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Here are links to all the people I mentioned in the talk, including every obituary:

• Ann Wroe’s obituaries in The Economist

• Four more from The Economist (not mentioned in the talk but worth reading):

  • Harold Pinter

  • The Mars Rover

  • Bill Millin, the bagpiper at the D-Day landings

  • Benson the fish

  • Cédric Mauduit, civil servant killed in the Bataclan attacks

• Simon Mann obituary (The Economist)

• The third Lord Moynihan obituary (Daily Telegraph via Wayback Machine)

• Tina Turner obituary (The Economist)

• Matthew Perry obituary (The Economist)

• Basil D’Oliveira obituary (Daily Telegraph)

• David Lawrence obituary (Daily Telegraph)

• Julius Eastman obituary (Village Voice) ~ Julius Eastman (BBC Sounds) ~ More about Julius Eastman

• “The double obit of Alfred Brendel and Kim Woodburn”

• Harrison Birtwistle obituary (Morning Star)

• The History of Bad Ideas: the decisive battle Past Present Future podcast

• Lt Col John Pine-Coffin obituary (Daily Telegraph)

• Noreen Riols obituary (The Times)

• Martha Gellhorn’s obituary can be found in the book The Times: Great Women’s Lives (2014)

• Leo Marks obituary (Daily Telegraph) ~ Between Silk And Cyanide ~ My earlier post about Leo Marks

• Anne Wroe’s Reddit AMA

• Irmgard Furchner obituary (Daily Telegraph)

• Somerset Struben de Chair ~ Somerset Struben de Chair’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery

• Asil Nadir obituary (Financial Times)

• The history of British obituaries

• Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd obituary (The Guardian)

• The Economist on Hermann Abs and Lord Roll

• Harry de Quetteville on Daily Telegraph obits

• Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer by Heather Lende

• The Halsingland Hotel

• The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson’s book about obituaries and obit writers

• Matthew Engel’s 2012 FT piece about Lunch with the FT, from which the Gavin Ewart story is taken ~ Gavin and Jane Ewart portrait in the National Portrait Gallery

I originally wrote it three years ago, idling away a Sunday afternoon watching the BBC’s Glastonbury livestream and wondering about data science, as one does. The question on my mind was the one at the top: since I started paying attention to the festival in the mid-1990s it has felt as though the acts are getting older. I decided to find out whether the numbers bore that out.

The full original post is below, and I’ve added an epilogue.

I was wondering, in a Whatsapp group with some friends (as much wondering is done these days) whether it’s true that the acts playing Glastonbury are getting older.

So I decided to find out. This, I should say, is highly unscientific, and there are various caveats to the data. But I reckon it stands up reasonably well.

A note: I used to go to a lot of gigs, but I’ve never been all that interested in Glastonbury, so I have no particular bias, in either direction, regarding whether the trends depicted are good, or bad, or happy, or sad, or whether they tell us anything about the state of the nation. I enjoy the sound of modern Glastonbury on the BBC as much as I enjoyed the sound of 1990s Glastonbury on Channel 4. I was just interested in the answer to the question.

That answer looks like it is: yes, headliners are getting older. That may or may not be obvious, but I still found the data interesting (skip to the charts below if you want to get to the good stuff).

Here’s the main source, along with each act’s own Wikipedia pages.

Here is the average age of acts to have headlined Glastonbury on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of each festival since 1992, on the Main Stage (the Pyramid for almost all the listed years) and the Other (second) Stage.

“Headlined” in this case means “is listed most prominently on the Wikipedia page for that year’s festival. And it goes back to 1992 because there was no festival in 1991 and Wikipedia doesn’t list Other Stage headliners for 1990, and I didn’t think it was worth going looking, for the sake of this meager “research”.

Where acts have more than one member, I’ve taken a rough average of their listed years of birth. Where that isn’t listed I’ve used the ages of those members who are listed. Where there are large age differences within acts, I’ve used the ages of the most prominent members, or the most frequent ages. I’ll admit that this is quite wishy-washy, but it wouldn’t skew the data all that much if you were to collect the exact ages.

Here’s the average number of years since each of those headliners rose to prominence:

Caveats: I’ve had to use a bit of leeway here. New Order more or less became prominent as soon as they formed in 1980, whereas did Ladysmith Black Mambazo become prominent in the 1960s or the 1980s? Fortunately the latter question didn’t arise because LBM played in 1990 and I decided not to include that year, for this and other reasons. You’ll have to accept my definitions of “prominence”, but again I don’t think exact dates, were we able to agree that such things existed, would make very much difference.

Here’s the age data in a time-series chart, including linear trend lines:

And here’s the prominence data in the same format

Here, also, is the size (number of members) of each act (similar caveats re Wikipedia and my definitions of who’s in or not in the group), because one of the group asked about it. I don’t find it all that interesting so I haven’t made a time series chart but, eyeballing it, there seems to be a shift towards smaller/solo acts, which probably reflects modern pop sensibilities.

Epilogue

It’s been three years, so how has the festival fared in the three years since? Here’s the data:

I haven’t included the graphs but they tell more or less the same story as they did last time.

When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, and when Pope Benedict retired in 2013, I ran a game we called Popestakes, a simple sweepstakes lottery to allow people to bet on whom the next Pope would be.

Well, we’re back. But with some changes.

Entries are now closed

The rules for Popestakes III (entries now closed)

• Entries will cost £5 per person

• One entry per person

• The contest is open to anyone: please tell your friends

• You will receive two entries:

  • For your first entry you will be allocated (at random, as in a standard sweepstakes) a potential Pope from the list of 15 top-seeded cardinals.

  • For your second entry you may choose any other cardinal who is not in the list of 15 top seeds. If you do not wish to pick one of those, you may opt instead to have one randomly allocated to you.

  • The full pot (the sum of all entry fees minus credit/debit card transaction fees) will be paid out to the person who has selected or been allocated the cardinal who is named Pope by the conclave.

  • If more than one person has selected or been allocated the named electee, the pot will be shared between those winners.

Questions

• Is this legal?

  • Under the UK’s gambling legislation I do not believe this to be an illegal lottery.

• Will I go to hell?

  • I can’t tell you that. On the question of whether this game specifically will lead you to eternal damnation, my learned theological opinion is that there is long precedent for people betting on the conclave, which suggests that… well, you may or not find it reassuring. In any case, the church’s position is that the sole condition of entry to heaven is that at the point of death one exists in a state of grace. The rest is up to you.

• From where did you get the list of runners and riders?

  • From oddschecker.com which has a comprehensive list. I have not checked any of the names so should you pick a name who turns out to be in some way ineligible, that’s on you.

• Where is the entry money going?

  • I have to pay a small fee on the payment card transactions. Other than that, every penny will be paid out in winnings as described in the rules above.

• What if nobody wins?

  • If the new Pope has not been chosen by (or allocated to) any Popestakes player, all the prize money will be donated to charity.

• Can you help me choose whom to back?

  • Here’s an entertaining Bluesky thread comparing some of the big names to central bankers. I grant you that’s probably not the kind of help you were hoping for, but it does give each of them some biographical detail.

• How do I know you’re not just going to run off with all the money?

  • You don’t: you’ll just have to trust me. But you broadly know who I am, and also I’ve run this twice before, to the benefit of many happy participants.

The runners and riders

The top 15 seeds are:

• Pietro Parolin

• Luis Antonio Tagle

• Peter Turkson

• Matteo Zuppi

• Pierbattista Pizzaballa

• Peter Erdo

• Robert Sarah

• Fridolin Ambongo Besungu

• Vincent Nichols

• Angelo Scola

• Jean-Marc Aveline

• Kevin Farrell

• Jose Tolentino

• Fernando Filoni

• Michael Czerny

The rest of the field:

• Joseph Tobin

• Angelo Bagnasco

• Raymond Leo Burke

• Mario Grech

• Timothy Radcliffe

• Louis Sako

• Wim Eijk

• Angelo De Donatis

• Timothy Dolan

• Robert Francis Prevost

• Francis Arinze

• Konrad Krajewski

• Mark Ouellet

• Gerhard Ludwig Muller

• Baldassare Reina

• Christoph Schonborn

• Wilton Daniel Gregory

• Antonio Canizares Llovera

• Blase Joseph Cupich

• Malcolm Ranjith

• Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga

• Joao Braz de Aviz

• Carlos Aguiar Retes

• Odilo Pedro Scherer

• Mauro Piacenza

• Sean Patrick OMalley

• Dominik Duka

• Jack McDonald

• Francisco Robles Ortega

• Gianfranco Ravasi

• Reinhard Marx

• Lauro Tisi

• Bechara Peter Rai

• Anders Arborelius

• William Goh

• Thomas Collins

• Arthur Roche

• Piero Marini

• Leonardo Steiner

• Charles Maung Bo

• Wilfrid Napier

• Italo DellOro

• Salvador Iniguez

• Carlo Maria Vigano

• Cristobal Lopez Romero

• Daniel Sturla

• Gerald Cyprien Lacroix

• Jaime Spengler

• Jean-Claude Hollerich

• John Dew

• Lazarus You Heung-sik

• Mauro Gambetti

• Mykola Bychok

• Wilton Gregory

The totals were:

• 18 art exhibitions

• 14 museums

• 28 plays and musicals

• 20 gigs or concerts

• 26 others, including talks, walks, comedy, major sporting events and one particularly interesting restaurant

Here are the final three highlights from 2024:

4. 🎶Most highly-awaited gig

I interviewed Candidate more than 20 years ago in a pub in Camden, for PennyBlackMusic, a site with which I’m still involved. At the time they didn’t gig very much, and when they wound things down a few years after that interview I assumed my chance to see them had gone.

But then in 2023 new Candidate records began to appear, and then that November the band played a stripped-down set in a (surprisingly good) pizza/cocktail bar in Walthamstow. The band then put in a full appearance in September 2024 at The Harrison pub in the no-man’s land between Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury and King’s Cross. It was incredible.

Other memorable gigs in the gallery above are Crowded House and Nilufer Yanya at Pryzm in Kingston, Bat for Lashes at St John’s Church in Kingston (all of which were put on by the incredible Banquet Records), MJ Lenderman at the Garage in Highbury, Bonnie “Prince” Billy at Rough Trade in Shoreditch, and below - and only just second to Candidate in the highlight of the year, the incomparable Beth Gibbons doing a secret(ish) pre-tour warm-up show at the Charing Cross Theatre.

5. 🤡Scariest clown

I’m still not totally sure what a “clown” is in the modern sense in which comedians use it, but it seems to involve lots of physical work, lots of audience work and - maybe - lots of costume/make-up work? Let me know what you think in the comments.

In February I saw the excellent clown Mikey Bligh-Smith (pictured above as a clown cloud) at This Machine Kills Wasps, a regular night my friend James runs down in Brighton. You should go.

Later in the year, in November at Soho Theatre, I saw the clown Natalie Palamides do an excellent one-woman two-person show called Weer. I returned to Soho Theatre the following month for the best of the lot, the incredible Julia Masli (the aforementioned James booked her for one of his shows a couple of years ago, so he knows what he’s doing. You should go). Masli’s show combines clowning, comedy of embarrassment and group therapy in a way that sounds excruciating but which works exceptionally well.

6. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦Most entertaining kids’ show

My son is now 10 which means he has started coming to things that I might do alone or that my wife and I would have done ourselves. He enjoyed Hadestown and was pretty caught up in the story and the songs.

We saw Bubble Man Louis Pearl at a local theatre who was good, but the highlight of 2024 was Ministry of Science which tours regularly but which we saw at the glorious Richmond Theatre back in January. In addition to putting in an enormous amount of hard work, MoS managed to thrill an audience of very mixed ages, with experiments and gags that entertained five-year-olds as much as ten-year-olds. Thoroughly recommended, should you be in the market for such things.

Onwards, then, into 2025, kicking off with the historically unlikely double act of Franz Ferdinand and Doctor Strangelove. What were your cultural highlights of 2024 and what are you looking forward to in 2025?

That led me to a thought that it would be interesting specifically to note down everything cultural I did in 2024. So here we are. The totals were:

• 18 art exhibitions

• 14 museums

• 28 plays and musicals

• 20 gigs or concerts

• 26 others, including talks, walks, comedy, major sporting events and one particularly interesting restaurant

And here are three highlights - the other three will follow next week:

1. 🎭Most memorable theatre

I saw a lot this year, not particularly through effort to seek out good stuff, but simply because (perhaps this is a post-covid dividend) there seemed to be an enormous amount of inventive new theatre in London this year. Ulster American was cartoonish and entertainingly violent, while the new Jez Butterworth play, The Hills of California, was beautiful, if slighter than Jerusalem or The Ferryman. The Patrick Marber-directed Nachtland was perhaps trying too hard, while Standing at the Sky’s Edge was fun, if less memorable tune-wise than I’d hoped for from a Richard Hawley-scored musical. Passing Strange was less than the sum of its parts, sadly, while Farm Hall was engrossing but ultimately a little disappointing, and Harry Clarke, the one-man Billy Crudup show, was almost the most memorable, simply because of Crudup’s stage presence.

But probably the most memorable show was the revived Death of England trilogy, a pair of 90-minute one-man shows followed by a slightly longer two-hander. Paapa Essiedu and Thomas Coombes were electrifying as Delroy and Michael respectively, two friends each telling their own (and one another’s) stories. Coombes had the better script, and Erin Doherty and Sharon Duncan-Brewster were let down a little by a much lighter script for their double act. But this was the show (alright, set of shows) that I’d see again without thinking.

2. ^🍹Most well-crafted drinks

I almost called this “most well-crafted soft drinks” but then realised that would mean I couldn’t commend 🔶🟥🔵 A Bar with Shapes for a Name, one of many London entries on most “best bars in the world” list, where the cocktails are endlessly inventive and the service is top-notch.

But my most memorable drinks were softs, at the twelve-seater Aulis in Soho, where my wife and I had dinner in February. We drove, so we both went for the soft drinks pairings, a set menu of drinks to accompany each course, and it was the highlight of the evening. I can remember almost none of them, ten months later, except for one that the maître d'/sommelier/barman (there are only four staff on site so everyone does a bit of everything) had lovingly crafted from pressed raspberry twigs. The whole thing was delightful.

3. 🛣️Longest journey (and most fun art)

In January my son and I set out on a small adventure, heading to a wintry Glasgow by rail for a few days, on a mission to see my cousin Ramesh’s art exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water, at Glasgow’s Tramshed gallery.

The exhibition was immense, and immensely enjoyable, not least because it’s Ramesh’s first showing in the UK.

To be continued next week…

I’m going to be taking a bit of a new direction, which is to write about the thing I’ve thought the most about at work over the last several years: decision making and critical thinking.

Those (they’re really the same thing) are the key skills of product management, the discipline in which I’ve worked for the last 12 years. It will also branch out into related fields such as process improvement and modern ways of working, and of thinking about work.

I’ll make it fun and readable, so don’t worry that you’re going to get an academic treatise in your inbox. There’ll also be a short music playlist each time, and I’ll keep on with the links to interesting stuff that’s not just about decision making.

Tell me what you think, and what you want to see. And let’s kick off with a thought about decisions.

1. Decisions and the serenity prayer

I’m not a religious person, though I did grow up in a religious household, and I went to church for the first half of my life, so religious thinking suffuses my brain in ways that are occasionally useful.

One of those is that over and over again I’ve found myself in conversations with product managers I’m coaching or managing, or simply with colleagues or on social media, in which I find myself recommending the “serenity prayer” as a way to cope with the demands of the job.

The prayer is attributed to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, albeit in a slightly different form from how it’s famously used today, which is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

This, it seems to me, is as close as we can get to a founding tenet of the craft of product management, which is all about opportunity costs, trade-offs and the art of saying “no” to people while not making them hate you.

As a guide to decision-making, what it directs us to do is to focus on the things we can change: in other words, to prioritise. Amazon famously uses the concept of one-way and two-way doors in its decision-making process: if a door (conceptually) is two-way, so you can walk back through your decision, then don’t spend too much time on the decision. If it’s one-way, and so irreversible (or very hard or costly to reverse) then take more care over the decision.

What the serenity prayer (and it works equally well if you lop the word “God,” from the beginning) tells us is that we should spend our time (and our wisdom) deciding not what’s reversible but what’s changeable at all, and then to drop the things that are not - and, crucially, to try to be serene about them.

This, of course, applies equally well to people living in political regimes they wish were different: focus on the change you can enact and disregard the things you cannot do anything about.

What do you think? Have you used serenity at work?

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2. A fascinating video

“Have you ever seen soldering THIS close?” asks this video’s title, and there’s not much more to it than that. It’s ten minutes of someone soldering various things, but it’s both unexpectedly interesting and also quite soothing.

3. Playlist: Nick Cave

I went to see Nick Cave play live last week. It was excellent, transcendent, magnificent, despite being in the airless shed that is the O2 in North Greenwich. A masterclass in how to make the most of such a potentially overpowering venue.

Here’s a playlist (Spotify and Youtube) of five great Cave songs, three by the Bad Seeds, one by Cave’s side project Grinderman and one Cave song covered apocalyptically by a dying, broken, yet defiant Johnny Cash.

Here it is on Youtube

4. A question about Twitter

A lot of people are leaving Twitter for other platforms (you can find me on Bluesky and you can find my “starter pack” of product people here) which led me to notice that many big users (those who have more than 10,000 followers, sometimes many times more than that) are wedded to what product managers would call a “vanity metric”, their total number of followers.

Twitter was always famously bad at driving sales or onward traffic more generally (that is, people tended not to click on links from Twitter and when they did they tended not to buy/subscribe/order). But you’ll find no shortage of people sticking to Twitter for their 70,000 followers, despite the total lack of evidence that those followers are actually valuable to those users.

What do we think is going on here? A simple addiction to Twitter, which then manifests as an insistence that Twitter is good for business? A desire to believe that the number of followers must be reflective of success? Or simply a misunderstanding of the difference between vanity metrics and numbers that are actually valuable or instructive? Let me know what you think.

5. A good Bluesky post

From Andy Lewis:

6. A photograph

For no reason other than I like the glow from the floodlight. I took this picture on a jaunt around Bloomsbury on cold day 12 years ago. I haven’t been back recently but I assume the van (Delia’s Kitchen Afrika) is long gone.

In the meantime, here are three shorts - half, if you will, of a normal sixthings newsletter:

Array Game

My son plays “clicker” games such as Cookie Clicker, but I’ve been finding Array Game very interesting. There’s a bit of maths behind it, which you can click into and read about, but you don’t have to. It just boils all these games down to “make big number get bigger”.

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Desi Pubs

Despite being allergic to the word “desi” (for complicated intra-Asian reasons that I might explain in a future newsletter) I have bought but not yet read Desi Pubs, the new book by. I am very much looking forward to it, and I can also recommend David’s newsletter .

Listen to Wikipedia

This site maps Wikipedia edits onto a neat little display with melodic notes that indicate different things depending on the type of sound. You might need to click “enable sound” at the top.

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In 1998 I was working in the City of London (where, after a 25-year gap, I find myself working again now) and spent a fair amount of time in the bookshops of the square mile, all of which are now gone. There used to be a whole funny little district of booksellers and bookbinders in a warren of alleys leading into Paternoster Square behind St Paul’s Cathedral. The newly developed Square, with its repositioned Temple Bar gate and semi-tasteful restaurants, is probably an improvement, all told, but is not as conducive to good reading.

One of the books I picked up largely because its cover appealed to me, was a slim paperback called 253 which turned out to be by a Canadian science fiction writer called Geoff Ryman. It was an experimental novel - my first foray into reading experimental fiction, which would later take me into the path of one of the form’s masters, BS Johnson, but he is for another time. The book tells the story of 253 people travelling on a southbound Bakerloo Line tube train one day in January 1995.

Ryman had originally made it as a piece of interactive fiction for what was then the new technology of the World Wide Web. The site was unavailable for years, but it was brought back by Ryman a few months ago for the anniversary of the book. It is excellent and you should read it (or if you’ve already read it, read it again).

Read 253 online or buy a copy

two: harbinger customers

I learned about this concept a few years ago and I still find it fascinating: if you’re in the business of building or creating products - as I am - there are always customers whom you wish to court, be they influencers (of whatever kind) or big-name clients or people whose needs are most obviously unmet.

But there is a second type of customer whom you probably want to avoid: the harbinger customer. There’s a good 2020 New York Times article on them which outlines the idea: that there is a type of person who is drawn to products that are doomed to fail. And what’s strange is that not only do these harbingers’ tastes predict failure in one product, but one harbinger can predict taste in many types of product. And stranger still, the effect applies even to regions and areas - a paper published by MIT in 2019 suggested that harbinger ZIP codes exist, in which more people than average make these unusual purchasing decisions compared with households in other areas. And they even predict losing electoral candidates. One Reddit user even claimed to have worked backward from the paper and identified the localities in question:

Now, we’re firmly in the realm of social science, which is in the middle of a massive replication crisis, so it’s entirely possible that this will all turn out to be complete nonsense. And it’s not possible to just walk up to one of these harbinger customers and ask them to tell you what they think of your product, so the idea is of little practical use, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. If there are people who can pick out winners, it’s not far-fetched to believe that there are people who unfailingly pick out losers.

three: Dexy’s Midnight Runners

My son and I were recently listening to Come On Eileen by Dexy’s, and I noticed that last year the band released a remixed version (in the original meaning of ‘remixed’) which is an interesting comparison, and apparently closer to what Kevin Rowland wanted to achieve in 1982. Both videos below:

four: Prayer, by Carol Ann Duffy

A propos of nothing, I was recently reminded of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Prayer

five: the end of computer magazines

Harry McCracken writes about the final print editions of two American computer magazines, Maximum PC and Mac Life. I spent my teens reading computer magazines and music magazines, and my twenties writing for them, and so it was with some sadness that I read Harry’s reflections on the death of print computer magazines in the USA.

I left computer magazines in 2011 having become convinced that audiences were no longer interested in what we had to offer them, and that the barrier to entry was low enough that - to take an example from my particular line of work, editing a reviews section - anyone could either buy software or hardware off the shelf and write a review of it, or they could increasingly convince tech companies’ PR departments to send them the same review samples that we’d been getting, on the basis of growing web traffic that the old print dinosaurs hadn’t been able to capitalise upon*.

The picture below is of issue 121 of Computer Shopper, in its 1998 heyday. Issue 121 has, including the advertising, nearly 1,000 pages, and always felt like the Bible, not just because of its heft but also because of the thinness of its pages. As Harry says, this style of catalogue-magazine was always going to be hit hard by the advent of shopping on the web.

As the chart below shows, I was actually fairly slow on the uptake: by 2011 the computer magazine sector in the UK (the chart shows the biggest titles in the market between 2000 and now, and it’s striking that only two of those titles are left standing) had already taken most of the damage it was going to, and the 12 years after that were really a period of retrenchment and finding of whatever stability they could in the new, much smaller world in which they found themselves.

The prior ten years were where all the damage happened, and to be honest, it did feel like that at the time. It wasn’t fun being in the quarterly editorial meetings in which the story was always and inevitably one of decline, in which if we were bucking the rest of the market by declining more slowly than our competitors, then we took that to be a victory. It’s not until you see the decline mapped out as starkly as it is in the graph that it becomes clear quite how badly things were falling at that time, even for what was still then the biggest-selling technology publication in Europe. In total, for those six titles, the total circulation fell from 841,000 in 2000 to just 79,000 today, just slightly more than one of the smaller titles, PC Gamer, was selling per issue in 2000.

What is surprising, looking back, is not just the number of people the magazine healthily supported - journalists including writers, editors and sub-editors (both freelance and staff), designers, sales people, brand and marketing, print and process, lab technicians, photographers and illustrators to name a few - but that they were being supported at wages and rates that, if not exactly lavish in 2004, look positively generous by the standards of what people get paid for writing and other work online in 2023 (with a tiny number of exceptions such as ).

*the star is because at the time, and for several years after 2011, it did look like those old print dinosaurs weren’t able to build web audiences, but there has in the last couple of years been one apparent British success story, which is Future Publishing. Having bought out several of the other major magazine publishers in the UK (IPC, which was itself part of Time Inc by the time of its surrender, Dennis, and parts of my own former employer VNU-Ziff Davis which had ended up with Dennis at various points over the last 20 years) Future has now been able to build a remarkably stable and growing business of digital titles.

six: AI photobooth

A Reddit user has turned an old telephone exchange switchbox into some sort of AI photobooth. I’ve no real idea what it’s doing, but I like the steampunk innovation.

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John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is generally a good watch, and this week the show put out a bonus web episode “for people aged under 35 who will never own a house, so our main episode about houses has no value to you, so here’s half an hour about the history of Chuck E Cheese for you instead”.

Like Oliver, I grew up in the UK and so I don’t really know what Chuck E Cheese is, beyond what I’ve picked up from mentions in American TV shows and books. But the episode is unexpectedly fascinating, and among other things it touches on something I knew but had forgotten: CEC was a spin off from Nolan Bushnell’s original Atari Company, in an effort to position its arcade machines in more family-friendly environments than the pool halls they were in already.

But there’s so much more in the video beyond that (the video contains lots of swearing, like most LWT episodes, in case you are watching with kids around or are otherwise concerned).

two: more about American food

One of the things the John Oliver video above touches on is how “ghost kitchens” or “dark kitchens” now work. Most of us are familiar with the dark kitchen concept: a restaurant that doesn’t exist in the real world as a place you can go to, but only appears as a brand on delivery apps. Orders go to a warehouse kitchen (in London these are often in railway arches) and the delivery driver picks up your food from there and delivers it to you.

What’s new is the rise of dark kitchen brands that are actually existing restaurants, just under a new name. John Oliver covers Chuck E Cheese’s version of this (a hipster pizza delivery outlet called - for some reason - Pasqually’s) but the Eddy Burback video linked above goes into much more detail on the whole thing, and is fascinating. And in case you’re wondering, this kind of fake ghost kitchen branding also exists in the UK - I’ve seen it on delivery apps in London.

three: incredible innovation in India

A terrific piece of reporting from Rest of World, about how small Indian shopkeepers (mainly of roadside stalls) were struggling with the move to digital payments: they were happy to accept them, but were not able to confirm the payments had gone through, because so many of the shopkeepers cannot read or write.

The customers, often in a rush, would get impatient. Ali would have to spend more time attending to them than he had back when he accepted only cash. Eventually, a fellow vendor suggested he subscribe to a “sound box” — a nifty internet-connected device that reads out payment confirmation messages. “Earlier, I had to wait for five to 10 minutes after every transaction to get confirmation,” Ali told Rest of World. “I can now focus on other customers while the payment is being made. I have installed two sound boxes … one from Paytm and the other one from PhonePe.”

So as the piece explains, and as the above quote trails, the shopkeepers have been investing en masse in little speakers that read out a confirmation that the payment has gone through. You can hear a recording in the piece. It’s a clever example of innovation in a specific space that works because a company was listening to its customers and developing empathy for them.

four: a London thing

If you happen to be in London later this month, you can visit one of the city’s more quirky museums as it reopens after restoration: The Old Operating Theatre, in Southwark just by London Bridge station. I was lucky enough to see a theatrical magic performance there about 10 years ago which was excellent, but it’s an enjoyable place to visit even when there isn’t a show on.

Entry will cost £8.45 for adults from Saturday 22 April onwards, but on Friday 21 April entry is free all day, from 10.30am until 5pm.

The Old Operating Theatre: 9a St Thomas St, London SE1 9RY

five: the republicans and wrestling

Turns out we’re a bit America-heavy this issue. This was a fascinating opinion piece from the New York Times making the case that if you want to understand the modern Republican Party (the GOP as it’s sometimes called) then you should look to wrestling, or the WWE. I know almost nothing about wrestling but it was still a fascinating and persuasive case.

Before he met Mr. McMahon, Mr. Trump had probably never worked a rowdy arena into a bitter, liberated frenzy by feeding it a mix of verboten truths and outrageous lies. But that skill, so essential in wrestling, would become Mr. Trump’s world-changing trademark.

(I’ve used an NYT gift link so you should be able to read the story even if you don’t have a subscription. I’m reasonably sure my NYT subscription allows me to post my gift links here - let’s find out 👀.)

six: revenue management on the Titanic

I just read this piece this morning and thought it was worth sharing. writes a Substack called which I read even though I have no professional interest in airlines. It's interesting regardless, and sometimes he comes through with a corker, as in the piece below, in which he compares fares, lodgings, food and entertainment on the RMS Titanic to what modern air passengers would experience (without the falling-into-a-freezing-ocean bit). If you're interested in products, pricing, positioning or marketing then it's a must-read, and even if you're not, you're likely to find something of interest.

and a bonus thing: Substack Notes

Substack suggested that I should send this to you as a plug for its new Notes feature which has heartily upset Twitter owner Elon Musk. The wording is not very me but here it is, followed by the rest of the bumf about Notes:

I just published my first note on Substack Notes, and would love for you to join me there!

Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

Go to Notes

How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to six things, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of six things can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Go to Notes

one: drums

At a gig last week I was reminiscing with Daniel about a musician we’d both enjoyed back in the early 2000s. Back then Andrew Dymond, who also called himself Andre Diamant, was also known as Duracell. He played extraordinary, energetic and explosive sets at small gigs, where he used drum triggers to play covers of old computer game theme tunes, more or less entirely on a drum kit.

I was sorry to look him up as a result of that conversation to find that he now suffers from hyperacusis (a noise sensitivity disorder that sounds like it can make everyday life extremely unpleasant - let alone making music) and he no longer drums, though apparently he creates mbira music on Youtube.

The forum thread linked above has a lot of information, and more importantly lots of links to Duracell in his prime, such as the one below. I was fortunate enough to see him back then at a gig at the (sadly missed) Luminaire in Kilburn, north London, and he was just as extraordinary as I’d been hoping.

Some apt thoughts from that forum thread:

1 It’s rare that this type of setup (drum triggers and sequencing + 80s game music) moves beyond novelty but this is precisely that.

2 Such a physical performance - afterwards it felt like a herculean feat

3 There’s a 2008 documentary about him and other one-person performers, which is available to watch here - I’ve only seen the first few minutes so far, but it looks very good

two: mark

Mark (MJ) Hibbett has played one thousand gigs, and Daniel (again) and I managed to join him for the thousandth, at the King and Queen pub in central London on February 2. If you’ve heard of him for one thing, it’ll be for Hey Hey 16k, a delightful song that he released in 1999 which celebrates the olden days of home computers.

Since then he has carved out a career as a modern English troubador, creating sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful and sometimes elegiac folk music. He (obviously) has some more gigs coming up this year, and is always worth catching. In the brief time when I co-ran an indie club in the mid-2000s, Mark was the only live act we ever got it together enough to present live at the club, and I’m glad we did. Being both a nerd and a data guy by trade, Mark has also released a dataset about his gigs, along with GRAPHS.

three: megablast

At work we were talking about game soundtracks and I couldn’t not post the greatest thing I heard in 1991 when someone at school lent me a pirated Commodore Amiga disk that had the words “XENON 2” written on the label in felt-tip.

The game was great, but the opening credits, and the music, were astounding. The Bitmap Brothers did extraordinary things with the limited resources at hand in the computers of the early 1990s, but the masterstroke was teaming up with actual pop stars - Bomb the Bass in this case - to produce a soundtrack that would make use of the state-of-the-art sound hardware in the Amiga and Atari ST computers. The charting version of the song (“Megablast”) is below the game soundtrack video.

four: the perfect concert piano

From the Toronto Globe and Mail, one of those terrific pieces about a very specific thing. The headline is: How do you pick the perfect concert piano? Inside the Royal Conservatory’s $300,000 bet, but if anything it’s even more interesting. It takes us into the world of piano movers, piano choosers, the history of the Steinway company, Glenn Gould and so much more.

five: frustration, creativity, jazz

The piano thing above reminded me to write about this talk which I showed to some colleagues this month. We were talking about inspiring product managers and I said that when I want inspiration as a PM I turn to Tim Harford, which is true. I love his delivery: I was at this talk (at the 2016 Mind The Product conference) and he had the audience spellbound from start to finish - and you will notice that for maybe 98 per cent of the time there is nothing at all on the screen behind him. No videos, no gifs, no headlines and certainly no walls of text.

The talk itself is inspiring too. Its title is How Frustration Makes Us Creative, but it’s about so much more than that: Keith Jarrett, London tube strikes, Brian Eno to name but three. You can also listen to a version of the same talk as a podcast from Tim if you prefer audio to video.

six: Rippa

I recently subscribed to 's Substack which is excellent. In this recent issue he talked about a former mentee of his, Rippa, who is making a name for himself as a recording artist. I enjoyed this track of his (Youtube version here) and you can - and should - read the full story from Ciaran’s newsletter below.

ALL CITY

Flow Like River

During the lockdowns of 2020, one of my esteemed me…

Read more

3 years ago · 5 likes · Ciaran Thapar

Thank you for your time and your headspace. I’ll see you again next month. If you have a tip for me - music or otherwise - let me know.

Leave a comment

I play in a quiz league called LearnedLeague (I found out about it from this excellent 2021 New Yorker piece and I joined up later that year). If you’re interested in that sort of thing, drop me a line and I should be able to refer you for an invitation.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to submit my own question set for what’s known as a One-Day Special on the site - a quiz on a specific topic. My quiz was about The BBC and its history, and you can see the questions and play along here. You don’t need to be a member, or to log in - just click or tap the little prompts to see each answer.

a London thing

This video is “London’s unfinished motorways”, a 2011 video by the tremendous Jay Foreman. It’s part one in an ongoing series called “Unfinished London” - the most recent, episode 15, was only a couple of months ago.

I was reminded of it by a Whatsapp conversation about this Guardian article, which treads some of the same roads, so to speak. Both the article and the video are worth your time if you want to learn about why some of London’s roads are the way they are, and how they might have been very different.

a money thing

Why The Super Rich Are Inevitable is a smart little web comic that explains cleverly (a view of) why economic inequality is a function of the systems we have.

a Youtube thing and a poker thing all at once

I recently came across Steven Bridges on Youtube - he’s a British magician who decided to become a card counter. He’s been posting videos of his adventures for the last 12 months or so. Interestingly, he waited more than a year before he even started posting about what he was up to. And inevitably, in the later videos, he is often “backed off” (told to stop playing) by casino staff because they have seen his videos.

The one I’ve picked here is a good place to start. The two series so far do follow a rough story, but you can start at any point. It’s always fascinating - he is a charismatic and entertaining fellow to watch, which makes sense given that he was a professional magician.

a… work thing, I suppose

So this is how I learned my work calendar wasn’t private.

a food thing

I really enjoyed this interview with Tim Hayward (FT columnist, BBC food show panellist, Cambridge restaurateur, and more) by from his newsletter .

It’s typically wide-ranging and insightful (on both sides of the conversation), but what stood out to me in particular was the observation that below-the-line commenters on FT articles are different to below-the-line commenters on Guardian articles, because the people reading the FT pieces don’t want your job. They have a job they’re happy with and they just want to know what you think. Not a universal phenomenon, but one that holds some water, I think.

It was Bob Granleese at The Guardian says Hayward who pointed out that “whenever you write anything for The Guardian you'll get upward of 100 comments underneath, 99 of which will say, you know, you're a filthy metropolitan oaf or how can you possibly say that about cheese? What about the vegetarians? Or, some people are allergic to this, you know, not me, but just saying.”

“And you don't get any of that at the FT. I used to get letters in fountain pen saying [affects a clipped Home Counties tone] my wife and I find your review extremely agreeable, and perhaps we'll go there one day. Thank you very much. Yours sincerely. And it was lovely.”

Bob said, you know, the thing about The Guardian is everybody who reads it got a liberal arts degree at a reasonable university. It would be the height of their ambition to write for The Guardian section that specialises in their area. And they all think they could do a better job than you, and truth is probably most of them can.”

At the FT, “they don't want to do your job,” says Hayward. “It's a lovely, rewarding space in which to then go out and do whatever you like. We've just had a new editor join us from the US who's giving me even more space now, and it's literally part of the brief to choose your own restaurants, not just upmarket places, anything.”

Agree, disagree, just want to shout at me?

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a youtube thing

Years ago, I bought one of those huge police-style Maglite torches (or “flashlights” if you insist). I have hardly used it, but during the first covid lockdown I bought a conversion kit that switches out the old tungsten bulb for a new and powerful Cree LED. It seemed relatively above board, but I found this video fascinating this week because I didn’t know there was such a market for shonky high-power torches on Amazon (this was foolish - of course there is such a market. There’s a market for everything). And it’s astonishing how far the true luminescence of these lights is from their manufacturers’ claims.

a product management thing

My intention is to include something related to my work each time. Here’s a good thought from about asking “why” and testing our assumptions.

a music thing

I’m behind the curve but I recently came across this Irish neo-folk band and this song (along with Eileen Og) has quickly become a favourite for my son and me (and, grudgingly, for my wife).

a twitter thing

A conversation about surprising acronyms. Replies included Stax (the record label), Gestapo, scuba and other excellent suggestions.

a culture thing

I saw this excellent one-man theatrical/poetic reading of Die Hard in London before Christmas. It’s no longer on there, but it’s going on tour in 2023, and is well worth watching (I have already managed to sell at least three tickets on Whatsapp or on Slack and each of them has come back happy). It’s by Richard Marsh and you can find more information, a trailer and tour dates at the show’s website.

another thing

I got 28 on this quiz, I think, which is lower than I’d have predicted, but quite satisfying (via Marie Le Conte)

I was wondering, in a Whatsapp group with some friends (as much wondering is done these days) whether it’s true that the acts playing Glastonbury are getting older.

So I decided to find out. This, I should say, is highly unscientific, and there are various caveats to the data. But I reckon it stands up reasonably well.

A note: I used to go to a lot of gigs, but I’ve never been all that interested in Glastonbury, so I have no particular bias, in either direction, regarding whether the trends depicted are good, or bad, or happy, or sad, or whether they tell us anything about the state of the nation. I enjoy the sound of modern Glastonbury on the BBC as much as I enjoyed the sound of 1990s Glastonbury on Channel 4. I was just interested in the answer to the question.

That answer looks like it is: yes, headliners are getting older. That may or may not be obvious, but I still found the data interesting (skip to the charts below if you want to get to the good stuff).

Here’s the main source, along with each act’s own Wikipedia pages.

Here is the average age of acts to have headlined Glastonbury on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of each festival since 1992, on the Main Stage (the Pyramid for almost all the listed years) and the Other (second) Stage.

“Headlined” in this case means “is listed most prominently on the Wikipedia page for that year’s festival. And it goes back to 1992 because there was no festival in 1991 and Wikipedia doesn’t list Other Stage headliners for 1990, and I didn’t think it was worth going looking, for the sake of this meager “research”.

Where acts have more than one member, I’ve taken a rough average of their listed years of birth. Where that isn’t listed I’ve used the ages of those members who are listed. Where there are large age differences within acts, I’ve used the ages of the most prominent members, or the most frequent ages. I’ll admit that this is quite wishy-washy, but it wouldn’t skew the data all that much if you were to collect the exact ages.

Here’s the average number of years since each of those headliners rose to prominence:

Caveats: I’ve had to use a bit of leeway here. New Order more or less became prominent as soon as they formed in 1980, whereas did Ladysmith Black Mambazo become prominent in the 1960s or the 1980s? Fortunately the latter question didn’t arise because LBM played in 1990 and I decided not to include that year, for this and other reasons. You’ll have to accept my definitions of “prominence”, but again I don’t think exact dates, were we able to agree that such things existed, would make very much difference.

Here’s the age data in a time-series chart, including linear trend lines:

And here’s the prominence data in the same format

Here, also, is the size (number of members) of each act (similar caveats re Wikipedia and my definitions of who’s in or not in the group), because one of the group asked about it. I don’t find it all that interesting so I haven’t made a time series chart but, eyeballing it, there seems to be a shift towards smaller/solo acts, which probably reflects modern pop sensibilities.

GOOD KIDS ON THE BLOCK

The jury is still out on GOOD CHARLOTTE — they’ve cornered the teen market but is there more to the bratty punkers than meets the eye for the rest of us? As they release their new album ‘The Young And The Hopeless’, we sent ANTHONY DHANENDRAN to find out why we should give ’em another listen…

Good Charlotte are a punk band. That’s punk as in three-chord, thrash-em-out anthems, all attitude and aggro. Well, some of those things, anyway. They’ve got the songs, sure, but they’re decidedly lacking in the attitude side of things. Which is to say, they won’t spit at you in the street, nor will they be baited into throwing a television set out of a hotel window. Not even at the Hilton.

If you were looking for a punk band in central London, the Trafalgar Hilton is probably not the first place you’d think of trying. Sandwiched between The Mall and Trafalgar Square, and overseen by the sombre bronze figure of General Charles Napier (d. 1853), the place seems to be largely populated by people in suits either having or arranging meetings.

“We’re an honest band, and you’ll always be able to tell what’s going on in our lives through our music” — Benji Madden

Today, though, the guest roster includes Benji and Joel Madden, Billy Martin, Paul Thomas and Chris Wilson (the band), and assorted hangers-on. They’re here to promote ‘The Young And The Hopeless’, their album of the aforementioned thrash-em-out anthems, in between full-house shows in Birmingham, London and Manchester, at the end of an 18-date European tour.

“We actually have one more leg of this tour after Christmas, and that’s in Japan, but it’s only a week,” says Joel. “So at that point I think we’ll all be really happy that the tour’s over. We really all just want to get back into the studio, so early next year we’re going to get back in and make another record.”

‘The Young And The Hopeless’, the band’s major-label debut, is a collection of 14 songs largely about growing up in small-town America, and avoiding spending the rest of your life in the same place. It is evidently a popular theme, the album having gone platinum on both sides of the Atlantic.

Joel and twin brother Benji formed the band in 1997 and worked the local circuit of tiny gigs, while working “all kinds of shitty jobs”, according to Benji. Having come up through the musical ranks, moving from small venue to slightly-less-small-venue, until finally being signed nearly three years later, GC found themselves feted as ‘the next big thing’. Won’t the next album be a more difficult proposition, now there’s no more need to wait tables down at the Golden Corral restaurant (“it was literally a corral for angry fat people”)?

“I think you change, obviously, not so much for the bad,” says Joel, who, as vocalist, assumes the role of spokesman. “Everybody changes — every year you’re a different person than you were last year, so the last two years have definitely changed us. Seeing the world and doing the things we’ve done, I think we’re definitely different, so the record will definitely be a different record, and that’s a good thing. We want kids to see how we change. That’s the exciting part, to me, of loving a band. All the bands that I love, I’ve watched their evolution, of where they were when I bought their first record, to where they were on their third, fourth, fifth record. So we want to have the same thing, we want people to be able to be able to map out where we’ve been from our first record, to now, to the next record. We’re an honest band, and you’ll always be able to tell what’s going on in our lives through our music.”

“What the fuck is so cool about trashing a hotel room, or getting drunk and insulting people? That, to me, is not cool, to me that’s just stupid” — Joel Madden

Honesty is important to Good Charlotte (the name comes from a favourite children’s book). One question that has dogged them since the album’s release is that of their punk-ness. Can musicians who cavort with the mainstream media, from MTV to CD:UK, and who — most heinous of all — are trimly well-behaved, really be considered Punk? A recent Rolling Stone piece was headlined ‘The Polite Punks’, a charge that seems to rile the band (only they’re too polite to admit it).

“Was that because we actually have manners or something?” asks Joel. “The notion that you have to party to be a punk is, I guess… Well, whoever had that is fine with me, but I never want us to be a band that doesn’t have to answer for what we do. I never want to not have consequences for trashing a hotel room. That, to me, is just a waste of time, energy and money.”

So no car-in-pool incidents, then?

“I think of things realistically, like, what the fuck is so cool about trashing a hotel room, or getting drunk and insulting people? That, to me, is not cool, to me that’s just stupid. The way I choose to live my life, and these guys are the same way, we wanna answer for what we do. If I’m an asshole to someone, I want them to go, ‘You’re an asshole,’ and not just let me do it ‘cos I’m in a band.”

That seems to be the end of that. It may not be fashionable, but they aren’t party animals. Another charge that has been levelled at them is the notion that they’re a kids’ band. With those tight, controlled harmonies, and eschewing chugging riffs for melody, it’s easy to see why they appeal to the younger end of the market. That said, there’s no reason why, if it’s good, this kind of thing shouldn’t appeal across a wider age range, and GC’s particular brand of angst is better than most.

It may be that their refusal to stick to punk’s unwritten rules was their undoing within the punk community, such as it is. GC disregarded those rules, largely to do with the notion of ‘selling out’, in favour of maximum appeal to the fans they wanted to hear the record. It’s the same approach that Kurt Cobain took when he agreed to change the cover art of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ to suit the giant US retail chain Wal-Mart, because that was the only place many kids in the mid-West could buy the album.

In GC’s case it meant lots of MTV action, even to the point where they were given the chance to present their own show, ‘All Things Rock’, something they had to give up recently. “We’d done a great thing — we got a lot of bands on MTV that would have otherwise not been played on MTV, we got a lot of new music out to kids, from bands they might not have heard of, so we got an opportunity to do some really good things for the scene that we were in. But there’s a point where you have to just go, ‘That was then, we had a good time and we got to do that, but this is now and we just don’t have the time or energy.’”

They’ve played a selection of London’s smaller venues on previous tours, and “we’re really looking forward to playing Brixton Academy. We’ve heard about it a lot, but we’ve never played there,” says Billy. But Joel’s mind is on other things — namely the gig three days hence in Manchester, and a possible chance meeting with one Steven Patrick Morrissey: “I didn’t really get into Morrissey until the last couple of years. But it’s definitely been influencing lately the things that I write about.” Behind him, the rest of the band, chuckling, break into singing ‘We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful’, complete with bad Spinal-Tap-English accents.

The Smith are an unlikely influence on an American punk band, but just as Morrissey’s tales of middle-English idiosyncrasies resonated with minds in America, so Joel Madden’s lyrics seem to have struck a chord over here. Not that GC are the new Smiths, or anything like them, but the influence isn’t as silly as it first seemed. “The older I get, the more his style influences mine,” Joel adds. “I think the older I get the more I can understand his lyrics a little better.”

For a 23-year-old, Joel has led an eventful life, from those “shitty jobs” to the years of constant touring, and the eventual fame and fortune of the present day. They are experiences that inform both his writing and his attitude to work: “It’s a working-class attitude, I think. It’s always having jobs and always working for the money. If, when we were kids, we wanted something, we had to go out and buy it, or if we wanted to do something, we had to work for it. I think it’s just a working-class attitude that we’ve always had, but it’s not something that we’re proud of, it’s just there.

“I couldn’t care less whether or not someone thinks I’m a party animal, I don’t give a damn. It doesn’t matter to me. I like being able to comprehend shit, and I don’t like being super wasted. But back when I used to get fucked-up, it was because I was escaping my life, what I had to deal with. And what I had to deal with, I was 17 or 18 when I left home, I got fucked up to get away from something, because I hated my jobs, and I hated that I was going nowhere.”

Chris adds: “We’ve had plenty of times getting fucked up on the weekends. But you still had to go to work, and you don’t show up to work drunk, you’ve gotta get your job done, you’ve gotta make the money. Sure, Joel doesn’t drink, but the three of us do, and there’ll be nights where we’ll go and we will party.”

“I like being able to comprehend shit, and I don’t like being super wasted. But back when I used to get fucked-up, it was because I was escaping my life” — Joel Madden

Other than being (relatively) clean-living, the band’s faith is another important pillar, and another reason they get up the noses of the punk cognoscenti. In amongst the tattoos, you’ll find religious imagery as well as the more usual tattoo fare, but they are more reluctant to discuss their religion with regards to the music than other American Christian-rockers. A teetotaler Christian might be the last thing you expect to find in a punk band, but Joel is uninterested in such stereotypes: “Getting fucked up was like, the coolest thing, the funniest thing I had, besides being in the band. But the band, even, was sometimes so hard work and such stress, because it felt like we were never gonna go anywhere, that getting fucked up was the only thing I had. But as I’ve gotten older, and when I chose to go straight-edged, it was a whole different thing for me, and it’s just something that I am now. The person that I am now is not the same person that I was six years ago. But I don’t care what anyone else does.”

It is the sincerity, and the impression they give that they really care about what they’re doing, and who they’re doing it for, that both define the band and defy the punk attitude. But, as Chris points out: “We love what we have and we’re really happy that we’ve got to this stage, that there’s no sense in just throwing it all away.”

‘The Young And The Hopeless’ is out now on Sony Music

Matchday thirteen

Q1. LIFESTYLE — The association of doves with peace originates with the biblical story of the Great Flood, during which a dove — released by Noah after the rains stopped — returned holding what in its beak (a sign of life indicating that the waters had receded)? OLIVE LEAF/BRANCH

A straightforward one to start with, and a 94 per cent leaguewide get rate. My opponent and I both score 1 here.

Q2. SCIENCE — Of the actual historical people after whom elements of the periodic table are named, two are women. One is Marie Curie, while the other was a Viennese-born Swedish physicist who was a co-discoverer of nuclear fission in 1938. What is her name, commemorated in element 109? LISE MEITNER

And then no idea here. I miss for 3 and my opponent, who looked strong in science, misses for 1. Turns out element 109 was not named Meitnerium until after I’d left school, so it wasn’t on the periodic table of my A-Level chemistry years. I hope I won’t forget this, but I can’t be annoyed at myself for missing it. From the easy previous question to a 15 per cent leaguewide get rate here.

Q3. CURR EVENTS — The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is known as COP26 (as it is the 26th “Conference of the Parties” to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), convened on October 31, 2021, in what city? GLASGOW

Another easy one for the Brits, I am awarded 1 for this and my opponent gets it right for a well-placed 0, which puts us on 2(2)-1(2) at half-way.

Q4. GEOGRAPHY — While all three claims are debatable, what mountain — a volcano that last erupted in 1707 — is widely credited as the world’s most visited mountain (credible given its proximity to a major world city), as the world’s most climbed (possible as no experience is necessary during the summer months), and also as the world’s most photographed (a fact that would not be its only association with photography)? MT. FUJI

This took me a while, and like many players I first alit at Mt Vesuvius, but finally after a few minutes the association of Fuji with Tokyo made itself clear. Interesting half clue in “Fuji”/”photography” too. We both hit 2 here.

Q5. GAMES/SPORT — Most races which are categorized as TT races (for “Tourist Trophy”), including the original Isle of Man TT which first took place in 1907 and the Dutch TT which is normally held each June, are races using what conveyance? MOTORCYCLE

Again, relatively straightforward for the Brits, the Manx TT is a motorcycle race, but only 28 per cent of players get this, and my opponent is not one of them, missing a 3. I score a 0, though, presumably based on my declared location. We’re at 4(4)-3(3) with one to go.

Q6. AMER HIST — “Africa for Africans at home and abroad” was the slogan of an organization founded by what Jamaican in 1914, whose efforts in the US starting in 1916 focused on repatriation of Black people to a new African republic established from former German colonies? MARCUS GARVEY

Kicking myself for this. Couldn’t think of a Jamaican statesman for the right time period, and ended up with Norman Manley, who was roughly the right age but wrong politically. My opponent does score this, for 2, and I miss a 2, so I go down 4(4)-5(4).

Matchday fourteen

Q1. FILM — In an enduringly popular 1994 film adaptation, the character played by Morgan Freeman was an Irishman in Stephen King’s original story. What name is used for that character in both the movie and novella? RED

I’m playing people higher than me in the league this week but this was a poor performance on my part. On this question I couldn’t pin the character’s name at all. Of course it’s Red, but I ended up with “Bird” which is not the name of a Shawshank character at all, though does sort-of describe one of the inmates. I miss for 2 but at least I score my strong-on-film a 0.

Q2. WORLD HIST — The ancient cities of Argos, Sparta, and Megalopolis were located on what Greek peninsula, connected to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth? PELOPONNESUS/PELOPONNESE

Another kicker, after question one. I’ve been here, and I studied it at school, and it just didn’t come to me. I settled on “Aegean” like a lot of players, but my opponent hits for 2 and I miss my 3.

Q3. THEATRE — “Now and Forever” was the tagline for what musical, which, with 21 years in London and 18 on Broadway, did seem to run forever, figuratively speaking? CATS

I can’t decide whether this was a kicker. I didn’t recognise the tag and haven’t seen the musical, and also couldn’t work out whether “forever” was some sort of extra clue. But I probably should have got to it. I went with “Love Never Dies”, Lloyd-Webber’s dreary sequel to Phantom — cruelly caricatured as “Paint Never Dries” when it came out — and missed a 2, while my opponent scored a 1, leaving us at 0(0)-3(3) at half time. This was the first matchday on which I had three questions for which I felt I could or should have done better with more thinking.

Q4. LITERATURE — What publishing partnership, formed in 1857 between an established lithographer and his firm’s bookkeeper, promoted its lithographs for many years as “Colored Engravings for the People”? CURRIER & IVES

But then we get to a “definitely would never have got this”. I went with Conde Nast as the name of a publishing house (of what I thought was about the right time, but was actually founded fifty years later). We both miss here — me for 1 and my oppo for 2.

Q5. LIFESTYLE — The Hegira, which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar, was Muhammad’s secret migration in 622 from Mecca to escape persecution and live among the people of Yathrib, which is today better known as what? MEDINA

I finally score a point on question five. There’s been a very lively message board discussion about whether this question was well written, but I think it was clear. It was obviously — to me — asking for a place, and having started in Yemen, led astray by the letter Y, I finally decided this must refer to the migration to Medina, and Medina must have had an earlier name, which of course turned out to be true. But while my opponent misses a 3, I only score a 0. So we’re 0(1)-3(3) and I can’t win because only the 1s are in play.

Q6. ART — Thousands of figures created in the third century BCE and discovered near the Chinese city of Xi’an were sculpted in what medium, which is included in the name by which the collection is regularly known? TERRA COTTA

I knew this one straight off, as did 80 per cent of players, but I only score a 1, and the fact that my opponent misses is scant consolation as I slide to another loss, 1(2)-3(3).

Matchday fifteen

Q1. GAMES/SPORT — Name the German who won Wimbledon Singles championships in 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, and 1996, with the first of those a part of a historic “Golden Slam” (all four Grand Slams plus Olympic gold). STEFFI GRAF

Like many players, my mind went to Boris Becker (the most common wrong answer) but something nagging at the back of my mind led me to the brilliant Steffi Graf, and I pick up 2 here, and my opponent misses the 3.

Q2. WORLD HIST — At least 60 pharaohs of ancient Egypt’s 18th to 20th dynasties, beginning with Thutmose I and famously including Tutankhamun, were buried in tombs in a narrow gorge in western Thebes known (quite accurately, in fact) as the ______ of the _____. (Fill in both blanks.) VALLEY, KINGS

Like 74 per cent of players, we both score here, though for 0 each. I thought this would be even better known, to be honest.

Q3. MATH — What unit of measurement of angles is equal to approximately 57.296 degrees? Exactly π/2 of this unit equals a right angle. RADIANS

Having not forgotten my A Level maths, this was an easy get, which scored me 2 and my opponent missed a 2, which left us at 4(3)-0(1) half-way in.

Q4. THEATRE — In the original 1955 Broadway run of the musical Damn Yankees, Gwen Verdon played what character, the devil’s assistant who gets whatever she wants? LOLA

I had no idea here (apparently the phrase “what Lola wants, Lola gets” is an American cultural trope) and having submitted my answers and got this wrong at 7.55am, I opened the New York Times crossword app at 8.05am to find the following clue. Note to self: always do the crossword first. I miss a 3 but my opponent at least has the good grace to miss, for 1.

Q5. SCIENCE — American chemist Stephanie Kwolek developed the first liquid crystal polymer fiber, leading to the development of poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, which has a myriad of applications (e.g., tires, cables, helmet, ballistic body armor). This polymer is better known by what brand name owned by DuPont (Kwolek’s employer for 40+ years)? KEVLAR

I went through various artificial fibres, from Rayon to Nylon to Teflon, and then I re-read the question and noticed the references to armour and protection, which made the answer fairly clear. I pick up 1, and my opponent scores 2, which leaves us at 5(4)-2(2) with one to go.

Q6. GEOGRAPHY — Africa’s third-largest lake by area (after Victoria and Tanganyika) covers 20% of its namesake country. What is the name that the lake and country share? MALAWI

I am not familiar with Lake Malawi (formerly Lake Nyasa, it turns out) so I ended up at Lake Chad, which was foolish because Chad is 1) huge and 2) more or less Saharan. Fortunately my opponent misses too, both of us for 1, and so we end the day with our scores unchanged and my first win since matchday nine, when I was fifth, and as a result I raise my league position from 16 yesterday to the slightly less precarious 11 today.

Matchday sixteen

Q1. LITERATURE — Of Athenian dramatist Sophocles’s 123 plays, only seven remain intact, including three relating to Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and what third, named after and centered on Oedipus and Jocasta’s daughter? ANTIGONE

The eternal question: might I have got this? I’m not a player who stews over questions all day. I prefer to get in and out quickly, and it’s rare that I find a question that causes me to rethink that strategy. I went with “Oedipus the Father”. I’ve seen the first play — in a remarkable Ralph Fiennes performance — but I’ve never seen Antigone, so this was a miss for 2, but also a miss for my opponent for a well-placed 3.

Q2. POP MUSIC — 1950’s “Rollin’ Stone” was the first single on the Chicago-based Chess record label by what artist, who was born McKinley Morganfield in (or around) 1915 and raised near Clarksdale, MS? MUDDY WATERS

An insta-get for me, with Muddy Waters’s real name imprinted in my mind, and we both score 1.

Q3. FILM — According to on-screen text that opens the film, what 1999 movie is based on found footage shot five years prior by three student documentary filmmakers? THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

We both score here too, me for 1 and my opponent for 2. A quick question in my mind over whether this was Cloverfield, which actually came much later, but otherwise no real question. It’s 2(2)-3(2) at half-time.

Q4. AMER HIST — The policy with respect to Latin America during the early Franklin D. Roosevelt administration had what popular name, which today may be more associated with State Farm Insurance, but in the 1930s reflected America’s intended hands-off approach and military withdrawal from the region? GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY

The State Farm clue is no help to me here (though I suspect it was to the Americans, with this question having a 79 per cent leaguewide get rate), so I end up with the definitely-wrong-but-it’s-an-answer “Isolation”. I’ve never even heard of the “good neighbo(u)r policy”. But my opponent has, for 1, and I miss a 3, which I was never going to hit.

Q5. CURR EVENTS — A border crisis and humanitarian crisis erupted in the summer of 2021 as tens of thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, attempted to enter the European Union from what country, in an orchestrated act by that country in retaliation for the EU’s economic sanctions against it? BELARUS

A quick riffle here through various countries just to make sure, and a quick mental check to make sure Hungary was definitely in the EU, but otherwise this is definitely Belarus, and we both score our 0 here.

Q6. TELEVISION — Leland McKenzie, Douglas Brackman, Ann Kelsey, Arnie Becker, and Stuart Markowitz were among the large cast of characters on what acclaimed ensemble drama, which aired Thursday nights at 10:00 pm (ET) on NBC from 1986 to 1994? L.A. LAW

I’m 4–2 down with my 2 to score, and had I hit it, I’d have tied the match, because my opponent missed for 2. The correct answer even flashed through my mind, and I regret not listening to my mind in this case. But Thirtysomething (which I suspect might be a sitcom, I’ve never seen it) had settled in my mind already, probably because the “large cast” in the clue and “thirty” in the title were chatting to each other. The lesson here is to listen to the signals in my mind, I guess. So we end on 2(3)-4(4) and I slip back to 12th place with one day to go this week.

One ray of light, though, is that I played my first (I think) perfect defense, having allocated the 0, 1, 1 and 2 to the four questions my opponent answered correctly. Sadly my opponent played an even better defense, with me hitting my 0, 1 and 1.

Matchday seventeen

Q1. SCIENCE — What was the last name of the Scottish botanist who introduced the popular Pseudotsuga menziesii into cultivation in 1827, and thus after whom the tree is commonly named (or mis-named, as it is actually a conifer in the pine family)? DOUGLAS

A common theme in my write-ups has been a kind of generalised acceptance, where I was never going to get the answer to a particular question, because that knowledge has never come anywhere close to me. But this was the opposite, a kicker in the sense that I kicked myself once I saw the answer. I think I must have misread the clue and assumed the question was much harder than it turned out to be, which was why I scored my opponent 3 — which they missed — and while I could have done with the 2 here, it didn’t end up a big deal.

I posted on the LL message board thread for this question that it reminded me of one of my favourite pieces of writing, a lament upon the death of Douglas Adams, by Richard Dawkins.

The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those cliches.

We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas Fir, tall, upright, evergreen. It is the wrong time of year, but we’ll give it our best shot.

Off to the arboretum.

Q2. GEOGRAPHY — The House of Hashim (a.k.a. Hashemites) is the ruling royal family of what country (as reflected in the country’s full official name)? JORDAN

This one was more straightforward. I was tumbling around the Middle East for a while and settled upon Lebanon, before the voice in my head shouting “Lebanon isn’t a monarchy, you fool” got too loud to ignore. But from there it was a short mental hop to the phrase “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” for the correct answer. One each here for my opponent and me.

Q3. POP MUSIC — Name the country artist who released the 1987 album Always and Forever, which spent 40 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Country album chart and saw four of its songs (including “Forever and Ever, Amen”) reach #1 on the Country Singles chart. RANDY TRAVIS

I like country music and have spent time in Nashville, but 1980s mainstream country pop isn’t really my thing and so I didn’t really have a clue here. I went with Bonnie Raitt, who’s really more blues than country. Could have picked up a 3 for the right answer, but I wasn’t ever going to get to Randy Travis, an artist I’ve never consciously heard. My opponent missed too, for 1, so we end the half on 1(1)-1(1).

Q4. BUS/ECON — American businesswoman Marissa Mayer, who was an executive at Google for many years (where she was employee #20), served as president and CEO of what other company from July 2012 until its acquisition by Verizon in 2017? YAHOO!

Some slight hesitation here, trying to remember whether Mayer was ever CEO of AOL, but in the end I plumped for the right answer, for 1, and my opponent got it right for 0.

Q5. WORLD HIST — What was the name of the building, made of prefabricated glass and iron, that was constructed in Hyde Park, London, to accommodate the Great Exhibition of 1851? It was the birthplace (after its move to South London) and namesake of a still-extant English Premiership side. CRYSTAL PALACE

An insta-get for most British people, I imagine, and my 2 for the opponent was well placed (they missed), and their 0 for me was also well placed. It’s 2(3)-1(2) with one to go, and each of us has a 2 in play.

Q6. LITERATURE — A best-selling series of young adult mysteries by British author Holly Jackson begins with the 2019 novel (and is collectively known as) A Good Girl’s Guide to what? MURDER

This was a guess for me, but it seemed a decent guess to go for murder. For younger readers that’d be too dark a word to put in the title of book, but I re-checked the clue to make sure I’d correctly read “young adult” and decided that murder was exactly the sort of title you’d find here. My opponent and I both hit our 2-pointers, and we end up 4(4)-3(3).

That final-day win brings me back up to 11th place in the league (out of 32). It’s still very closely bunched in the middle, so no safety yet, though.

Matchday eleven

Q1. CURR EVENTS — H.R.3684, a $1 trillion bill that was passed by the 117th Congress after a bipartisan vote in the US House of Representatives on November 5, 2021, is officially known as the [REDACTED] Investment and Jobs Act. What word has been redacted? INFRASTRUCTURE

I couldn’t quite put my finger on this, though once I saw the answer it was obvious. I went with “coronavirus”, but I did assume that it was pretty well known among Americans, and given that my opponent was in the USA, I scored this a zero, as did my opponent for me. She scored, as did 77 per cent of players leaguewide, and I missed, but both for 0.

Q2. LITERATURE — One of 20th-century author Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh’s first successful short stories — a genre in which he is regarded as a master — was titled “Farsi shakar ast”, which translates to English as “_____ is Sugar” (fill in the blank). PERSIAN

Reasonably easy for me, knowing several Farsi speakers. There’s since been an entertaining discussion in the LL message board about whether “Farsi” itself should have been an acceptable answer, a splendidly nitpicky position with which I find myself agreeing. We scored each other 2 here, but my opponent missed.

Q3. GEOGRAPHY — The “city” of Nuuk (technically an illoqarfik and formerly known as Godthåb) is the most populous city on what island? GREENLAND

The image that popped into my head here was the moving map on various transatlantic flights, where the way to tell that you’re at least close to land, after the interminable north Atlantic great circle route, is seeing “Godthåb” on the map on Greenland’s western coast. I didn’t know that Nuuk was the same place, but was pleased with the extra clue. We scored each other 1 here and both made the points. It’s 3(2)-1(2) at half time.

Q4. SCIENCE — Belfast-born physicist and mathematician William Thomson, who is widely credited with clarifying the thermodynamic concept of absolute zero and determining its correct value, was elevated to the peerage in 1892, becoming 1st Baron what? KELVIN

William Thomson was Lord Kelvin, a fact somehow osmosed into me from GCSE physics lessons, so no trouble here, but no trouble either for my opponent, and we both score 2.

Q5. AMER HIST — What was the last name of the patriarch and self-made millionaire who was the first chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, chair of the powerful US Maritime Commission in 1937, and the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1938? KENNEDY

I thought this was either Rockefeller or Getty and went for Getty. I would have scored 3 for it had I got it right, but the correct answer turned out to be (of course) (Joe) Kennedy. A nice little touch that this was clued on November 22, 58 years after the death of Joe Kennedy’s most famous son. Scored my opponent 1 and we both missed, so with a question to go, it’s 5(3)-3(3).

Q6. TELEVISION — Rebecca Rabbit, Suzy Sheep, and Danny Dog are among the close friends of what cheeky animated British ungulate? (Full name required.) PEPPA PIG

Another easy one here for anyone with school-age children. I foolishly underestimated how well known the programme is, though, and gave my opponent a 3 here, and she scored me 1. The leaguewide get rate is 62 per cent. We both get it right, and I’ve gone from a position of strength to an avoidable tie, at 6(4)-6(4). A learning opportunity.

Matchday twelve

Q1. MATH — In math, a “multiplicative inverse” can be defined, for a number x, as the number which when multiplied by x produces the “multiplicative identity” (i.e., one). In most scenarios, the multiplicative inverse is much better known by what other term? RECIPROCAL

A real head-scratcher, because having done GCSEs, A-Levels and part of a degree in mathematics, I’ve apparently forgotten the word “reciprocal” in the 20 years since I last did any proper maths. Again, as with yesterday’s Q1, I scored it 0 because I think it will be well-known and my opponent is very strong in “math”. I don’t think I’d ever have got to the correct answer (I put the definitely-wrong “inverse” just to put something down), so not much to be done here other than move on. He gets a 0 and takes it, while I miss a 1.

Q2. BUS/ECON — The name of what pencil model, produced by a company founded by American entrepreneur Joseph Dixon in 1827, comes from the discovery of a graphite ore in 1815 on Lead Mountain in upstate New York? TICONDEROGA

No idea here, and the answer is not something I could have pulled out of my memory. Assuming that the pencils themselves are well-known in the US, and knowing that my opponent is an American, I scored it 1, which he picks up, and I miss a 2.

Q3. FILM — The title of a 1988 stylized documentary by Errol Morris, when shifted on the visible color spectrum, becomes an ambitious 1998 war epic by Terrence Malick. Give the title of either film. THE THIN BLUE LINE/THE THIN RED LINE

I am an Errol Morris fan but without hte Terrence Malick part of the clue I couldn’t have placed the Morris film. The Malick film is terrific, however, and was an instant get. A 2 for my opponent who is medium-weak in film and who I’m hoping doesn’t remember either of these films. Turns out he does, though, and we end the first half on 1(0)-3(3).

Q4. ART — In a mock-epic poem published in The New York Review of Books in 1984 titled “The SoHoiad”, in which critic Robert Hughes pillories the commercialization and dishonesty of the New York art scene in that decade, he refers to two particular artists (rather unfairly) as “Keith Boring” and “Jean-Michel Basketcase”. What were the actual last names of these two individuals? HARING, BASQUIAT

I don’t know the poem, but the artists were reasonably easy to get, and I made a possibly unwise assumption that because Art is my opponent’s weakest category, this is where the 3 should go, which turns out to be about right, because he misses it, and I pick up a 2.

Q5. WORLD HIST — Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Kent are generally identified as four of the seven kingdoms in England from the 5th century until the 8th century. The other three are named after what Germanic people (specifically, their West, East, and South tribes), who entered Britain with the Angles during the latter stages of the Roman occupation? SAXONS

Another of those questions that reminds me not to complain about American-centric ones like Q2 above. An easy get, and a 2 for my opponent on the basis of weakness in Geography and a hope that he doesn’t know this, which he turns out not to. However, based (presumably and correctly) on my location, I pick up my 0 here. With one question to go it’s 3(3)-3(3).

Q6. LANGUAGE — Coca, guano, jerky, poncho, and llama are among the words that originated in what language, which was spoken by the Incan tribes around Cuzco and today has official status in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia? QUECHUA

The only question of the round, apart from the forehead-slapping Q1, where I was left wondering whether I should have let this sit in my head for a while. I went with “Andean” without any real clue, and I have heard of Quechua. One to think about. But my opponent is good on language, so a 1 for them here, which they miss, but I’ve also missed my 3, and we end up tied 3(3)-3(3).

Down a couple of places at the end of this short game week, I finish up in ninth position. Need to start picking things up next week to avoid sliding into the bottom half of the table.

Matchday six

Q1. FOOD/DRINK — Among the vast contributions to American culture and cuisine by Jewish immigrants from Romania in the 19th century is what spiced, smoked, and steamed delicacy and delicatessen staple, whose name comes from the Romanian verb for “to preserve”? PASTRAMI

I was struggling with this one. I initially alighted on “bagel” and then re-read the question and realised the first two adjectives count it out. And then I remembered my friend The Picky Glutton writing about pastirma, so maybe pastrami is the answer. It’s certainly spiced and smoked, but I didn’t realise until afterwards that it’s steamed as well (which distinguishes it from pastirma). My opponent gives me 1 for this. She’s in Ohio which as far as I know isn’t pastrami country, but she’s strong on Food/Drink so I score her 0 which she misses.

Q2. GAMES/SPORT — Point guard and NBA All-Star Richie Guerin led the visiting New York Knicks with 39 points in a high-scoring affair played in the Hershey Sports Arena on March 2, 1962. What Warrior led all scorers that night? WILT CHAMBERLAIN

Absolutely no idea. Another US sport question, and I gather (afterward) that this is a famous game, but I’d never even heard of Wilt Chamberlain. I put Kareem Abdul Jabbar here on the usual “name a basketball player” basis. I mainly know him from Airplane, and it turns out he was 15 at the time of this game. Oh well. My oppo looks weak on sport so she gets a 3, and I got a 2, but we both missed.

Q3. FILM — The Best Actor winner for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Best Years of Our Lives, the director of The Heartbreak Kid and Ishtar, and the writer/director of Me and You and Everyone We Know and Kajillionaire — these three individuals have last names that share what distinction, most notably? MONTHS

I couldn’t place any of these except Ishtar, and for that I could only remember Dustin Hoffman’s name. Without a clue, I went (along with nine per cent of players) with “hyphenation”. This is a good question, I think, with plenty of “ins”, so I’ll chalk it up to experience and move on. We scored each other 1 and both missed, so at the half it’s 1(1)-0(0).

Q4. LITERATURE — One of the first American magazines targeted toward women (in 1884) and the first American magazine of any kind to reach one million subscribers ceased monthly print publication in 2014, with its last newsstand issue published in 2016. What was the three-word name of this “Seven Sisters” periodical? LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL

I spent a long time on this one, but it turned out I was barking up the wrong tree anyway. I was thinking “women’s magazines” in general and was heading for Cosmopolitan, Elle, etc, but “seven sisters” turns out to refer to “homemaker” magazines: Better Homes and Gardens (1922-), Family Circle (1932–2019), Good Housekeeping (1885-), Ladies’ Home Journal (1873–2016), McCall’s (1873–2002), Redbook (1903–2019), Woman’s Day (1937-)

I would only have been able to name Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, which I think are the two that made it to the UK. Ladies’ Home Journal didn’t, as far as I know. My answer here was “The Vanity Fair” which I was pretty sure was wrong but was at least a valid answer by the terms of the question. My opponent hit this for 1, and I would have scored 3 had I done the same, which of course I didn’t.

Q5. WORLD HIST — The Chinese nationalist party founded and led by Sun Yat-Sen shortly after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, and still today a prominent party in the politics of Taiwan, is often referred to in the west by what three-letter abbreviation? KMT

Annoyed with this one. Where I would never have got question 2, and can’t really fault myself on question 4, I should have got this but couldn’t quite pull “Kuomintang” out of my head. I ended up going with PNC, which, once it had stuck in my head, wasn’t leaving. It turns out it’s the name of an American bank and nothing to do with China, so I’m not sure why it suggested itself so strongly to me. I’ve been to Taiwan — it’s a glorious country and well worth visiting. And I read up on its history and on the KMT. But managed to forget it. Nevermind. I’d have scored 0 for it anyway, and my opponent missed the 2 I scored her. So we have one question to go and it’s 1(1)-1(1). Nail-biter.

Q6. SCIENCE — The two-empire system of biological classification divided all cellular life into prokaryota and eukaryota. The more current and prevailing three-domain system retains eukaryote and splits prokaryota into two domains. Name either of these two. BACTERIA, ARCHAEA

“Archaea” suggested itself in my head as soon as I read the question. I couldn’t remember the other bit of the prokaryota, but it didn’t matter. I was fairly confident in the answer, and my opponent and I scored each other 2. I scored, she missed, and we finish up 3(2)-1(1). A win, but too close for comfort.

Matchday seven

Q1. FOOD/DRINK — Yogurt diluted with water and flavored (with fruit, cumin, mint, or numerous other options) and sometimes sweetened is a refreshing drink of Punjabi origin best known as what? LASSI

One of those questions that I suspect is a lot easier for Brits than for Americans. I do wonder whether opponents clock my name as south Asian and score appropriately (which they should, usually), but I got a 0 for this. Scored my opponent 1 and she picked it up.

Q2. AMER HIST — Identify the university in New Jersey named after the first canonized native-born American and founder of the first order of nuns in the United States (the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph). SETON HALL UNIVERSITY

Another “never heard of it”. Racked my brain to think of a suitably named university. I figured Columbia might be St Columba, who I was fairly sure wasn’t American (and wasn’t a nun, but might a man have founded an order of nuns? Stranger things have happened). I couldn’t think of a good answer so went with that. Wrong, of course, and would have picked up a 3. Scored my opponent 0 and we both missed.

Q3. GEOGRAPHY — The mountain range known as the Lion Mountains, whose highest point is Picket Hill at just under 3,000 feet, is located on the Atlantic coast entirely within what nation? SIERRA LEONE

It wasn’t until the day after these questions that I finally remembered that “sierra” is Spanish for “mountain chain”, but after a few thoughts in South America, I finally thought the “Leone” bit of Sierra Leone might make sense. Of course on reflection a day later, the whole thing is an obvious clue to the right answer. I picked up 2 for this, and scored my opponent a 3 which she missed. So we’re 2(2)-1(1) at the half.

Q4. CLASS MUSIC — What is the two-word term, a phrase from Italian that idiomatically means “from the beginning” and is often abbreviated “D.C.”, which indicates in musical notation that the previous section of music should be repeated? DA CAPO

As a classical guitar player in my youth, this one came easily having seen it on countless pieces of sheet music. Usually “da capo al fine”. I picked up 1 for this and gave my opponent a 2 for a miss.

Q5. SCIENCE — In 1958, a Swede named Arne Larsson became the first recipient of an implanted artificial device whose natural function is normally provided by a mass of muscle fibers called the sinoatrial node. This device is most commonly and colloquially referred to by what word? PACEMAKER

We both scored 1 here. The pacemaker came to me fairly quickly and while the sinoatrial node didn’t mean anything, I couldn’t come to a better answer. Though “atrial” suggested “heart” to me, so that was an additional point in its favour. We’re 4(4)-2(2) with one to go.

Q6. LIFESTYLE — Which derived unit in the International System of Units would fit best in a particular list that includes a Latin word for “bird”, the location of Davy Crockett’s last stand, a certain fictional spacecraft, and a comic book/cartoon dalmatian-like dog? HERTZ

Annoyed with myself here. I had “avia” as the latin rather than “avis”, and I had “Alamo” correct. The spacecraft is of course “Enterprise” and the dog might be “Dollar” but I didn’t get those. Fixed on the av- and al- beginnings, my mind was already ploughing the “begins with a” furrough — the danger of incorrect anchoring, there. So I ended up with “ampere” which I didn’t think was derived, but I tricked myself into thinking, from V=IR, that it might be. So I didn’t pick up my 2 here — of course, with the other clues, Hertz is the other car rental company — but my opponent collected hers. Good question, and we end on a tie, at 4(4)-4(3).

Matchday eight

Q1. POP MUSIC — What was the last name of the brothers who operated a haberdashery for many years on the corner of 49th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, in a building they would come to own for decades (and name after themselves), and which would become a locus for American popular music? BRILL

Today’s opponent was at the top of the league (called a “Rundle” in LearnedLeague jargon) at the time of this match so I wasn’t hopeful. But this was a good start. I knew that I knew the name, but couldn’t initially pull it out. I had “Tin Pan Alley”, but after a while remembered Brill. I scored it as a 2 which my opponent missed, and I picked up 1 for it.

Q2. WORLD HIST — The October 1986 summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, which defied expectations by nearly ending the Cold War arms race and bringing about nuclear disarmament, took place in what European capital city? REYKJAVIK

I remember quite a few news events from my childhood and this — the Reykjavik summit — was one of them. It put in place (more or less — the talks failed but led to the treaty anyway) the INF nuclear test ban treaty which stood until 2019. I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. I think the name Reykjavik just stuck in my head when I was a child. But I picked up 0 for it and my opponent took her 2.

Q3. GEOGRAPHY — Until October 2018, the name of a famous bridge (originally the Narrows Bridge) was officially misspelled for more than fifty years due to a typo in a construction contract (as it properly has two double letters, not just one). What was this misspelled word (correct spelling not required)? VERRAZZANO

Another one I knew, having spent a lot of time in New York City, and even some time on Staten Island, the borough that is connected to the rest of New York by the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge. I scored my opponent 3 for this, and given a relatively low get rate of 56 per cent, and her profile suggesting no obvious New York connection, I can’t decide whether that was a bad move on my part. Either way we both picked it up, for 1 in my case. So we’re 3(3)-5(2) at the half. It’s not looking great for me, but I still have my 2s and the 3 in play.

Q4. GAMES/SPORT — The best-selling American football video game is known by the shorthand “Madden”; the best-selling basketball series is “2K’; baseball’s is “MLB the Show”. What is the common short name for the best-selling soccer video game series of all time (and by far the biggest for any sport)? FIFA

Another of those “easy if you’re British” questions, though with a league-wide get rate of 87 per cent, it’s clearly well known across the world, even in the soccerphobic USA. My opponent misses, but only for a 0 anyway, and I pick up 2 here.

Q5. SCIENCE — What is the meteorological term for a brief, sudden, violent windstorm, lasting longer than a gust (at least a minute) but shorter than a sustained wind? (It is derived etymologically from a Nordic term — perhaps nautical, perhaps meaning to “cry out” — and is at the center of a 1996 Ridley Scott box office disappointment.) SQUALL

VERY annoyed with myself here. Couldn’t work out a good answer, and neither the “Nordic” clue nor Ridley Scott helped (I hadn’t heard of the film, White Squall). “Squall” did pop into my head, mainly from the term “squally showers” which is often used on the weather forecast and which always feels like it might be the name of a minor character in a Chandler novel. BUT then I left the answer blank, ignoring the cardinal rule of quizzes such as this which is: always answer the question. Either put something in if you think it could be right, or go for a good joke answer if not. My opponent collected her 1 here and I missed the other 2, but crucially I missed the chance of my first 9(6), when you get all the questions right and so collect all the points. Anyway, we’re now 4(4)-6(3) and I need to pick up my 3 in the next question.

Q6. LITERATURE — The Nadine Gordimer novels The Late Bourgeois World (1966), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and July’s People (1981) were set in, and banned in, what country? SOUTH AFRICA

Which turns out to be straightforward. I’ve never read Nadine Gordimer but I do know that she was South African, so in it goes, for the 3. My opponent misses her 1 and we end on 7(5)-4(4).

Matchday nine

Q1. TELEVISION — Rent-a-Car Crash-up Derby, Alligator Tightrope, Shopping Cart Attack, Wasabi Snooters, and Golf Course Airhorn are a few of the dozens of segments from a 2002 film. Name that film, or the earlier television series from which it spun off. JACKASS: THE MOVIE/JACKASS

I was struggling with this for a couple of minutes until I closely re-read the segment titles and then it became clear. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full episode, but my flatmates at the time watched Jackass religiously so in it goes. My opponent forfeited this match so I had no points assigned. I assigned him 1 for this.

Q2. SCIENCE — Although mass and energy can be converted into one another, the total quantity of mass and energy in a system must remain constant. This conservation law in physics is reflected in Einstein’s famous equation where e is energy, m is mass, and c represents what? SPEED OF LIGHT (IN A VACUUM)

Another quick get for me, and I scored my opponent 0 as although he looks weak in science, this is well known, isn’t it? The league-wide get rate is 80 per cent here, so I was probably about right, on balance.

Q3. GEOGRAPHY — Unimak, Umnak, and Attu are among the largest islands in what island chain and volcanic island arc, known natively as Unangam Tanaa? ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

This is a “can’t decide” question — I can’t decide whether I should have got this or not. I’ll know it now, but in the end, without a real clue, I went with Tuvalu. Assigned my opponent 1.

Q4. CLASS MUSIC — Prussian Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, an 18th century composer and harpsichordist to Russian Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, died of tuberculosis at age 29 in 1756, and is most remembered today thanks to a 1741 composition by whom? JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

I wasn’t totally sure here, but reasonably confident it was a Bach, probably the Bach (JS, of course). The LL rule is that unless a first name is specifically asked for in the question, you don’t need to provide one, so I didn’t. I assigned my opponent 3 on the basis of him being middling-to-weak in classical music. It’d be interesting to know whether that was “correct” or not.

Q5. WORLD HIST — What is the term used for the underground burial galleries of the Roman Empire, used most often (but not always) for Christian burials? The word today is often used for any subterranean cemetery and sometimes for underground passageways in general. CATACOMBS

This one came to me quickly as well. I figured the MCWA (most common wrong answer) would be “crypt” which is was with 11 per cent. But crypt comes from the Greek for “hidden” (same as “cryptography” for codes being things used to hide other things), and there would have been a clue to that in the question had it been the correct answer. I scored my opponent 2 here.

Q6. LITERATURE — In 1673, during his performance in the title role of a play he wrote while ill, Molière collapsed, and he died later that day. The play, perhaps ironically, has a title often translated into English as The _____ Invalid (provide the adjective — a direct cognate from the original French title — that fills in the blank). IMAGINARY

I hadn’t heard of this play, but I should probably have worked it out. I went with “false” (/faux) which I think was a reasonable guess. But with a bit more thought I might have got to imaginary. I assigned a 2 here but of course it didn’t matter, and I end up 6(4)-0(F).

Matchday ten

Q1. SCIENCE — What is the two-word phrase for the property of a liquid where the molecules at its exterior edge show a strong inward attraction, with these cohesive forces forming an apparent outer membrane across the edge? SURFACE TENSION

I was a bit uneasy about this question but then the answer “surface tension” reminded me of itself, and it seemed to fit. Nothing else seemed to fit better, so I went with it, fairly confidently. I gave my opponent 2 for this, possibly foolishly, he gave me 1 and we both picked up our points.

Q2. FOOD/DRINK — Derived from the French verb meaning “to spin thread”, what is the four-letter name of the herb — dried sassafras leaves reduced to powder — that can be used to thicken and flavor soups, stews, and, most notably, gumbo? FILÉ

On the other hand, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get this. The only four letter foodstuff associated with Louisiana and New Orleans was okra, and once it had lodged in my head it refused to leave. So although it isn’t a herb and I was sure isn’t sassafras I went with it. I hadn’t heard of Filé but I’ll know it now. It certainly makes more sense of the line “jambalaya, crawfish pie, filé gumbo” from Jambalaya (On the Bayou) by Hank Williams (or the Carpenters, or Gerry and the Pacemakers, if you prefer). We scored each other 1 and neither of us got it right.

Q3. LITERATURE — The Nereids, Naiads, Dryads, Oceanids, and Napaeae were among the groups of minor divinities in Greek mythology who are collectively classified by what term, from the Greek for “bride” or “young wife”? NYMPH

Kicking myself on this one. I went with “Nubia” on the basis of “nubile” meaning “of marriageable age” but being fairly sure it wasn’t correct. And of course it was nymphs, which I should have remembered. My opponent got it right, for 1, and I missed a 2 here. It’s 1(1)-3(2) at half-time.

Q4. GAMES/SPORT — With the christening of the Chiefs’ home in March 2021 as GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, there remain exactly three stadiums that are primary homes to NFL teams and are not named after a corporate entity. Give the full name (city and team name) of any one of the three teams that play in these three stadiums. CHICAGO BEARS, CINCINNATI BENGALS, GREEN BAY PACKERS

This one, though, I was never going to get. Luckily it wasn’t “name an American football stadium”, but I could at least get to “name an NFL team” and have a nine per cent chance of getting it right. Went with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and though I could have named any of the other three, there’s no reason to think I would have, so I’m happy to just move on. I’ve never been one for revising general knowledge, so I’m not going to spend time learning the names of teams and their stadiums, so I’ll be content with taking the loss on this sort of question in future. That said, neither of us got this for 2, against a high league-wide get rate of 73 per cent.

Q5. WORLD HIST — Although originally included in the 1963 establishment of the Federation of Malaysia, which of the country’s fourteen states was forced to secede — and form its own nation — in 1965 due (at least in part) to fears that its largely Chinese population would challenge Malay political dominance? SINGAPORE

No real question about this one in my mind — it was fairly clearly Singapore so I went with that. Unfortunately it was clear to my oppo as well, and we exchanged zeroes here. So with one question to go, I’m losing 1(2)-3(3) and both our 3s are in play on the next question.

Q6. TELEVISION — Rose Marie, George Gobel, Vincent Price, and, most centrally, Paul Lynde were stars that appeared regularly on the classic version of what game show? HOLLYWOOD SQUARES

I was quite confident that the answer was “What’s My Line” which I went with — the clip of Salvador Dali appearing on that programme is well worth your time — and I couldn’t think of another good answer. I have heard of “Hollywood Squares” but I don’t think I could have pulled it out given the clues in the question, so I’ll chalk this one up. In retrospect I’m not sure why I scored my opponent 3 here if I thought it was so obvious, even if he’s weak-ish on Television questions. One to think about for future defenses. In any case, I miss, he scores and from a fairly close position going into this question I end up being thumped 1(2)-6(4).

Having finished week 1 in 16th place, I finish week 2 in 7th, which should feel like a win, but my poor final game of the week meant I slipped from the heights of 5th, one off the promotion places. But it’s my first season in LL proper and so I should be thinking about a steady mid-table finish, not promotion into a rundle from which I’ll get dumped straight back out again after one season. So I’m happy with my placing. See you next week.

I started playing in LearnedLeague a few months ago — it’s a league of 20–30,000 trivia players, and contests take place four times a year for 25 days each. Several players already do daily recaps, and taking those as my cue, I was thinking about doing the same. But I don’t want to log into Twitter, so I’m doing them weekly, and on Medium instead. Playing by LL rules, I won’t post them until all the questions for the week have been publicly marked, to avoid giving hints.

LL is different from most quizzes in that what Americans call “defense” is very important. In addition to answering the six questions posed each game day, you must assign each question a defensive score. That score is what your opponent scores if they get the question right. And if you get it right, you get the defensive points assigned to you for that question by your opponent. The scores are 3, 2, 2, 1, 1 and 0.

There is a culture of “recapping” on Twitter where players run through the previous day’s questions in public. I think this is a great idea: as with prediction tournaments, there is value in publicly or privately thinking one’s answers through. And as Annie Duke says, there is value in re-evaluating the matches you win as much as you do the matches you lose. She was talking about poker, but I think the same principle holds. I’m trying to stay off Twitter, though, so I’m going to do them here, and do them weekly. I don’t really expect anybody to read these — not all the thousands of words, certainly.

Matchday one

Q1. TELEVISION — What TV sitcom’s 1963 episode titled “Family Scrapbook”, during which the central characters reminisce as the title character prepares to enter Mayfield High while his older brother gets ready for State College, is widely credited as the first primetime sitcom episode explicitly presented as a series finale? LEAVE IT TO BEAVER

I was never going to get this. I had heard of LITB before, but I think I’d assumed it was a cartoon about an actual beaver, rather than being about a small child with that nickname. I think I left this blank, being unable to think of a sitcom that fitted all the criteria (a named character in the title, aged about 11–13). I assigned it 3 on the basis that my opponent was weak on television questions (it doesn’t tell you the category when you’re answering, but it does afterwards, as shown above). He did the same to me and both of us got zero for it (you don’t see your opponent’s answers, just the scores assigned).

Q2. LITERATURE — According to a recorded poem from 1970 by Gil Scott-Heron, what “will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions”, “will not make you look five pounds thinner”, “will not go better with Coke”, and “will not fight germs that may cause bad breath” (among many other things)? THE REVOLUTION

GSH was popular when I was in my teens and at university so this was an easy one. My opponent’s ratings suggested he was middling on music, so I dropped in a 2 here. So did he and we both hit our marks.

Q3. FILM — “FR Remove Cart” and “MF Feed A4” are among the error codes displayed on older HP LaserJet printers, but the best known and most notorious was what other code, which was central to an iconic scene in the 1999 movie Office Space? PC LOAD LETTER

Irritating. I watched Office Space again a few months ago, but I couldn’t remember the code. I put “PAPER JAM” but pretty much knowing it wasn’t correct. Turns out the answer was a bit of an Americanism, given that we don’t use Letter paper over here in the UK. But fair enough, given that it’s an American film, and an American quiz league. I scored it 1 and my opponent 2, but we both missed.

At the halfway stage were 2(1)-2(1) — that is to say, we each have two points, and each from one correct answer.

Q4.WORLD HIST — The name of what European city did not become a common feminine name until it was given to, and popularized by, a woman who first came into prominence during the Crimean War in the 1850s. What is that given name, #12 for baby girls in England in 2020 per the UK’s Office for National Statistics? FLORENCE

I was surprised how few people got this (leaguewide % correct was 50) but then it’s an American quiz and Florence Nightingale was a British nurse, so maybe she’s better known here than elsewhere. It took me a while to get to the answer, thinking around European cities, failing to think critically about how many women became famous during the Crimean War. Then it clicked. I happily scooped up the 1 my opponent assigned. I assumed it was easier so I’d assigned this 0, but my opponent missed.

Q5.BUS/ECON — Though it is currently owned by the American manufacturer Stanley Black & Decker, the Craftsman brand of tools was originally established by, and for many decades sold at, what retailer? SEARS

Another American-centric question (if I sound aggrieved, I’m not — as demonstrated by Florence, clearly non-Americans have advantages for some questions). I am not really aware of the Craftsman brand, and so I put Home Depot (as did six per cent of players). I don’t feel so bad about this one, or Q1, because I wasn’t ever going to have got them. Could I have dug out “PC LOAD LETTER” from a recess of the mind? Maybe, but even that is unlikely.

I assigned 2 to this and he 0 to me, but he scored here, so after five of six questions we’re 4(2)-3(2).

Q6.SCIENCE — “Houston, [REDACTED] Base here. The Eagle has landed.” What word is redacted from this quote from July 20, 1969, and is also the name of the “Sea” where the lunar module made its landing on that day? TRANQUILITY

This one came easily, just because for some reason the audio from the Apollo 11 landing is in my head, and the crackly “Tranquility Base here” from Neil Armstrong started playing as soon as I read the question. It may have done for my opponent too, because we both rated this 1, and we both scored, leaving me losing by a point: 5(3)-4(3).

Matchday two

Q1. POP MUSIC — Titles of different songs from the late 1970s by the Bee Gees, Leo Sayer, ABBA, and Andy Gibb all contain what word — an activity appropriate for the era (or really any era)? DANCING

There are questions that look tough on first read, and this was one of them. But then you go back in, break them down and the answer reveals itself. Dancing, of course, via Abba and the Bee Gees. My opponent was in the same “rookie” league as me last season, which means neither of us has much history on which to base a defense. I gave this a 1 and she missed it, having given me a 1 too. Phew.

Q2. MATH — The hexadecimal number 2A, when converted to decimal, becomes a number historically associated in baseball most closely with what player? JACKIE ROBINSON

As soon as I read the whole sentence I knew I wasn’t getting this one. I was able to convert the hex easily into 42, but then I was lost. I presume this is well known among baseball fans, and baseball is a big part of American culture, but I’d barely heard of Robinson before this and wouldn’t have said he was a baseball player, had I been asked. I put Yogi Berra, on the basis of “name a baseball player”. It turns out Chadwick Boseman starred as Robinson in a film called “42” which is what led a lot of players to the correct answer, but it was interesting to learn that of the $97.5m the film made at the box office, $95m was made in the USA, which made me feel less bad about never having heard of the film either. I gave my opponent a 3 on this and she scored me 1, and we both missed. I don’t mind missing questions like this — you live and learn, as they say, and there’s no point getting annoyed about something you couldn’t possibly have known.

Q3. FOOD/DRINK — Identify the cheese, the most popular of the Italian blue cheeses, which is among the earliest of all veined cheeses (having been introduced to the Po Valley in the 9th century) and is named after a village outside Milan. GORGONZOLA

The most popular of all the Italian blues is Gorgonzola so let’s go with that. We gave one another a 2, but my opponent missed, so we’re 3(2)-0(0) at the half, which means I can’t lose but I can tie.

Q4. SCIENCE — Herbaceous plants whose scientific name is trifolium (“trefoil”), referring to the most common (but not exclusive) appearance of their leaves, are best-known by what familiar name? CLOVER

Quite annoyed with myself here. Knew it was a shamrock/clover, but was so pleased with myself for knowing it that I failed to think it through and realise that “clover” is a much better answer than “shamrock” which is what I put. Again we gave one another a 2, and we both missed.

Q5. GEOGRAPHY — Sixteenth-century Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator is remembered today for his namesake cylindrical projection of the Earth’s surface (with its major distortion at the polar regions), but he also coined what titanic neologism used commonly today for a collection of maps? ATLAS

I can’t say I knew this one outright, but it seemed fairly clear from “a collection of maps” that the answer was atlas, and the clue on the word “titanic” sealed the deal. My opponent scored me 0 and I scored her 1, so we’re 3(3)-1(1) going into Q6.

Q6. AMER HIST — Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton were the seven towns that famously hosted large crowds (reportedly upwards of 18,000 in Galesburg) that gathered to watch what duo? STEPHEN DOUGLAS, ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Another of those hard-to-gets for non-Americans. It would be fascinating to break down the “get rate” (which you can see in aggregate by clicking “Q6” above) by country or continent. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Stephen Douglas before today. It seemed clear that we’re talking pre-20th century, probably 19th century, but beyond that I was lost. I went, absurdly, with Lewis and Clark, just for the sake of putting an answer down. My opponent scored me 3 for this and I gave her 0, but we both missed, anyway, leaving me with a narrow 3(3)-1(1) win. Onward.

Matchday three

Q1. WORLD HIST — Following the outbreak of the “Troubles” in the late 1960s, the Irish Republican Army split into two wings: the “Official” IRA, and what other, which staged numerous assassinations and bombings in Britain and Northern Ireland over the subsequent three decades? PROVISIONAL

Here’s one reason why I don’t get annoyed about America-centric questions. This was an easy point for someone who grew up in London in the 1980s, where the Provisional IRA was a constant low-level threat. My LL profile shows where I live, and so my opponent scored me a 1 for this, I assume as a result of reading that. I scored him 3, and he missed.

Q2. LIFESTYLE — The American Book Award-winning The Testing of Luther Albright was the debut novel from 2005 of an author who, according to Bloomberg, is the 23rd-wealthiest individual in the world in 2021. What is her name? MACKENZIE SCOTT

I had heard of the book, but couldn’t place the author. The most common wrong answer was Oprah, which is a reasonable shout. I didn’t think of her but would have discounted her on the basis that she didn’t write a book with that name. The obvious “rich woman author” is Rowling, but 2005 obviously was well past her debut. I left this blank, we scored one another 2, and we both missed. I don’t know whether I could have pulled this knowledge out of my brain, but maybe.

Q3. SCIENCE — Reindeer is a familiar term in North America — thanks in no small part to a certain red-nosed fellow — but the species (Rangifer tarandus) is more often referred to in Canada and the US by what other common name? CARIBOU

I was confident the answer to this was “elk” and before today would have thought a caribou was some sort of bison. Another live-and-learn for me. I scored this 1 and my opponent gave me his other 2, but we both missed. So we’re 1(1)-0(0) at the half.

Q4. POP MUSIC — In 2020, Rolling Stone magazine named a 1998 song by what artist as the greatest debut single of all time — a song which, it could easily be argued, is also the most successful single of all time whose title begins with an ellipsis? Note, name the artist. BRITNEY SPEARS

Interesting question, which took me a while to get to, but it suddenly clicked while I was thinking about who made their debut in 1998, then of course I realise it’s Britney. My opponent inexplicably scored me a 3 for this (I think my pop music get rate is lower than it should be, so maybe slightly misleading for my opponents) and I scored him 1.

Q5. LITERATURE — Among the many notable elements in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is its internal rhyme, which starts in its first line. The 16-syllable line fittingly begins “Once upon” and rhymes what two words? DREARY, WEARY

Annoyed with myself for this one. Somehow failed to read the question properly and answered “never more” (along with several people, according to the LL discussion boards). I would probably have got to the correct answer in the end, and should have thought harder about it. I was given a 1 and scored my opponent 0 (he looks strong on literature), so we’re 4(2)-0(1) with one to go, and the win is in the bag.

Q6. GAMES/SPORT — To have more points than your opponent(s) once numbers 15 through 20 and the bullseye have been “closed out” is the object of a darts game known by many names, but probably most commonly by one it shares with what orthopteran? CRICKET

I don’t believe this darts game is known as cricket outside America, but the clues were all there and so I was happy to type in “cricket”. I think I first came across it in the 1980s or 1990s on a computer when I came across a game on a disk, called cricket.exe. I excitedly ran it, only to find that it was not about cricket, but darts. Still, that knowledge helped me here. My opponent used his 0 here and I was left with my 2. We both got it, so we end on 4(3)-2(2).

Matchday four

Q1. ART — While he was an accomplished painter, what 17th-century Neapolitan is also widely regarded as the inventor of Baroque sculpture, with numerous monumental works in Rome and the Vatican that include the design of St. Peter’s Square? GIOVANNI LORENZO BERNINI

It’s Bernini, of course it’s Bernini. Did I get it? Of course not. I had the image in my head of Bernini’s veiled woman, who turned out, when I Googled it later, to be by Strazza, 200 years after Bernini. For the question I thought for a bit and put down Giacometti, who was a sculptor but was 1) Swiss and 2) born in 1901. My opponent seems weak in art, relatively, so I give him the two as does he for me, and we both miss.

Q2. TELEVISION — A popular puppet show from the early days of television starred singer and comedian Fran Allison interacting with various puppets, two of whom were most prominent. Give the name of either of these two characters. KUKLA, OLLIE

We both miss this as well. Despite some of the above reflections, it’s fairly rare for me not to have heard of an answer at all. I may not be able to tell you anything about Jackie Robinson, or Craftsman tools, but at least the names have some familiarity. Here? Nothing. I couldn’t think of a worthwhile answer and had a vague idea about “Amos and Andy” being a thing so I went with Amos. Turns out that was a radio sitcom about two black men, voiced — obviously, for the time — by two white men 😬. Anyway, my opponent gave me his 3 for this and I returned a 1 for him, and we both missed.

Q3. BUS/ECON — George and William Penrose began a business in 1783 producing flint glass in what city on the southeastern coast of Ireland, starting an association of the city with fine glass and crystal which endures to this day? WATERFORD

This one we both get, though. Him for 3, on the basis that he was (probably) an American and unlikely to know much Irish stuff, and me for 1, perhaps on the basis of my relative proximity to Ireland. I think I underestimated how well Waterford crystal is known, since 57 per cent of players got this right. I’m losing 1(1)-3(1) at the half.

Q4. CLASS MUSIC — Baku-born Russian maestro Mstislav Rostropovich is considered by many to be the 20th century’s greatest virtuoso at what instrument? CELLO

Like several players (from the chat forum) I decided that Yo Yo Ma was the century’s greatest cellist, and I couldn’t think of a good alternative so I went with violin, as did 24 per cent of players (and only 27 per cent got it right). I knew Rostropovich’s name but couldn’t place him. My oppo gave me the 0 here in any case, and I scored him 2, and we both missed.

Q5. FILM — A 1963 spy novel by John Le Carré (and its 1965 film adaptation starring Richard Burton) popularized a phrase describing a spy who seeks to abandon the tricks and dangers of the profession as one who wants to “come in from the” what? COLD

This one I knew straight away, and was rewarded with a 1 from my opponent. I gave him the 0 and he got it right, so with one question to go he leads 3(2)-2(2).

Q6. SCIENCE — Sternutation is the medical term for a convulsive reflex closely associated, by name, with what secondary Disney character? SNEEZY

I should have thought harder here. I also couldn’t think of any secondary Disney characters, and of course the Dwarves are the hat to pick from. I also failed to read the question properly and missed the “by name” bit, so I picked Donald Duck in a vague attempt at a guess. I think I did know sternutation, somewhere in my brain, so I should have made more of an attempt to retrieve it. My opponent scored me 2 for this, as well, which would have snatched a draw (or a tie as the Americans call it). Instead he takes it for 1, and we end up 4(3)-2(2).

Matchday five

Q1. WORLD HIST — What city, founded in its present location in 1519 by Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez, was originally located on its country’s south coast, and was the site of a disputed event that triggered a war in 1898? HAVANA, CUBA

We’re obviously in central America, and probably on an island. I couldn’t work out which island, though, until a dim bit of memory retrieved itself and reminded me that didn’t the Spanish-American war start in 1898 and didn’t it take place (partly) in Cuba? Let’s go with Havana, then. Turns out I was right, though I only got 1 for it — my stats suggest I’m strong-ish in Geography and World History and my opponent had clearly taken note. I was — for the first time this season — playing someone in the UK, and I gave them 2, which they missed.

Q2. GAMES/SPORT — “Players may choose from 1 to 10 numbers between 1 and 80, in hopes that some or all will be randomly selected by the centralized computer.” This is a quote from the Rhode Island Lottery for what game, which is also popular in casinos (especially to the casinos themselves, given the game’s huge house edge)? KENO

I didn’t think I’d get this — and I didn’t. A lot of people seem to have chosen Roulette, which suggests they are playing on very strange roulette wheels, or hadn’t read the question fully. It’s clearly some sort of electronic lottery game, but those aren’t popular in British casinos, so I was lost. I went with “pinochle” on the basis of remembering Top Cat being into pinochle but it turns out that’s a card game. Oh well. We gave one another 2 and both missed.

Q3. LITERATURE — Various versions of a certain African American spiritual include lines such as “Gonna lay down my sword and shield”, “Gonna put on my golden shoes”, and “Gonna meet my dear old mother”. What line, sung three times, follows each of these preceding lines, is a common title of the spiritual, and is the location where these activities will take place? DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

An easy one for me, whether that’s through going to church as a kid, or church schools, or something else. The chorus started playing in my head as soon as I got to the first lyric. I seriously overestimated how many people would know this and should have made it a 3 for my opponent, instead of a 1. They missed, and I scored my 2. We’re 3(2)-0(0) at the half but both 3s are still in play so it’s anyone’s game.

Q4. LIFESTYLE — What type of dog, whose three breeds are “Standard”, “Miniature”, and “Giant”, has a German name which colloquially means “mustache” — rather appropriate, given the dog’s distinctive facial appearance? SCHNAUZER

I know very little about dogs, but “miniature schnauzer” suggested itself here, and turned out to be correct. I scored 0 for it, though, and though my opponent got it as well, I managed to score them 1.

Q5. GEOGRAPHY — Of the fifteen current sovereign states that were republics of the Soviet Union, identify the one whose national flag has three equal horizontal stripes of white, blue, and red (from top to bottom). RUSSIA

Immediately the Russian flag sprang to mind, having seen it a lot during the 2018 football World Cup, but I wasn’t sure it was right. I ran through a few others, and couldn’t think of a better answer so just went with it. I’m not sure why I scored my opponent 3 for this, which they got (I got 1 for it). Their statistics suggest a weakness in Geography but I should have scored it lower nonetheless. We’re tied 4(4)-4(2) with one to go.

Q6. ART — Five-year-old Margarita, the daughter of King Phillip IV of Spain, is surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting as they visit the atelier of the Spanish Court painter Diego Velázquez. This is the scene for a complex, influential, and variously interpreted painting from 1656 with what name (which translates to “The Maids-of-Honor”)? LAS MENINAS

And I’ve got no hope now. My opponent’s strength in Art meant a 0 for them, which was prudent because they got it. It would have been a 3 for me, but I’ve never heard of the painting. I spent a little while trying to deduce it from the translated title given, to no avail. I leave this blank and the match ends tied at 4(4)-4(3). I wouldn’t have ever got the two questions I missed (at my current level of knowledge, I mean) but my defense lets me down again — that’s something I need to work on.

And that’s the week, which I finish in 16th place (out of a league of 32). Not bad, but I shouldn’t have made some of those mistakes. Roll on next week.

I am not yet sure what this will turn out to be, but for now you should expect one newsletter a month, each time containing six things I found interesting.

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“How would you improve the Daily Mail?”

I was stumped. The question was impossible to answer. I was 23 years old and was in the middle of an interview for a scholarship to a prestigious postgraduate journalism school (I didn’t get it) and was being grilled by a panel of academics and journalists. And they had just asked me the killer question.

The Daily Mail was and still is the second-biggest selling newspaper in the UK. Barring print strikes, the biggest public holidays, and the odd war, it has sold more than 1.5 million copies to the middle-classes of the country every weekday for the last hundred years. At the time I was being interviewed, the daily sale was 2.5 million.

It did so by serving its readers an almost perfect concoction of reporting, editorialising and feature writing that was calculated to press their buttons, tickle their fancies and yank their chains. I don’t remember how I answered the question, but as far as I can recall I had nothing to offer. I think if I were asked the question again today, I’d have a few ideas up my sleeve, but I’ve come to realise that what I should probably have done is talked not about answers but about the kind of questions I would have asked.

How would I improve this newspaper, this finely tuned machine for giving its readers what they wanted to read? I should have started by talking about who the readers are, and how I’d find out more about them. What makes them tick? What bits of the paper do they turn to first? What bits do they skim through? Which sections do they avoid completely? That would have allowed me to start to build a picture of what to change.

It’s worth asking what the word “improve” means. If I were the editor, I’d be interested in selling more newspapers, so the question doesn’t have to just be about the readers. I might have looked at the parts of the country in which the paper sold well, and the parts in which it sold poorly. Compared regions with similar demographics but differing sales figures. One might even go so far as to look at specific shops that sell better than others and ask why that is. But in any case, I should have started by asking questions.

It’s natural to want to give answers — and to want to receive them. We are conditioned from an early age that we should have the answers to things at our fingertips — times tables, place names, historical dates. I don’t disagree with this. Memorisation can unlock our abilities to do things with the things we’ve memorised. But we carry that on into adulthood, and we don’t want to look stupid when we are asked a question. When was the last time you said “I don’t know” in a meeting at work?

“I don’t know” can be a powerful statement, but we are fearful of saying it because we don’t want other people to think we are fools. Sometimes, when I tell a colleague I don’t know something, I can tell they think less of me, but I have trained myself not to care. I don’t need to prove myself by knowing things, because that’s not what my job is for.

It’s rare to admit to not knowing, and yet we don’t know most of the things, most of the time. Product managers, particularly, operate in a world of uncertainty that can be taxing — if not downright unsettling — for colleagues whose jobs need to exist in worlds of certainty. My product colleagues and I are taking uncertain futures — what is the right thing to build that will ensure our future success — and iterating on the solutions to well-defined problems that will allow us to steadily reduce that uncertainty.

The first step on the road to certainty is to admit what you don’t know. After all, if we knew what to build, our jobs wouldn’t be necessary. Why conduct that costly and time-consuming user research if you know that you can produce a feature that will double your user base or triple your revenue?

But we don’t, and so we go out and we ask people. We do guerrilla testing in corridors, bribing our colleagues with sweets and chocolates if they’ll tell us what they think of a prototype. We take our products out to lab tests where we ask people whether — in short — they are any good. We A/B test features just in case our earlier questions were wrong and the thing our test subjects said they loved turned out in fact to be a steaming pile of elephant dung when we let real users loose upon it.

A good product manager will not only ask questions at user research time. We are — usually — not the most experienced programmers in our teams, nor the most experienced designers, testers or researchers. It’s easy to think — particularly when we are working remotely and every interaction feels like a time-sink of a Teams meeting — that we should let our team be, and allow them to get on with it. And we should. But we should also make use of their expertise, skills and experience to help us shape both the problems and the solutions at hand. We should be asking more questions, not fewer.

It’s worth noting here that user research is not note-taking: we’re not asking questions in order to create a shopping list of product features that we’ll mindlessly deploy. There’s probably enough here for a separate article, so let’s just say that the product manager’s job is not only to ask the questions but to understand what to do with the answers.

A year or so ago, someone who works in a Silicon Valley VC firm asked an interesting question on Twitter:

Recent PM interview question I’ve been using: You’re the PM at Netflix handling the home screen. How do you determine how shows get promoted editorially vs algorithmically recommended? Walk through metrics/principles/trade-offs and how it impacts various parts of the biz.

What I found particularly interesting was how many of the 250 people who answered went straight to their pet topic: all automatic curation, all human curation, fully personalised home screen, let users customise the “panels” on the home screen, machine learning, you name it. My favourite answer was this one:

More than the ideas for solutions, it’s revealing what questions are asked first. Does the candidate start asking about metrics/objectives? What about time/resource constraints? So many PMs start framing plans without getting curious.

I have asked similar questions when interviewing applicants for product positions, and the strongest candidates are typically the ones who will not jump straight into a solution but who will lay out their basis for increasing their knowledge, decreasing uncertainty and improving the definition of the problem before attempting to solve it. We’re interested in what questions people ask. Meta-questions, even: who do they need in the room before they start to formulate the questions: UX researchers, product designers, service designers?

There’s room for knowledge, intuition and induction, mind you. The person who asked the question said that this was his favourite answer:

I’d be particularly impressed with candidates who can identify how this impacts partner dynamics, can correctly predict that some partners have already been contractually promised editorial promotional consideration in rights deals, how this impacts ecosystem over years, etc. And I’d also like someone who can give a principled case either for or against doing the “obvious” thing of “Giving the user our perception of what they are likely to want, all of the time, bowing minimally to other considerations”, weighing it against commercials and artistry.

I didn’t get the scholarship but I did join the journalism school and went on to spend 10 years in writing and editing jobs. As a writer, I spent a lot of my time interviewing people. I was looking for stories, of course, but also I was looking for enlightenment and illumination — of a musician’s creative process, of a CEO’s plans for a dying industry — and the way to do that was to delve deep into questions, as quickly and as deeply as possible. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, her character Scout says:

“Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby-food.”

That’s great advice for a lawyer, but it’s terrible advice for a journalist, and by extension it’s also terrible advice for a product manager, because we’re not trying to convince people, we are trying to enlighten ourselves.

I read a great piece on the same subject not too long ago:

PM interviews cherish the “jobs for people” section of a candidate’s answer. The part that has them say, “this customer wants x so they can do y.” By doing so, they propagate a competition of who can make up the most arbitrary, yet convincing reasoning. That is maybe a decent measure of intelligence, but not of knowing how to build products. This is a small question, but it invalidates the entire interview’s legitimacy. It transfer’s the focus from product sense, to BS’ing ability.

It would be much more telling to ask a candidate how they would go about discovering those x values. It’s not important that a PM know book case use cases, but rather that they know how to discover the hidden needs of their customer. That is because most people who set out to build anything and really talk to their users, quickly discover that they are building the wrong thing.

This is exactly right. If you go into a piece of development with answers and not questions, the chances are that you’re not going to build the optimal thing for your users. Product management is about making inductive leaps and learning about our users in order to iteratively reduce our uncertainty, and the best way to do that is to ask questions. Lots of them.