANSWER: Hilary Hahn

Seeing as Twitter handles are not important, either academically or otherwise; reward "aesthetic," rather than substantive, engagement with classical music; and generally work against any purpose that this tossup might have had (either as a question on Hahn vis a vis her contribution to "classical music" as a performer/dedicatee of music, or as a question on Hahn as a vehicle to ask about under-asked classical music), I don't see any grounds under which this decision could be defended, and I would be rather happy if I never saw a clue like this in quizbowl again. Some other clues in this tossup also strike me as a little suspect, but I know basically nothing about Hilary Hahn/her career and will refrain from commenting.

The second method, which I think is what was more being referred to in the above post, involves the inclusion of clues that are not trivial in content, but are inspired by online discourse about a certain subject. I also object to this being a good thing, though for more theoretical reasons: in short, I believe that the point of entry for an obscure clue should be that clue itself, and in a way, I believe this gets at the heart of what quizbowl has been to me and what I believe its message should be.

We have two cases. If the clue is obscure and also unimportant, it shouldn't be in quizbowl at all. If the author of a tossup on a novel has, in a misguided attempt to easily produce early clues, resorted to cluing increasingly arcane and unimportant plot details that neither reward the reading of nor critical engagement with said novel, then, whether or not said clues have been motivated by the Twitterverse, they should not be clued.

On the other hand, if the clue is obscure yet important... to me, the point of quizbowl is that obscure (to an extent, most everything asked about in quizbowl at a certain level is "obscure" to a "normal person"), important things are really fun to learn, even in a vacuum - that rigorous engagement with "the academic world" is, at some intellectual level, deeply worth it. Should I not have bought into this reasonably early on in my time with the game, there is absolutely no way I would have stayed with the game, and I think this is true of most players. If quizbowl must rely on Twitter or wherever else to motivate an obscure clue's worth, what does that say about its belief in its own credo? Why are academic things worth learning at all if they obtain their "interestingness" from someone online's pithy viewpoint on them, not their existence in themselves?

A tiny earmarked pop culture distribution, against a giant universe of possible pop culture topics, is more of a "relief" or "break" from these aspects of the game, rather than part of it. I can see why this relief can be appealing, but why not just make other parts of the set more entertaining instead?

I think this is reasonably close to the attitude I'm getting at above. If academic quizbowl is something we need a relief from, why do we even bother playing it? If the things quizbowl asks about are not interesting in themselves, why do we care so much about a game that is basically staked on how fun it is to learn about them?

No matter what quizbowl is or becomes, it will never be an all-purpose test of what it is "important" for one to know. Quizbowl will never test if you can do an ELISA or play an instrument, if you know how to cook healthy food or do your taxes, nor whether you're even a decent person. And that's completely okay. I think it's far more important to stick to having a cohesive picture of what quizbowl's message is than to ask about xyz because it's important, or even academically studied - I think this is a good reason to keep a focus on academic rigor in our questions and, honestly, simply remove trash from quizbowl.

[Og's Magog Bog]

The second method, which I think is what was more being referred to in the above post, involves the inclusion of clues that are not trivial in content, but are inspired by online discourse about a certain subject. I also object to this being a good thing, though for more theoretical reasons: in short, I believe that the point of entry for an obscure clue should be that clue itself, and in a way, I believe this gets at the heart of what quizbowl has been to me and what I believe its message should be.

We have two cases. If the clue is obscure and also unimportant, it shouldn't be in quizbowl at all. If the author of a tossup on a novel has, in a misguided attempt to easily produce early clues, resorted to cluing increasingly arcane and unimportant plot details that neither reward the reading of nor critical engagement with said novel, then, whether or not said clues have been motivated by the Twitterverse, they should not be clued.

On the other hand, if the clue is obscure yet important... to me, the point of quizbowl is that obscure (to an extent, most everything asked about in quizbowl at a certain level is "obscure" to a "normal person"), important things are really fun to learn, even in a vacuum - that rigorous engagement with "the academic world" is, at some intellectual level, deeply worth it. Should I not have bought into this reasonably early on in my time with the game, there is absolutely no way I would have stayed with the game, and I think this is true of most players. If quizbowl must rely on Twitter or wherever else to motivate an obscure clue's worth, what does that say about its belief in its own credo? Why are academic things worth learning at all if they obtain their "interestingness" from someone online's pithy viewpoint on them, not their existence in themselves?

People don't encounter clues in themselves, they encounter clues in a context. I don't really understand what either of your cases are trying to prove.
In the first case, I would ask why "arcane and unimportant plot details" of a novel would be discussed on Twitter.
In the second case, I don't understand what makes Twitter a uniquely bad entry point for learning things or what actual bad questions have been written because of what you're describing. What exactly does your idealized vision of "rigorous engagement look like? Is it just taking a bunch of classes on everything imaginable? Obviously scrolling through Twitter doesn't qualify as substantive engagement, but is it really that bad of a way of encountering new works or ideas relative to clicking through Wikipedia or whatever? I don't think question writers would write from Twitter without reference to more reliable texts. Also, figuring out which clues are actually important is an extremely inexact science, and, from a practical perspective, "people might know this from Twitter" doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world to incorporate into that analysis.
TL;DR: It's 2022, online is real life.

P.S. - This isn't really relevant because we're talking about academic questions and honestly I don't think Winter should have trash but the Twitter clue in the Winter tossup on the Angels ruled and if we're going to keep having tiny trash distributions it's super important to have questions cluing from a variety of sources like that.

[AKKOLADE]

I don’t know much about Hahn but googling pretty quickly reveals that her outreach on social media is a big part of what makes her notable. Including information about this aspect of her career seems like it’s extremely fair game to me.

[eygotem]

Late to the discussion, but I don't see why pop culture having a dedicated distribution and there being elements of it in other subjects are mutually exclusive.

As a disclaimer I'm not super privy to trash myself, but as a model I would look at geography, which has its own guaranteed distro but has content residing in other categories as well (with location and culture being inherently intertwined with subjects like history and religion). Not to mention other examples like historical context influencing literature, mythology inspiring art, "other ac" having links to pretty much everything, et cetera. I would say pop culture's relationship with art is analogous in nauture, albeit easier for writers to avoid touching on.

Quiz bowl is to me at least about testing knowledge as a whole and categories should not be pigeonholed into avoiding other topics. If pop culture is to remain in the game in any form, there should be both an effort to mention it in other subjects and a dedicated distribution. As for the size of the trash distro I have no comment other than I would like to see more sets experiment. Overall though, trash when done well is an important part of the game that keeps people engaged, and frankly sets trying to eliminate it just makes the game seem stuck-up about importance. (Which I feel the circuit has an issue with in general but I'll leave that for another post.)

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

Quiz bowl is to me at least about testing knowledge as a whole and categories should not be pigeonholed into avoiding other topics. If pop culture is to remain in the game in any form, there should be both an effort to mention it in other subjects and a dedicated distribution. As for the size of the trash distro I have no comment other than I would like to see more sets experiment. Overall though, trash when done well is an important part of the game that keeps people engaged, and frankly sets trying to eliminate it just makes the game seem stuck-up about importance. (Which I feel the circuit has an issue with in general but I'll leave that for another post.)

I think quizbowl often avoids asking about pop culture not because of stuck up claims of importance, but about the primary way people engage with pop culture (non-academically). I don't think this is the same thing as saying pop culture isn't important (and the often insanely niche or difficult pop culture packets people produce for events like festivus suggests to me quizbowlers, broadly speaking, are not "above" being super into things we wouldn't ask about at ACF Regs).

[34 + P.J. Dozier]

I've had a lot of thoughts on popular culture in quizbowl in the past that perhaps many people here are already aware of, so I'm not going to say too much right now. Like some others in this thread, I believe that what is more important to consider is not *what* is asked about, but *how* it is asked. I would argue that this isn't even a novel idea. We could very easily just write a whole literature tossup on Lord Byron entirely cluing his rumored sexual escapades and miscellaneous yet amusing quotes, and it would probably annoy a lot of people; instead, we write literature tossups on Lord Byron's literary and cultural impact, his most beautifully written lines, the way that Romantic era poetry and onwards would not have been the same without him. I think that we can do the same for, obviously, the oft-mentioned examples of Kendrick Lamar and Bob Dylan, but even (as Ned mentioned above) topics that may be encountered in settings like Twitter.

The other thing I want to say is that I think we should stop referring to "popular culture" as "trash." It makes the community look pretentious, exclusionary, and elitist (which, in fairness, is often true).

[Cheynem]

I think the issue for me is kind of what Emmett is getting at. Kendrick Lamar writes far better "poetry" than a lot of poets that come up in quizbowl, including that hack Edna St. Vincent Millay. But I would guess 90% of people experience this poetry by just listening to "popular" music, which doesn't strike me as the greatest use of quizbowl questions (similarly, the drama in something like Westworld or Succession is probably more intelligent than the claptrap of Walter Scott, yet I don't feel comfortable asking about such programs whole sale in academic quizbowl). This doesn't mean that there's not a place for occasional questions on such stuff in various portions of the distro, but I do think quizbowl should strive to get beyond the "popular."

Also, we've had this conversation at several points--I, who wrote a thesis on Popular Culture Studies and frequently play trash tournaments, do not find the word "trash" to be elitist or offensive, but rather an endearing, almost playful word. I do recognize that not everyone shares such views, so in official discourse I attempt to use "popular culture" (but it's always going to be CO Trash for me and not CO Popular Culture).

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

We could very easily just write a whole literature tossup on Lord Byron entirely cluing his rumored sexual escapades and miscellaneous yet amusing quotes, and it would probably annoy a lot of people

what? this would rule you dork

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

One thing I don't think holds up is argument based on how people engage with things.

I think if you were to actually follow college quizbowl players for months and document how they engage with the material that comes up at academic tournaments, you would find that for the most part they are engaging with this content outside of a formal academic setting.

Sure, there are lots of classes about the US Civil War or Walter Scott, and some quizbowl players surely take those classes. But I'd bet that far many more quizbowl players just read Civil War history in their spare time in books (or podcasts) or read Walter Scott books for fun in their spare time. When a Physics PhD student powers a history or literature tossup at ICT, it's probably not from a class they took.

What, exactly, is the difference between reading Walter Scott in your spare time for fun and listening to Kendrick Lamar on Spotify in your spare time for fun? What's the difference between visiting the Bull Run battlefield and reading the signs and going to a Kendrick Lamar concert and listening to the lyrics?

I think it's more honest to accept that society has divided the world into these "academic" and "non-academic" buckets and, warts and all, quizbowl has decided to accept this division and have tournaments test either one or the other. The Civil War is academic knowledge even if you learned a fact about the war from a popular TV show and Kendrick Lamar is non-academic even if you learned a fact about him from your music class.

[Cheynem]

What, exactly, is the difference between reading Walter Scott in your spare time for fun and listening to Kendrick Lamar on Spotify in your spare time for fun? What's the difference between visiting the Bull Run battlefield and reading the signs and going to a Kendrick Lamar concert and listening to the lyrics?

I think it's more honest to accept that society has divided the world into these "academic" and "non-academic" buckets and, warts and all, quizbowl has decided to accept this division and have tournaments test either one or the other. The Civil War is academic knowledge even if you learned a fact about the war from a popular TV show and Kendrick Lamar is non-academic even if you learned a fact about him from your music class.

I think your second paragraph is more or less correct, but as to your first--

The difference between reading Walter Scott (or Eugene O'Neill or Mary Shelley or whomever) and listening to Kendrick Lamar is that I would suspect far more people (today) do the latter (might be closer, depending on the popularity of the author). A lot of people certainly go to the Bull Run battlefield and read the signs, but I would imagine there are far more people who can rattle off Kendrick lyrics just by hearing them so much (at concerts, on the radio, on Spotify) as opposed to people who can rattle off information about Bull Run from reading a book, watching a TV show, or going to a concert.

Again, this isn't a perfect metric. There's room for doses of popular culture in the regular distribution. There are academic things that are (probably far more) popular than some pop culture stuff (I would imagine more people know things about To Kill a Mockingbird the book than The Jeffersons at this point). But I think the point of quizbowl is an attempt to reward knowledge for things that go beyond the typical culture of the day.

[henrygoff]

We could very easily just write a whole literature tossup on Lord Byron entirely cluing his rumored sexual escapades and miscellaneous yet amusing quotes, and it would probably annoy a lot of people

what? this would rule you dork

First, I agree with Wang that Wonyoung picked a bad example here. A biographical tossup on Lord Byron wouldn’t just be fun to play, it would be a subject worth asking about--an author’s personal life and reputation are studied and discussed in literature classes just as often as their work is, especially that of a celebrity like Byron. But I’m also confused as to the point Wonyoung is making with this analogy--is the implication that popular culture figures (actors, musicians, sportspeople. etc.) generally aren’t asked about based on their work? Because that’s obviously incorrect. If it’s that we should focus specifically on relevant pop culture figures whose work receives academic (in this case, let’s say literary) attention, that list is incredibly small, and it would make pop culture distributions rather dry and predictable. I’d love a David Berman or Patti Smith tossup as much as the next guy, but editors should aim to keep the pop in their pop culture questions.

[Santa Claus]

I think it's more honest to accept that society has divided the world into these "academic" and "non-academic" buckets and, warts and all, quizbowl has decided to accept this division

Would agree with this, if only because it's clearcut in a way that the others aren't. Dividing things further into "higher culture" to try to fit it into an otherwise purely academic distro seems fraught with difficulty.

and have tournaments test either one or the other.

I don't think this necessarily follows. I agree that no pop culture is better than <1/1, but it feels like nobody has suggested expanding the distro. Perhaps a tournament could do 22/22 with 2/2 pop culture - I'd be more interested in that than more philosophy.

The second method, which I think is what was more being referred to in the above post, involves the inclusion of clues that are not trivial in content, but are inspired by online discourse about a certain subject. I also object to this being a good thing, though for more theoretical reasons: in short, I believe that the point of entry for an obscure clue should be that clue itself, and in a way, I believe this gets at the heart of what quizbowl has been to me and what I believe its message should be.

Underlining mine.

I like the sentiment (learning is cool and good) but personally I am pessimistic about the possibility of producing questions to promote it - quiz bowl is just too much of a game to prevent the artifice of "scoring points" from interfering with any underlying philosophy.

There's a lot of scenarios where this criteria is not very practical. For one, there's a threshold difficulty below which one cannot reasonably expect "the clue itself" to ever be the point of entry. On top of that, there's a substantial gray area where atypical avenues to "an obscure clue" (what does "obscure" mean anyways?) outnumber or at least rival direct engagement. I also don't like how even "good" clues can become "bad" if people online mention them after the fact.

Is learning a clue through quiz bowl better than learning it from online discourse? Does that really require any deeper engagement than reading a Tweet of equivalent length? This has nothing to do with pop culture anymore so I'll stop.

[everdiso]

Sorry for the late post, but this is something I've always felt strongly about, so I figured I'd toss in my two cents.

I don't think this necessarily follows. I agree that no pop culture is better than <1/1, but it feels like nobody has suggested expanding the distro. Perhaps a tournament could do 22/22 with 2/2 pop culture - I'd be more interested in that than more philosophy.

I was happy to hear this! Popular culture has massive relevance and significance to our society and people's lives - so much so, in fact, that I think 2/2 is not nearly enough to reflect it. The aforementioned Kenrick Lamar is much more important in our society than Haydn; the Super Bowl is way more culturally relevant than the Battle of Cannae. To really give pop culture its due, we'd need a lot more of it, probably 4/4 or 5/5.

But that's not what we really want, is it?

I think it's more honest to accept that society has divided the world into these "academic" and "non-academic" buckets and, warts and all, quizbowl has decided to accept this division and have tournaments test either one or the other. The Civil War is academic knowledge even if you learned a fact about the war from a popular TV show and Kendrick Lamar is non-academic even if you learned a fact about him from your music class.

I think Bruce hit the nail on the head here. Academic and popular culture topics are often pretty clearly divided in people's minds. Of course you can find complicated cases that straddle the divide, but the large majority of the time, the division is unambiguous. And this feels like an easy enough division for quizbowl. I think quizbowl should either give popular culture its proper due as one of the central parts of the distro, or embrace its role as a specifically academic trivia game and dispense with pop culture altogether. The latter approach is, of course, much more in keeping with the game's traditional focus, and, equally obviously, it makes it very unique from other trivia competitions. I think this is much better than being almost entirely a test of academic knowledge that sometimes injects bits of popular culture - not enough to be an actually all-around trivia competition, but just enough to mess with the academic distro. I think we should pick one side of the fence and stay on it.

Of course, I've never decided not to play a tournament because it had 1/1 pop culture, and I doubt I ever will. This isn't a huge deal, and many very good tournaments have had 1/1 pop culture. But we debate a lot of minor things to try to make the game better, and in my opinion this is the best call on this topic.

[Fado Alexandrino]

I agree with Paul that trash should be a substantial portion of the distribution if included and not just a tossup every four matches. 0/0 makes sense for ACF, and I actually think this means something like NAQT could afford to up their trash distro as to create more of a contrast between the two formats.