A modest proposal for AI in speech and debate

I used to believe when I was coaching that debate helped students in a number of areas that would be of lifelong value to them. There is public speaking, of course, something with which I had my own difficulties when I was younger. Sooner or later, in countless professions, one is called upon to make a presentation, and some professions are virtually endless presentations. Skill at this is definitely a skill for life, and debate is a great realm for learning it. And it is unlikely that anything about AI will replace that learning or that value. 

Which leaves us everything else I thought students would be learning.

There's research, of course. The art of research has changed dramatically in my lifetime. When I was a debater back during the Van Buren administration, research was a process of manipulating physical media. We went to the library and used The Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature to find articles in magazines that we then dug out of the stacks. The information we gleaned from those articles we wrote onto 3*5 index cards, and those cards, in shoeboxes, comprised our research. In the first phase of the personal computer, which was a machine that was not connected to a Web that didn't exist yet, I acquired an encyclopedia on a CD, Microsoft Encarta, for my personal research. Then the internet and search engines came along, and the magic of Google's algorithm. And then there was Wikipedia, which got off to a bumpy and rather unreliable start, to put it mildly, before becoming quite useful. The unifying factor of all of these is that their manipulation required skill. That is, it could be said that, using the tools at hand, one was, or wasn't, a good researcher. And learning to be a good researcher was another area of lifelong value added to a debater's education. 

Next up on the list of skills to be learnt was writing. To debate you needed cases, and if you wanted cases, you had to sit down and write them. In my experience, contemporary elementary school education does not come close to teaching students how to write. At best it teaches an approximation of what writing might be if one removed spelling, punctuation, grammar, and anything resembling lucidity. The writing of grammar school students is the equivalent of what we assume were the grunts and groans of the pre-Neanderthals: something was being communicated, but only at the most basic level. You can't communicate complex thoughts if you can't articulate them in the first place, and if you can't write them down, they remain unarticulated. Debating forced students, one way or another, to become decent writers, even if only of something that was going to be entirely spoken. (The exchange of written cases is relatively modern.) 

And finally, there is the logic of argumentation. (There are other valuable skills in Speech and Debate, of course, but we're concentrating here on the ones most in present-day jeopardy.) There is the structure of claim/warrant/impact. There is the ability to listen to what someone is saying and to respond cogently. There is the process of weighing in one's own mind the importance of what is being said, and prioritizing accordingly. In other words, there is the art of debate itself. What makes a good debater is the ability to present their own position clearly, and to clearly refute the position of the opponent. You take what is said and turn it around or disprove it or show that it misses the point and that what you are saying outweighs it. Refutation is a combination of quick thinking and logic and very much knowing what you're talking about (which you learned from your research). And successful refutation is the key to debate success.

And here's the problem. When it comes to research, writing, and argumentation, AI at its simplest, most easily accessible form, is incomparably better at the first two than any high school debater, and a fair contender with the third one. (I'm not going to demonstrate any of this. Either you know it already, or if you don't believe it, you can try it for yourself.) 

As for research, any AI agent can feed you a list of sources on literally any topic, saving you the need to poke around on Google or Wikipedia using only your wits and a galaxy-hitchhiking towel. If it is the first of the month and the topic has just been released, AI is probably not a bad starting point. It's the next progressive step in that research process I described earlier that used to begin with a physical trip to the public library. If this initial step in research is followed by careful analysis and evaluation of the results, I'm all for it. We would be using the presumably best possible research tool, combined with our own skill at evaluating research. Debate coaches can still envision educating a good researcher.

As for writing, I have fed an NSDA PF topic into an AI agent, and gotten back, in seconds, a perfectly acceptable set of both Pro and Con cases, complete with citations and timings to keep it within the speaking limits. Any novice could walk into a round with those cases and feel completely confident. Needless to say, with some juicing of one's queries, AI could produce some really excellent cases. Which means that, instead of learning to write cases, one would learn to use AI to write cases. This may or may not be a valuable skill—will anyone other than fiction authors actually write anything in the future?—but it certainly doesn't provide much education to a student in literal writing. It is, to writing, what asking AI to draw a picture is to art. It is not even close. 

Finally, there's going into the round and debating. Here let us imagine the completely usual process of teams entering a round and immediately sharing their cases. (The art of flowing, I am told, is akin today to the art of etching Egyptian hieroglyphics.) What a team can do, as soon as they have the opposition case in hand, is feed that to their AI agent and have the AI agent provide logical rebuttals, complete with citations. This means that debaters don't have to consider what their opponent is saying and figure out responses: AI has done it for them. For that matter, they can ask their AI agent for some leading questions for Crossfire or CX. They can ask their agent to weigh the opposition arguments and tell them which are the strongest and which are the weakest and where is it that they should attack with the best chance of a favorable outcome. None of this communication with their agent will take them more than a few seconds. 

And that is the state of AI today. (It will be getting better and better very quickly.) As for the research part, this is where the educator's skill comes into play. A debate coach in the 1960s had to teach a novice how to research. In 2026, a debate coach still needs to teach a novice how to research. The only thing that has changed is the actual "how." As for the writing of cases, again we rely on the educators. The debate coach can help students learn to write well, or the debate coach can skip that altogether and simply help students get their AI to write well. Those latter coaches will not be doing their students any favor...perhaps. But if the art of writing does go away, assigned to AI drones the way so many other things are being done by machines nowadays, well, I don't know. E. B. White's words may be prophetic: "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer." (That line still brings a tear to my eye.)

It is the use of AI in actual rounds, as an agent assisting debaters in their arguments, with which I take issue. Allowing use of AI in rounds means that it is not inconceivable that two teams will be facing off arguing not their own ideas and responses but the ideas and responses fed to them by their AI. This is not fantasy: it is absolutely possible. Worse still, one side could be relying on their own wits while the other side is arguing with an unseen assistant at their side, an assistant with the full access to the might and main of the internet, accessible in microseconds. If both teams use AI, what's the point of having the humans? If one team uses AI, how is that even remotely fair?

I will be petitioning my local league to ban AI in rounds. This includes, by the way, speech. I have tested this: a basic AI agent can create an absolutely perfect extemp speech in a handful of seconds, complete with timings and citations and speaking hints. Which means that an extemper who once spent precious minutes researching followed by precious minutes preparing a speech followed by precious minutes memorizing it, can now simply spend all those precious minutes on the memorization of something they had virtually no hand in creating. Where's the value in that? Where is the competitive fairness? Are we ranking speakers or are we ranking AI programs?

To be honest, I think that AI is the greatest challenge that coaches face today. AI needs to be understood and used wisely by coaches. And it does need to be used: It is real, it is not going away, and there are ways of using it that will provide good education to students. But there are also ways of using it that are, in a competitive environment, cheating. Let me emphasize that. Use of AI in rounds, which is the accessing of outside agents, is as much cheating as having your teammates in the back of the room provide you responses during the round in your Google doc. The only difference is the inherent humanity. Cheating is cheating no matter how you slice it. 

If I successfully pass a rule prohibiting AI in rounds, can it be enforceable? Probably not. I can only offer the honor system as enforcement. Given that I'm proposing this rule in our local Catholic Forensic League, I don't think it is too much to ask that we rely on that honor system. The students who are going to cheat are always going to find a way to do so—it's not as if cheating is unknown in our activity—but the vast majority of students, teams and coaches and judges, will be good citizens, adhering to the rule, and will gain the reward of achieving our speech and debate educational goal. And if we don't provide some guardrails against misuse of AI in our activity? First off, we can just dump extemp as totally worthless as an event, and before long, as students learn to train their AI (I imagine some eager entrepreneur coming up with Chat1AR before too long, available for just $9.99 a month plus, well, your immortal soul), we can dump PF, LD, CX and BQ. (I know little of how student congress works, but I would imagine it too is in jeopardy.)

Do any of us want to be around when Claude wins the TOC? In all events? 

Addendum: NSDA does ban AI in competition. NCFL does not. So this does, obviously, apply to CFL tournaments specifically. Which is why it's a rule I'm presenting to my local CFL league. I was rather shocked to find that use of AI in competition was acceptable when I worked at their MS virtual tournament. I wrote this rather long piece, which would all be relatively obvious to probably the vast majority in the activity, in the hopes of getting their national organization on board with this. 

In which we confront (the original) Rod Stewart

 I know in the past I’ve briefly mentioned Crooner Rod Stewart, so therefore I feel, well, ‘Nuff said. If you like it, fine. It’s good to have someone selling Great American Songbook albums, whatever I might personally think of them. (As a reminder, I neither hate nor love them: I listened once, and that was enough.)

But the other Rod Stewart? That’s something else. 

At the time, the late 60s, Stewart suddenly seemed to be everywhere. When I look at the release days of the music now, he was only sort of everywhere, but it was close enough. It started with the Jeff Beck Group and the album “Truth.” Everyone accepted this as a great album immediately, and it introduced Stewart’s voice to the world at large. (Even in those pre-interwebs days we already had an inkling of who Jeff Beck was.) Next thing you knew, Stewart was singing with the Faces, a group that immediately rose to the forefront as a result of its preexistence as Small Faces, creators of the all-time great “Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake” album. In reality, its preexistence was both Small Faces and Stewart and Rod Wood breaking off from the Jeff Beck Group; I would have known all this back in 1969 if my copy of Wikipedia hadn’t gotten lost in the mail. Faces immediately hit the stratosphere; “First Step,” “Long Player,” and “A Nod is as Good as a Wink” are bursting at the seams with great cuts, all released in the space of about a year in the wake of “Truth” and “Beck-Ola.”

So while all this is going on a friend of mine turns up in my college apartment with “The Rod Stewart Album.” It was amazing how much studio time these guys got back in the day. I remember reading at the time that the desire for Stewart to have his own material was that as a singer he liked slower, more deliberate songs than what the instrumentalists in the bands preferred. There’s no question that his first three solo albums are much softer than the Faces material. Of course, it was his third solo album, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” that finally made Stewart the relatively indestructible pop chameleon he is now well known as. If you Google him today, your first hit is a list of his upcoming concert dates. The man was born in 1945. No doubt he and Mick Jagger and a handful of others know something the rest of us don’t. (Maybe it’s that whole wives-younger-than-your-daughters thing…)

I bring all of this up because when I was originally working on my GOATs playlist, I had naturally simply dropped in Every P sight unseen sound unheard, a pure memory play. The title song and “Maggie May,” after all, are certainly all-time greats. But now I happened to be listening to “The Rod Stewart Album,” and the thought arose, “Wait a minute, this stuff is really great.” I mean, you simply cannot beat “Street-Fighting Man.”* At the break, when the temp changes… Well, this got me listening to those first three albums one after the other, bam, bam, bam. And when it was over, it was the first one that came out the clear winner. I went through the plodding process of removing Every P from the GOATs playlist and replacing it with The RSA. I will always love Every Picture and Maggie, but once you’re heard “Handbags & Gladrags,” there is no turning back. As for “Gasoline Alley?” Too many of those soft, singlerly takes. 

If you have nothing better to do, and you’re feeling in the mood for some rock history, treat yourself to these three albums, and make your own decisions. You won’t regret spending the time. 

• I asked the Boomer Manque for his opinion, and after giving the first album a listen, he claimed he enjoyed it accept for Stewart’s “anemic” version of “Street-Fighting Man.” That was the word he used. Anemic. The poor fellow. It isn’t easy missing a whole generation…

In which we finish a book or two

Reading—and more to the point, being somewhere in a book—is a presumed given. One is always somewhere inside a book. It is a constant. But there is a special situation where the constant is replaced by a variable, to wit, the ending of a book one is reading. (This does not really apply to a book to which one is listening.) You pick up your book and you see, if you are on your Kindle, that you are almost at the 90% mark. If it’s a physical book, you see just the slightest sliver of pages remaining. And this book, at which you have been chugging away for the same amount of time every day at the same rate of speed since forever, suddenly becomes a challenge. You are now going to finish this thing, regardless of how long it takes, no matter how tired you may be if you’re reading at night, no matter what distractions the universe might throw at you. You are going to move out of being somewhere inside this book. It will pass on. It will rest in peace. It will be an ex-book. 

There is something especially delectable about this final blast at a book. I just went through it with Robert Crais’s The Last Detective. This was not my favorite Cole/Pike novel, but it was a perfectly acceptable entry in the series. But when I saw that 87% read mark, I knew I could dispense with it and never pick it up again. This was especially important to me as I had begun The Forsyte Saga and finished the first volume, interrupting that one for a mystery break with the Crais. This was probably a bad idea. While the Forsyte books have way fewer shootouts than an Elvis Cole story, there is something about them that is sort of mesmerizing. There are more Forsytes than you can shake the proverbial stick at, all of them getting on with their lives one way or another, and once you jump on the wagon, it just keeps rolling along and rolling along. Galsworthy did not win the Nobel Prize for being a piker. And if it is lacking in shootouts, there is nevertheless action enough for a family saga. I’ve already complained about the most recent dramatization, "The Forsytes," which is more like a riff on the novels, or a Bizarro version, where characters bear no relation to their originals. That was what got me started reading in the first place. And now I’m lost. It will be ages before I’m finished with this, or at the point where the percentage on my Kindle tells me I can stay awake and finish it before the sun rises on a new day. 

Meanwhile, maybe there are shootouts in it and I just haven’t gotten to them yet. We’ll see. Anyhow, thank you, Mr. Crais, for the diversion.

Speaking of endlessness, I just finished the gazillion-hour-long audiobook of Frank, the Voice by James Kaplan. I enjoyed it and learned a lot I didn’t know about one of my favorite performers, and got him all the way up to winning the Oscar but still married to Ava, and when I removed it from my phone I immediately replaced it with the 40+ hours of the sequel, Frank, the Chairman. But I won’t listen to that one for a while. There is more to life than Frank Sinatra. Or so I am told. 

Meanwhile, and just as an aside, we saw Big Bad Voodoo Daddy perform live last night at our local concert hall. Quite the show, especially the second set when they were really in it. That aspect was interesting. They’re a tight band, and their first set was good, but they really didn’t take off until after the break, when they were great, while still being a very tight band. Go figure. Sometimes music-making comes out exactly right. Which is why you need to hear people live when you can. It can be transcendent. 

In which we dip back into the audit music queue

When most people think of Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods, they think of “Come Together.” It’s not that I hate the song—that would be impossible, like hating Mom and Apple Pie—but it was one of the most overplayed tunes of its day, back when we were all chained to our radios, and one had heard enough of it long before one stopped hearing it. I prefer to think of JCY&TY as album makers. (Disclaimer: They’re one of the first rock groups I saw live, in 1966. I was slightly younger then.) And when I think of their albums, there’s “Elephant Mountain,” probably one of the most underrated and forgotten albums of the 60s, and also the song “Grizzly Bear.” If GB isn’t on your radar as one of the greatest songs of all time, you need to fix your radar, bo bo dee yo… The guitarist for the group, nicknamed Banana, was Lowell Levinger. (It is possible that the guitarist for the group, Banana, was nicknamed Lowell Levinger.) What brings all this back is Levinger’s/Banana’s album “Married to the Blues.” Very nice acoustic stuff that obviously got me waxing nostalgic. If you’re an old JCY&TY-head yourself, it will do likewise for you. 

I have no idea how “Georgia Bound” by Blind Blake made the queue, but “500 Songs” is the likeliest suspect. As you can guess, it’s old blues and rag guitar, and very strong. And he is apparently the composer of “Diddy Wah Diddy,” which is warrant enough to give him a listen.

“Surf’s Up” by The Beach Boys, followed by “Going Public” by Bruce Johnston — There are those who place “Surf’s Up” high in the BB album pantheon. I wouldn’t go that far, but it did rescue the Wilson/Parks title tune from “Smile” oblivion, sung here by BB Johnston. It also has “Disney Girls,” an actual Johnston number, with the great inane rhyme of Fantasy Worlds and Dis-a-ney Girls. It’s a good BB album, always worth a listen. Following this is in the lineup with Johnston’s own solo album was a no-brainer. It’s a good album, kicking off with his most famous number, “I Write the Songs,” which famously is mostly identified with song-writer Barry Manilow who didn’t write the song. Apparently there are more covers of IWTS than there are people to cover it. More power to you, Bruce. BJ has the longest tenure in the BBs after Mike Love, which I wasn’t expecting. Anyhow, scratch a BB and you get a solo album or two in those 60 years or so. Brian’s are the best, unsurprisingly, but the others all get a good one off now and then. As does Johnston here.

Ron Dante, “Saturday Night Blast.” — So we’re sitting around the poker table and an unfamiliar song comes on my oldie playlist, and the Boomer Manque asks “Who is this?” I look on my phone and reply, Ron Dante. “Who’s Ran Dante?” he asks, so I look it up and reply, “The lead singer of the Archies,” to which the Boomer Manque slaps his head and replies, “I should have known that,” to which the only possible response on my end was, “No, you shouldn’t.” No self-respecting Boomer music fan would have listened to The Archies for any longer than it would take to hav changed the AM radio station, much less harbor such a fondness for their lead singer as to know his voice 60 years later after hearing two notes. As for this album, it takes a lot of mediocre pop hits and further mediocretizes them. I guess being the lead singer of the Archies got you plenty of studio time back in the day. Never underestimate the power of bubblegum. 

Oregon, "Music of Another Pleasant Era" - Nice jazz, if you’re interested. 'Nuff said.

In which we step down from the altar

I told Catholic Charlie that I’m pulling out of working CatNats. I have nothing against the organization—I told him I’d be happy to do the virtual Middle School tournament again—or against the actual Grand Tournament, of which I was a fan going back to my earliest coaching days. In fact, some of my favorite horror stories are tales of lost CatNat debate venues beyond the end of beyond, without food, water, sanitation facilities, or breathable atmosphere, where the restaurants closed before the last round, if they ever opened in the first place, and everyone judged all six times on the first day, even though there were only five rounds. Things were much better later on, even before I migrated into the tab room; they got their act together and things now are as smooth as the proverbial goat. That Nationals Saturday remains a tough one for judges, but at least the venues have become safe for human habitation. The last few years, in big hotels in Chicago and DC, has been about as good as it can get. Catholic C says that the upcoming event in Lafayette, Louisiana, will be the best digs ever. I believe him, except for the fact that Lafayette, Louisiana, is, the last time I looked, in Lafayette, Louisiana. You can’t get there from here. 

And that, circumspectly, is the reason I’m pulling out. The old bones just don’t have that kind of abuse left in them. Hard travel for endless hours—e.g., from chez moi to chez CatNat last weekend comprised two trains, a subway, and a half hour hike in 90 degree plus heat and/or rain—and way too much rich and expensive restaurant food, the alternative to which would be way too much poor and cheap inedible fast food which, nowadays, is not dreamt in my philosophy, and nary enough sleep to get even a splash of REM going. And yes, I was physically ill from some or all of this by the time I got home on Monday. Weekends in Minneapolis or Lafayette promise only more of the same. (I wouldn’t mind Orlando but I know the closest I would come to that one is Uganda.) Travel tournaments are a younger person’s game. Or maybe it’s just me. When I first started coaching I would go to all the expected venues, by air, land, or sea, and to be honest, I tired of it really quickly. It was fun when it was new, but back then I was living a life of a regular Day Job and a regular Weekend Job and about three minutes a week left over for everything else. I quickly devolved to a menu of basically local tournaments. Nowadays, tabbing, I go as far as Lexington a couple of times a year because I have a special friend relationship with Sheryl, and that’s about it. I’m planning on pulling out of Princeton as soon as I can get Kaz in my place as main advisor in a couple of years. After that, I’ve still got more than enough local gigs between NYCFL in-persons and ODLs to fill up anyone’s dance card. I do this because I want to serve the debate community, a cause I strongly support, not because I want to kill myself. And I know that it’s probably best to put oneself out to pasture before the knackers come along and do it for you. My biggest job is to find my replacement running the local tournaments. Somewhere in the NYCFL universe there’s someone who can do this every week and keep everyone happy, but they have yet to raise their head. And Lord knows I’ve asked for tab recruits. Granted it takes a particular mentality not only to tab, which isn’t terribly complicated, but to actually enjoy tabbing, which is something else altogether. All of us in the Northeast Traveling Tab Room share both the facility for it and the ability to derive pleasure from it, while at the same time quite enjoying one another’s company. All that is rare, and if one of us were to pull out because they’re older than Methuselah, finding a replacement isn’t, as I am learning, easy. 

Oh, well. I’m not pulling out of anything else in the foreseeable future. And replacing me in PF tab won’t be hard. Janet knows how to do everything that needs to be done and merely needs a second pair of hands to make it happen, and Charlie and I already have a good idea of who that could be. After all, every diocese has to provide tournament workers, so there’s no lack of helping hands. It’s the local business that I worry most about. There is time, given that although my hearing isn’t exactly what it used to be the rest of me seems to be percolating along well enough. Advancing years have not made me any more demented than I ever was. Sooner or later someone who would like to tab will come along, and I can retire to my rocking chair and watch the bees buzzing about in my garden. If you think you might be that person, please let me know.

In which we get back to listening some music

I traveled a bit last week, and sort of hated it. I was working a two-day tournament in DC, and I ate too much rich food, slept too little rich sleep, got battered by A) 90 degree heat followed by B) endless rain, and managed to catch the creeping crud (or, more likely, a mild cold) from being held captive in too many small rooms and too many train cars. To be honest, I don’t think I’ll do it again. However, I am back listening to music in the mornings, primarily going through my audit playlist, the one with albums I’ve mostly never heard before. Thank you, Spotify. 

The latest update:

• “Moving Targets,” Flo and Eddie — The surviving Turtles who became a doubles act (and also at some point, radio DJs) do a decent enough job of keeping the old sound alive, but the songs just aren’t there for them. 
• “Love So Strong,” Sugar Pie DeSanto — I’ve come to think of DeSanto as my own personal discovery. I have now listened to everything she recorded and loved all of it, and I can’t imagine why I had never heard of her. Peylia Marsema Balinton was a tiny dynamo, a buddy and collaborator with Etta James, a wild dancer who could do standing backflips, and a 2024 inductee to the Blues Hall of Fame. Do yourself a favor and seek her out.
• Mhaol, “Attachment Styles” — I went to Wikipedia to learn more about this unlistenable record, and found nothing. That is as it should be.
• Duffy Power, “Innovations” — A Brit pop star who never made it big, but he’s good and he lasted forever. He transitioned from attempting basic rock into blues. Definitely worth listening to.
• “The Paramounts at Abbey Road” — Another group that never made it over to me from England. This is good, straight-ahead Brit rock of the 60s. Enjoyable, and I grabbed a couple for my main playlist. 
• The Cure, “Three Imaginary Boys” — I kinda like The Cure. God knows why.
• “The White Stripes Greatest Hits” — On the other hand, I need someone to explain to me the attraction of the White Stripes. Lots of people obviously love them. I, on the other hand, am not lots of people, and I find them to be purveyors of amateurish noise. So when you do explain the attraction to me, don’t even begin to cite their playing. My cat plays better than this. And my cat is dead. 
• Beatles “Anthology 4” — I’ve talked about this before. The first Anthology set had some revelatory tracks, and this one doesn’t. So it goes.
• Kes, “On in 5” — Spotify calls them one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most celebrated musical acts. Very enjoyable, lively stuff. 

In which we go the the Catholic Forensic League Grand National Tournament

And then there’s CatNats…

Seeing as the event was in D.C., I arrived a couple of days early to do some touristing. The temperature was in the 90s, which made schlepping around a bit more daunting than one would like, but I got to tour the Capitol, ponder the Gutenberg Bible in the Library of Congress, see a music performance of The Great Gatsby, say hello to not one, not two, but three Vermeers in the National Gallery (not to mention Madame Monet and her son, a Whistler woman in white and a Rembrandt or two), and roam around the History Museum paying homage the wigs of both Harpo and Chico perched beside Groucho’s suit, Judy’s red shoes, the Babe’s signature with the rest of the team on aged baseball, and a whole bunch of other goodies from the Arts and Leisure past. And, oh yeah, I discovered I had forgotten to bring a mouse—I’m an 80s computist and can’t live without one—so I wandered into the nearby Apple Store and plunked down a hundred bucks for the wee, sleekit, cowrie, tim’rous beastie. Granted the Apple mouse is pretty great, but a not-so-great generic mouse off of Amazon is maybe fifteen bucks and does the job almost as well (and without a charger under its butt). I also gave the Neo a shot while I was in the store, and watched it slowly load its icons into the Finder and thought to myself, This slow, in an Apple Store? I think not.

Then it started to rain and it was time for CatNatting.

Friday is prep day. Not that there’s all that much to prep, but there is the issue of breaking out the folks we can for late rounds so that we don’t get caught with 5 white middle-aged men from Regis in the final. I have nothing against middle-aged men from Regis as a general rule, considering that half the tournaments I run are lousy with them, but CatNats runs on no-repeat-judging and no same-region-judging, and if you don’t play your cards right, you can end up in trouble. The diocesan directors allot judges in advance for all the break rounds, so you have to work with what you’ve got. If you plan ahead, you’re fine, which we learned early on in the process. Friday is for planning ahead.

The tournament itself isn’t particularly difficult. You have a lot of teams and a lot of judges, and the tabroom software runs best when the numbers are large. The work is chasing down the handful of no-shows and tech issues, like the poor woman who took an Uber to the wrong Westin (there’s at least 3 of them—Westins, that is, not poor women in Ubers). Mostly everybody is there to do the job, and they do. We provided ample warning in advance that they might judge all 5 prelims, and many did, and they didn’t come in whining how they can’t be expected to work all day under these conditions as they have in the past. Come to think of it, no matter how many rounds judges are assigned, and how fairly the burden is split, just about every invitational sooner or later has those poor harried neurasthenic judges storming tab demanding with their last breaths to be set free. But as I say, blissfully not this time. 

There are various rules and regs that are peculiar to CatNats, some of which I understand, some of which I don’t. Whatever. That’s probably true of every tournament everywhere. In situations where one finds the Rs and Rs unacceptable, one then votes with one’s feet. I’ve been doing CatNats for a few years now, so obviously my feet have voted for the incumbents. I am finding the weekend a bit difficult in some respects, though, mostly because I’m the oldest person there (until Grandma Julia shows up). Traveling to wherever it is can be wearing. At least Chicago and DC offered rewards beyond the tournament; some of the venues, like the upcoming Lafayette, Louisiana, are, well, Lafayette, Louisiana. You can’t get there from here, and when you do get there, there you are. And then there’s the food. My stomach is not exactly delicate, but I probably ate three times as much as I would if I were at home, and not necessarily as healthfully. And what is this “sleep” of which I have heard tell? Okay, I’ll admit it: I’ seriously thinking that this may have been my last CatNats. I mean, I did start going in 1996, back when I had skin in the game, and barely missed a one in my coaching years. I’ve now tabbed maybe half a dozen one way or the other. I even helped out with the virtual Middle School tournament. At some point…

We’ll see. 

In which we watch a little television, or more to the point, a little bit of a very big television, this being 2026 and all

One does watch TV…

• First of all, “The Forsytes,” because this requires special attention. When all was said and done I gave this one a Meh rating. The key problem was that it tried to pack too much into too short a time. Every scene seemed to last about eleven seconds and then we would rush to the next scene, and the next, and the next, never getting any traction anywhere. The only sparks between characters were in the final episode for the eleven seconds between Bossiney and Irene. The actors were for the most part perfectly fine and although occasionally miscast, quite up to the job, but the job wasn't there for them. Forty years ago I listened to The Forsyte Saga as a Books-on-Tape project and remembered enjoying it, so I figured I’d give it a read now. The volumes in my home library had type the size of [metaphor for some really small thing] so I downloaded it to the Kindle, and started reading. At this point, I have discovered that the TV show created the matriarch Ann practically whole cloth out of an invalid sister of James and old Jolyon (no doubt to grab the Dame Maggie Smith / Christine Baranski market), subtracted about 30 years and 8 siblings from said James and old Jolyon, replaced a governess with a dressmaker and given her secret children, focused on young Jolyon’s wife who is in fact dead as a doornail for six years long years at the start of the books, made June young Jolyon’s stepdaughter rather than actual daughter, created a completely non-existent Forsyte family business, moved the two remaining siblings into houses next door to one another, etc., etc., etc. These are, in other words, not the Forsytes. They are Forsytian stand-ins at best. Cryptoforsytes? Which raises the question, Why? Here you have a Nobel Prize winning set of novels that, in the past, provided numerous dramatizations fairly successfully, as I understand it. Why take those novels and change practically everything? If you don’t like what Galsworthy did in the first place, why bother with him? Why not just bite your thumb at him and steal all you want and change everything to your heart’s content and then call if something like "The Joneses" or "The Fink-Nottles?" It’s not as if in 2026 The Forsyte Saga is such an extraordinary hook upon which to pull in one’s viewing fish. Find me someone who has read these books who is under the age of 80 and, well, there’s me (assuming I stick with it) and about 123 other English-speaking people in your potential TV audience. So, ultimately, this show is a go-figure enterprise from the get-go, and I can’t possibly recommend it to anyone other than that 123 Galsworthy-worthy types who might want to marvel at the mayhem.
• I loved "Shrinking," on the other hand. What a great batch of characters! The third season wrap-up made it look over and done, but the interwebs are promising yet more to come. Good.
• “We Call it Imagineering” on Disney+ is an import from YouTube. It goes a little deeper than the usual documentary. Disney has been learning that you don’t have to keep the magic secret; there’s a lot of people out there who think knowing how it’s done makes it even more magical. I’m with them. 
• “The Irregulars” on Netflix is a totally off-the-wall Sherlock pastiche that will set True Irregulars off into apoplexy. It makes "The Forsytes" look like canon. It’s not great, but the cast is amiable enough. I neither recommend it nor pan it; if you like oddball supernatural stories, well, why not?
• Because I loved the movie and never watched the TV show, which was on for a hundred years with a thousand spinoffs, I started watching "Stargate." I’ve only watched a handful so far but I am told that it does find its stride soon enough, and as I say, it was awfully popular. The jury hasn’t even entered the box yet on this one. 
• “Mr. Wonder” — What the hell was this about??? What a nutty damned show. The episode with Josh Gad stands out especially. Anyone who wants to accuse the Feige Marvelites of the same old same old need to watch this one. Thumbs up? Yeah, why not. 
• “DTF St Louis” is another oddball show, where there is a dead body at the beginning and then we peel the onion of all the characters to find out why. It is a weird show, but it’s compelling, with a lot of strange behaviors and black humor. The best character is the old detective totally out of his milieu in all the craziness.
• Have I mentioned that we've been watching "David Chang Live?" Totally fun, and it's not even foodie-observant. Chang grabs a couple of friends and cooks a meal for them, obviously live to begin with, but streaming now for three seasons. Light entertainment that actually entertains. Recommended.

And that's it for now.

In which we're back listening to music

It must be Queue Thursday...

• “Lullaby of Broadway” from Rod Stewart and Jools Holland — The ubiquitous Holland, who often gets off a good one, and the also-ubiquitous Stewart, who hasn’t gotten off a good one since he discovered and subsequently attempted to lay waste to the Great American Songbook, teamed up for this lively recording of big band hits, proving two things: a lot of people like what Stewart does nowadays, as this was Holland’s first number one UK hit, and the Stewart and Holland combination is not a hell of a lot better than Stewart without Holland. As with Stewart's other albums of standards, that it’s bad is not the problem. I mean, it isn’t bad, it’s just that it isn’t really good either. Search the word “meh” in Google, and no doubt the collected oeuvre of Stewart singing standards will be the first hit. I listened to this because I’ve been listening to Holland. I am happy to put it, and my mother's Rod Stewart—she literally had a couple of his albums, neither of which was "Gasoline Alley"—behind me.
• Randy Newman, “Born Again” — Newman is one of those artists I simply run through from the start, and when I get to the end, I start over. I always find new stuff that I like. No doubt there will be yet another Disney soundtrack from the upcoming Toy Story 487. When I saw him in concert a number of years ago, he mumbled something about Disney being very, very good to him. Among the songs he wrote for them is “When Somebody Loved Me,” one of my all-time favorites, so I’d say he’s also been very, very good to Disney. Meanwhile, “Born Again” is solid, with “It’s Money That I Love” as the lead number.
• “Live Dead” was, as I recall, their first live album. As a Deadhead before you were born I immediately bought it and proceeded to never much like it. I’ve never much liked any live Dead recordings. Which demonstrates no doubt that I was not really a Deadhead by any true measure. Nevertheless, "Workingman’s Dead" and "American Beauty," which are one album as far as I’m concerned (cf. "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver"), are in my GOATs collection. Again, I'm doing the Dead as a run-through from beginning to end, and no doubt over again after that. Maybe I am a Deadhead!
• Rick Derringer, “Derringer” — Why not? He’s fun enough. I'll try more.
• Bad Company, “Holy Water” — I’ve listened to a lot of Bad Company by now, and it’s all starting to sound the same. I think they ran out of creative steam before this album. It’s all fine, but we’ve been there before. Song-writing ain’t easy, Pumpkin, which is why the streets are not littered with George Gershwins or Paul Simonses.
• Chris Rea, “Whatever Happened to Benny Santini?” — Rea got onto the list by having his obituary appear in the Times. According to Wikipedia: “He was known for his distinctive gravelly voice, slide guitar playing and music style blending soft rock with blues.” There’s not much of that on this perfectly pleasant album, but we’ll see what happens as we continue through the works in order.
• “The Original Lost Elektra Sessions” of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — Exactly what you expect.
• Olivia Dean, “Messy” — I can’t imagine who put this into my queue. 
• Al Jardine, “A Postcard from California” — An original unrelated-to-Brian Beach Boy, Jardine has put out exactly one solo album, this one, in 2010. I’ve listened to it a couple of times now. It’s got a couple of nice originals, plus some interesting retakes with friends, especially the version of “Help Me, Rhonda.” Cheerful stuff.
• Elvin Bishop, “Ace in the Hole” — Speaking of Paul Butterfield, I’ve been listening to the full Bishop, and enjoying him a lot. This one tends to have a bit more talking than I would prefer, as in talkin’ blues, but there’s worse things. I will continue on my journey, as this guy makes some great music.
• James Gang, “Jesse Come Home” — Their swan song, and it feels like a swan song, and it even has a “going off into the sunset” cover painting. They definitely had run out of gas by this point, but it wasn’t a terrible way to go out. 

In which we watch some movies and listen to some books

Movies: As noted previously, over the years my appetite for movies has lessened quite a bit. There was a time in my youth where I practically saw a movie a day—any movie, thanks to a membership at the Museum of Modern Art. Their daily 5:30 showing meshed perfectly with my 9-5 job in midtown. NYC in the 70s was movie theaters on every street corner, with all sorts of revivals and double features and foreign films: a cinema buff’s paradise. I was there for all of it. So what happened? Age, I guess. And not a lot of movies calling to me to leave home and go through the bother. And when I am at home, there’s plenty of reliable TV fare that as often as not is more engaging than the latest features. So it goes. 

That said, two movies got me to leave home recently. First, Project Hail Mary. Loved the book, enjoyed the movie. Not much more to say, except that I did recommend it for my nine-year-old granddaughter. Second, The Christophers. I saw this at the local arthouse, based on a critic’s choice review from the NY Times. It’s a Soderbergh film, and quite good, with two excellent core performances by Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel. I did not know Coel prior to this, but she manages to stand up majestically to McKellen, which is no easy feat for any actor. Highly recommended.

And then, with a free night at home, I watched Sinners. I didn’t really know what to expect aside from vampires, which honestly is not that great a magnet for me; I’m not exactly a horror movie fan. All the accolades nevertheless convinced me to give it a try. And, well, if you’ve seen this movie, you know that it’s in no way a silly horror movie. The first half of the film, culminating in a magical/phenomenal musical sequence at the juke joint, is something you haven’t seen before and won’t forget. And the vampires, when it comes to it, have something more to say than just, “May I come in.” No wonder this movie received so many accolades. I loved it. 

I also watched the final Downton Abbey movie. I mean, why not? It's like the TV show, only longer, with Granny gone, and everyone retiring at the end. Downton was always one step down from the gold standard of Upstairs, Downstairs but it was nevertheless watchable. So are the movies. And, finally, there won't be any more of them and we can get on with our lives. 

Books: On paper—all right, Kindle—I got to the last of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books. All of them are great, but I would definitely recommend reading them in order. After that, another of my favorite authors is Connie Willis, and I went for her first novel, Lincoln’s Dreams. This is an oddball book, genre-busting if you will. It’s not my favorite of hers—that distinction goes to the Oxford time travel series—but I certainly learned more about Robert E. Lee than I was expecting. If you’re new to her, the starting point would be The Doomsday Book. If you don’t like that one, you and I are done. 

And on the audio front, a woman who is swiftly joining the ranks of my favorites is H.G. Parry. I finished The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, and loved it. There’s something about a good away-at-school book that can really grab you. Who doesn’t mix in the narrative fiction with the narrative reality of one’s own school days, somehow wishing that the real had been more like the fictional, which in fact it somehow becomes? I was not a fan of her historical rights-of-magicians stories, The Shadow Histories, but there’s plenty more where that came from. She’s a New Zealander, by the way, and I would expect she has lots more books in her. 

Alan Moore's The Great When, on the other hand, was an almost impossible listen. The problem was that the style of the writing requires serious attention that is impossible to give to an audiobook. I gave up after a couple of hours of not really following it. I might try to read it on paper some day. It is not the first book that I've come across on my headphones that just doesn't work as an audio, including most indicatively Mrs. Dalloway and its stream of consciousness. Oh well... 

In which we honor Ted Turner Debate

Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this…

Once upon a time there was high school debate. (My HS time, for the sake of full disclosure.) A team of two debaters argued one another over government policies, citing facts to support their positions. Each team had a shoebox of index cards on which were hand-written the facts they were presenting, collected mostly from magazine articles, discovered through using a library reference book entitled The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (which, BTW, still exists online). Over time, and thanks to Xerox machines, those index cards grew into giant files of 8x10 sheets of documentation; an elite team might wheel four giant Rubbermaid tubs of these files from tournament to tournament and from round to round. In order to use this vast collection of research, speakers had to talk fast. Eventually, at the so-called highest levels of debate, the speaking speed was virtually incomprehensible to anyone not trained in it. 

Phillips 66 is a petroleum refineries company that, as many major corporations do, sponsors community activities. For a number of years Phillips sponsored high school debate: let’s face it, it takes a bit of the thing Woody Guthrie called the do re mi to run a national tournament. One year around 1980, the story goes, Phillips execs visited the NFL (as NSDA was called then) national tournament to bask in the glow of all that beneficial do re mi. They made the mistake, apparently, of visiting a debate round, and found themselves in a tobacco auction. Can’t we have something our people can watch and actually make some sort of sense out of? 

Thus Lincoln-Douglas Debate was born, aimed to provide an alternative to the existing Cross-X or Policy debate. The goal was to create an event that wouldn’t have all year, including summer camps, to amass evidence, and for that matter, to debate on a more philosophical rather than practical/policy level. Maybe with these changes, perhaps the average civilian could drop into a round and not only understand it, but even adjudicate it. 

And it worked. For a couple of decades. But as computers and the pipes of the internet came into our lives, eventually, as with Policy, at the so-called highest levels of debate, the speaking speed was virtually incomprehensible to anyone not trained in it. The content wasn’t exactly orthodox either, as postmodernism and critical theory bubbled up from contemporary academia. (This infected policy as well, and probably first, for that matter.) LD was becoming a one-person analog to Policy. And once again only an expert adjudicator could make much sense of it. None of this is to support a claim that there is something wrong with an extremely parochial forensics event; I am simply reporting the reality. Personally I’m all in favor of all kinds of debate, as long as we keep them in perspective. I’ll defend that position elsewhere (and already have, often enough, come to think of it).

And now, around the turn of the millennium, enter Ted Turner. 

Turner was something of a controversial figure in his day; you can read his obituary to get the details. And he was a philanthropist, with plenty of the do re mi to philanthropize with. I do not know the details of how it happened, but one day the NFL/NSDA announced the creation of Ted Turner Debate. Loosely based on the CNN debate program Crossfire, the paradigm of this new debate event was who could make the most persuasive argument. Like the TV show, facts and/or reality were not as important as being convincing. The topics would change every month, so that teams couldn’t amass tubs (or at that point, portable hard drives) of evidence. Since extreme speed was anything but persuasive, that managed inherently to cancel that aspect out. And to put that in boldfaced underlined italics, the audience literally allowed to judge the event was, as much as possible, members of the community (for which read, parents). The people who were presumably responsible for the flaws of CX and LD—the non-teaching professional judges and whatnot, college kids I guess—were banned. Quickly enough Ted Turner Debate became Controversy debate became Crossfire debate, in some order or another. And finally it became Public Forum.

Public Forum has changed a bit over the years, and if you’re reading this, you probably know how. Some topics are monthly, some bi-monthly. There are no longer bans on judging, and parent judging is as often as not the main core of the pool. Which means that at a given tournament a team might face anything from an expert college debater to a local businessperson to a first-time parent in the back of the room, and must adjust accordingly. I think that’s one of the best things about the activity. Flipping for sides and precedence happens sometimes (the NSDA) and not other times (the NCFL). Loosey goosey evidence is still problematic enough, with most of the complaints coming against paraphrasing and bogus strategic challenges. And, say what you will, Public Forum is now the coin of the realm. At least around my region, it is the most popular event on the docket. I would ascribe this ultimately to its accessibility. Any good educator can coach it. Any determined student can master it. Any reasonably intelligent adult can adjudicate it. (Parent judges, as a bonus, do not need to be paid, and can also act as chaperones, a double whammy.) 

So Ted Turner, recently deceased, creator of CNN and TCM and God knows what-all, should be honored in our debate circles for being one of the reasons we have our most popular debate activity. 

Rest in peace. 

In which we get the NYCFL ready for 2026-7

There has not been Policy at States for as long as I can remember. I think the last time was in Albany, the year Richard Sodikow retired. LD that year was in a bleak high school with virtually no hospitality for the judges or the students. Policy, apparently, made our venue look like a stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. Why Policy went off the boards after that is a mystery to me. They may have rebelled against the State organization, or maybe the State organization rebelled against them. Since then, the shrinking number of Policy schools in the region hasn’t helped. Monticello, Newburgh, Lakeland, Edgemont, even Hendrick Hudson…All gone. In any case, a couple of us were pushing to get Policy back at States, even in its diminished condition. Given that there was no more space at our venue, Bronx Science, why not at least try it as a virtual event on Saturday, maybe live on Sunday for Elims? Or mayb all virtual? Having no portfolio for the NYSFL myself, all I could do was wonder aloud in the direction of Catholic Charlie, a Regional Director.

Maybe next year? I’ll keep wondering aloud. 

Business from two directions brings this up now, because I have spent a bunch of time this most recent week working on next year’s NYCFL debate tournaments. First of all, one of the local CX stalwarts was having difficulty figuring exactly what divisions were when in the whole shebang. This was a case of it looking perfectly clear to me, the exhibitor, but not to her, the exhibitee (so to speak). In this situation there are two possible ways to proceed: blame the viewer for not understanding your obviously clear as spring water exposition, or accept that the spring water of your exposition has a bit of mud in it. Putting all the tournaments up on tabroom solves the problem. You can find all the tournaments offered in a circuit, ours being obviously NYCFL, and when you go to one of those tournaments, the events offered are clearly delineated. 

(Which, BTW, brings up another issue. I tend to be pretty free in approving tournaments for our circuit. The problem with that is that when you look at our circuit on tabroom, it’s overflowing with tournaments that are not NYCFLs. Given that we run a goodly number overall, between the literal NYCFL and the ODL, I think it makes sense in the future to be a little more discretionary with these approvals to make things more manageable for our membership. If someone is nearby, say the Tri-State League centered in Brooklyn, or the Long Island or NJ events that are heavily attended by our NYCFL folks, it’s one thing. But if I can’t find you on the map, even though you are a friend of ODL, no one from our league is really going to need to know what you’re running because they’re never going to go there even if they wanted to. Sorry about that.)

The other business was a question that arose over the nature of an invitation. I claim, truthfully, that our in-person NYCFL debate events are open to non-members. (The speech and congress events, with I think one exception, are all members-only.) In fact, the more non-members the better insofar as creating a more diverse field. The membership accepts same-school debates as a necessary evil, and we do our best in tab to stir things up as much as possible, but different-school debates are way more desirable. Bringing in outside schools helps that happen. So by me, everyone is invited. But as far as this nebulous everyone is concerned, how do they know that? Once upon a time, pre-internet, we were invited to tournaments because they sent us an invitation in the mail. Or they faxed it (look It up, young Padawan). Nowadays, you post it on tabroom. Which means that my posting of all of next year’s debate events on tabroom not only informs regular attendees of what’s happening, but it presents the information in the most public place possible, the de facto information center. Add to that, literally opening the page for any of these tournaments immediately presents you with the information that you are welcome even if you’re a non-member, plus I’m still working on some main-page language explaining as briefly as possible anything a non-member needs to know. It’s not exactly a mailed invitation, but it acts as one in 2026. 

So, two tournament birds, one tabroom stone. Perfect? Not quite. Pretty close? Hopefully.