2023 ACF Nationals Discussion and Thanks

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

This thread is for general thoughts, discussion, and thanks for 2023 ACF Nationals. The editors will be sharing their own thoughts and philosophies on the set after others have a chance to post. A separate thread about specific question discussion can be found here.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I may have more systematic Thoughts later, but I'll start by saying: I found it very cool that this tournament had a larger-than-normal focus on "public health" content across multiple subcategories, including biology, other sci, social science, current events, and Your Choice. Off the top of my head, the questions on air quality, HVAC filtration, health indices that have had negative impacts on minorities, indigenous people in genetics data, and yes, even the WoW gamers tossup from the finals (the Corrupted Blood incident led to real insights in epidemiology!) were all in this vein, and I'm forgetting some.

Public health is a hugely important field that doesn't always fit neatly into the hidebound category divisions that quizbowl settled into decades ago, and there's a large well of good, knowable clues there that aren't yet in packet archives. I'm glad that someone on the editing team made a deliberate effort to craft creative, accessible, instructive questions that drew from that well, and find fitting places for them. Thank you to that person/those people!

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I loved this set. Last year's Nats set a very high bar which this set definitely lived up to. Thanks to everyone who made it happen!

[DavidB256]

Loved this set. It was my first time playing a set as hard as Nats, and I enjoyed more than I expected to do so. I felt consistently rewarded for knowledge acquired from my academic research.

As a slightly below-median player on a slightly below-median team, the extreme variation in difficulty of bonus easy parts seemed inappropriate. From answerlines like "red" quoting Little Red Riding Hood to Richard II (which we only converted because I, lamentably, have a card for the order of plays in the Henriad) and viral load (which has one answerline hit on asseemsdb), bonus easy parts had significant impacts on many of our games. While I, of course, did not play finals, it is worth repeating Halle's mention of cluing Jupiter as the largest planet in the solar system as another inappropriately easy bonus part.

[VSCOelasticity]

The packets have been uploaded. Here is the link: https://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/2937/

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I had a blast playing this set - so many questions (Baldwin and Wright, e.g.) asked about familiar topics with answers I never would have thought to attempt. Often I found myself pretty surprised at what struck me as a hard question topic, only to see a younger team answer it without difficulty. I think this is a testament to the creative vision of the editors and the younger qb generation broadly, which is amazing to see.

Speaking of passing on the torch, I suppose I'll take this opportunity to announce - publicly, officially, for real, no-take-backsies - that I've played my last regular, non-open collegiate tournament. I know I've implied that before, but this time it's for real; I will be asking to freelance + playtest for the next ACF Nationals so that I can't go back on that. I'd like to thank the editors for producing this tournament; it was a good one to go out on.

[vydu]

I had an amazing time playing this year’s nats. There were multiple questions in pretty much every category that I thought were super cool and/or creative. My mind was blown many times over the weekend.

I expected it coming in, but am still consistently amazed with how much cool, important contemporary research Adam manages to integrate into his questions. Thinking about stuff like the spintronics/single-molecule magnets in the manganese tossup, the molecular motor stuff in the trans-to-cis tossup, etc. I was very excited to hear the Gillespie algorithm and chemical reaction network theory come up, having worked with some of that material this year.

I loved Jon’s categories, and thought the physics felt quite fresh - in particular really appreciated the smattering of science culture/history type content throughout the physics (Prescod-Weinstein! and stuff like Gell-Mann’s role in the Santa Fe institute, Bohm’s communism, the history of the conservation of energy, etc). Also very much appreciated the deep-dives into core theory like the spin-statistics and symplectic tossups. I think there may have been a few tossups that asked you to make distinctions that were hard to figure out in game time (e.g. whether the XY model clue was talking about the phase transition itself or symmetry breaking, whether nonlocal or local was the right answer on that tossup, etc) but I’d definitely buy that I just need to learn more about those things

Really appreciated the amount of chamber music in the AFA tossups, especially some of the more out there things (Sibelius chamber music!).

Thank you again to everyone who helped make this nats happen! even grant i guess

[TaylorH]

Thank you to everyone who made ACF Nationals happen this year. The other editors and I worked on the set for almost an entire year. All the time and heart we put into the set resulted in a product that I am immensely proud of. Here I'd like to shout out the people who made that possible.

First, my talented co-editors. We had a big team of 11 subject editors this year by design: no editor subject edited more than 3/3. This lightened individual workloads to manageable piles and brought in as many brains full of ideas to the table. Though perhaps a smaller team would have resulted in a more unified feel across categories, I think this big-tent approach is absolutely the way to go for future nationals. The eleven editors each had their own knowledge base, approach to clue finding, prose style, and authorial personality; bringing in all of these voices made Nationals a richer set. I will let each of them address their own question approach if they wish, but here I'd like to shout out each of them in turn.

Sameer Apte edited the Music, and did a fantastic job in what I think is one of, if not the most challenging categories to edit. Sameer brought a Mahler symphony-sized amount of Real Knowledge to the category and wrote so many fresh questions. Sameer finely tuned the distribution to balance eras, genres, and types of questions, as well as being sure to include questions referencing performance practices, theory, and the wider cultural impact of music.

Ganon Evans edited the sometimes-unpredictable Other category, and as always, he knocked it out of the park. I am consistently amazed by Ganon's novel but approachable way of writing CE, Geography, and especially Other Academic. Many of the most creative and talked-about questions in the set were Ganon's. His questions routinely probe knowledge that players have, but perhaps never expected to come up in quiz bowl. The "ah-ha" moments and joyful pulls I saw while Ganon's questions were being played were unparalleled. In addition to his writing chops, Ganon is also just one of the friendliest and funniest people in quiz bowl; his affable, goofy nature was always a wonderful presence to have on our writing server.

William Golden edited a superb batch of Other Fine Arts and European Literature. William and I share a similar approach to clue/answerline selection and taste in culture more broadly, so it was always a treat to see William's questions in two of my favorite categories. William probed so many interesting areas of his categories and constantly answered the "why should I care" question with ease. Additionally, he was prudently attuned to feedback and was able to revise and rework questions that weren't his with ease. William also has posted some of the best one-liners in quiz bowl history, though Will gives him a run for his money.

Hasna Karim edited the Biology and split Religion with me, focusing on the Islam. Hasna was the only editor on the set who I had never really interacted with before beginning, so an extra thank you to her for trusting me from the outset. Hasna wrote an absolute banger of a bio set, something I know for sure because it constantly caught my attention and piqued my interest, despite knowing very little about the subject. Each time I would look at one of Hasna's questions in playtesting I would immediately expose my own ignorance but be interested in learning more. Like the other science editors, she did an awesome job contextualizing the science and asking about topics with a broader cultural relevance even to non-specialists. She was also an excellent collaborator on religion, carving out a diverse and engaging batch of Islam questions that gelled with the rest of the category perfectly.

President Michael Kearney was lovely to have on the set, editing Other and European History with the august presence of a scholar. Micahel also had the fortune/misfortune of working in categories I know very little about, giving him a freedom largely immune to my criticism, which he used to great effect. Michael's classics questions were unmatched in depth and quality, but his forays into the diverse fields of archeology, historiography, and cross-cultural history constantly showed his meticulous craft in far-flung topics. Michael made categories that often risk being dry constantly pop and crackle with flavor.

Caroline Mao edited two of the categories closest to my heart, American and World Literature, and made these two categories shine. Over the last few years, Caro has shown themselves to be a literature writer and editor par excellence, and this National's set might be their best work yet. When Caro wrote about works I had read, I was always blown away by how evocative and memorable the clue selection was; when I had not read the works being clued, Caro's questions made me wonder why I hadn't. On top of this impressive editing job, Caro designed this year's beautiful program, and deserves extra praise for that challenging job.

Will Nediger edited the British Literature, Philosophy, and Social Science. Having the always-sagely and endlessly witty Will on the set was both a comfort and a treat. A comfort because he managed the largest individual editing load with extreme craft and speed. And, on a personal note, a treat because Will was and still is one of my QB writing inspirations. When I first started reading quiz bowl packets back in 2013 and 2014, Will's name was a name I kept noticing on the tops of packets and sets that I loved practicing on and studying from (special shout out to WELD, a set that hooked me early on tough literature questions). Getting to work with a writer whose work I had long admired from a distance was a joy and a privilege, and of course, the experience did not disappoint, as Will produced a rigorous but always exciting group of questions that were often pitch-perfect from the first drafts.

Grant Peet edited American and World History. It's been a great experience watching Grant develop from a basically unknown writer prior to working with me on FLopen in 2020 to going on to head edit sets and write some of the most on-point history questions in just a few years. Grant's organization, poise, and unique voice come through in all of his questions, which always feel both scholarly and accessible. Grant wry humor was also constantly a joy to have on the server, and he fully deserves his half credit for co-discovering the doubly-eponymous Kearney—Peet law of history question writing.

It was amazing getting to work on a Nationals with my long-time co-editor, teammate, and good friend Jonathen Settle. I spent the better part of the last 10 years playing and writing alongside Jonathen, without whom I never would have been involved in this game, as they invited me to my first UF QB practice. We have complemented each other over the long arch of our QB careers, with Jonathen's always delightful science and my humanities work becoming something of a house style for the Florida tournaments. Jonathen's tireless work ethic and wide-ranging interests make their writing some of the best in all of quiz bowl, regardless of category. The Physics and Other Science in Nationals were the best set of those categories I've ever seen in a tournament. Thank you Jon, for your colossal impact on this game and for always putting up with me.

Finally, Adam Silverman rounded out the set with his excellent-as-always batch of Chemistry. Adam should be especially lauded for returning to edit the category at Nationals for a second year in a row; I'm glad I somehow convinced him to do it all again after seeking out seemingly every other potential chemistry editor in the community, as Adam completed his diverse and well-polished questions in record time (despite insisting at the beginning that he was out of ideas). Despite many of Adam's questions going over my head, I was always drawn in by his carefully selected clues, direct prose, and fascinating answerline selection. Adam also greatly improved many other questions with his prudent and insightful comments during internal playtesting.

Once again, thank you to you all, working with each of you was a magical experience. I will sincerely miss chatting with each of you about questions, quiz bowl, and life in general every day.

---

Many other folks besides the editors also had huge hands in making the set happen.

First off, I need to thank ACF's Editor-In-Chief Nick Jensen for vastly improving the set and acting as an additional set of eyes for literally every question in the set. Nick was a part of the editing team from day one, but his efforts in the final weeks of production were Herculean in scope. Nick proofread every question in the set, making literally thousands of suggestions for improved phrasing, alternate clues, expanded answerlines, and stylistic consistency. In addition, Nick freelanced many of the most exciting questions in the set, including dropping a dozen VFA questions into the sheets in a single day when that category fell behind. All of this was on top of Nick's excellent head editing of Regionals, whose tone and rigor was an awesome prelude to Nationals. Nick is likely the most creative and hardworking editor working in quiz bowl today, and I am excited to see what he does next.

Thank you also to our other proofreaders JinAh Kim, Ophir Lifshitz, and Rahul Keyal for catching many errors and improving through your numerous suggestions.

I'd also like to thank our awesome batch of freelancer question writers: Henry Atkins, Mike Bentley, Austin Brownlow, Jordan Brownstein, Zach Foster, Shan Kothari, Jonathan Magin, Vivian Malouf, Eric Mukherjee, Kevin Thomas, and Chandler West. Many of the best questions in the set came straight from the pens of these folks, so I'd like to give my gratitude to each of them for their creative ideas and hard work.

Many of those freelancers also acted as part of our playtesting corp, along with Will Alston, Billy Busse, Jaimie Carlson, Michael Coates, Henry Goff, Aseem Keyal, Evan Knox, Joseph Krol, John Lawrence, Stephen Liu, Eric Mukherjee, Rohith Nagari, Victor Pavao, Kai Smith, Tejas Raje, Kevin Wang. The playtesters made the set so much better with their many nuanced thoughts and suggestions on every question, often forcing rewrites and revisions that made the set much more player-friendly in the end. Thank it was a blast sharing our questions with you in our sometimes grueling late-night sessions.

A special thanks to TD Ryan Rosenberg , not only for running things the weekend of, but also for working with me extensively beforehand on schedule planning, tournament format, packet combos, parsing the packets into MODAQ, and saving the editors from lots of extra work when we discovered that I had made an error in packet production. Thank you also to the other logistics folks: Zac Bennett, Ganon Evans, Em Gunter, Katherine Lei, John Nienajadlo, Nathan Sheffield, and Ryan Ritter for working hard to make the weekend go smoothly, you all did an awesome job.

Thanks also to everyone not mentioned above who moderated, staffed, or worked in the control room. Getting to see every one of you, even briefly, was a relief for my fried self last weekend, since I knew our set was in good hands.

Also a special thanks to Adam Fine for designing the Wordcounter Google Docs script, which made it so much easier to make sure our bonuses were concise; and Cody Voight for designing QAMS2, which made production planning and packetization so much easier.

On more personal notes, thank you to the Penn Bowl 2022 editors and writers for allowing me to work on that set and Nationals concurrently. And thank you to my partner Ezra for putting up with me constantly talking about Nats for the last year and for my long brooding evenings staring into the void of Google Sheets.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all the players; not only those of you who wrote for and played in this monster of a tournament, but also each individual who makes up this community, whether they made it to Nats this year or not. Seeing the joy, competitive fire, comradery, sportsmanship, and zeal for learning that each of you brings to our game makes the endless grind worth it. Everything I saw at Nats made me proud to be part of this community and made me excited what is in store for the future.

---

I may or may not post further on my general set editing philosophies and my thoughts on Myth/Religion/VFA for the set. I probably need a bit more time to collect my thoughts and at least another week or two of decompression. Editing this Nats was a huge undertaking and an honor: thank you to ACF for trusting me. I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. I feel surprisingly not at all burnt out at the moment: expect more quiz bowl from me in the future.

Best y'all.

[VSCOelasticity]

It was a pleasure to work on ACF Nationals this year! Thank you to all staffers, logisticians, freelance writers, playtesters, players, and my fellow editors for make the tournament such an amazing experience!

I've been playing quizbowl and writing questions with Taylor for nearly a decade now, and it was great to have him as a head editor on this project. He and I share similar visions for what makes quizbowl fun and engaging, so it makes collaboration easy. His constant feedback and absolutely prolific writing pace over the years has both made me a better writer/editor and inspired me to contribute more to the game.

On the topic of people who I have to thank for where I am today, I'd like to take a little space to shout out some people who have helped me get to this position!

• Aseem Keyal: for recruiting me to help save Fall Open (I still remember being amazed that THE Aseem was messaging little ol' me) and for being my buddy.
• Itamar Naveh-Benjamin: for being a great Fall Open head editor. He instilled in me his hatred for quizbowl-ese. Prose is important!!
• Eric Mukherjee: for all the help and advice while I worked on Lederberg III. Thanks to Eric, I started to get a handle on how to execute upper difficulty science questions.
• Adam Fine and Kevin Wang: for being very helpful WORKSHOP editors! In particular, Kevin made sure I think twice about how I clue research articles.

These people stick out in my narrative of my writing/editing career, but I am also a product of every community I've worked with on a set. Thank you to all my collaborators over the years for making quizbowl editing so rewarding!

I'd like to echo my thanks to my fellow editors--the set production process was very difficult for me, but they made it a lot of fun, too! They all a took a lot of care with their categories. Each category pulled from their unique knowledge bases, while still creating a tournament that a general audience could enjoy. Specifically, I want to highlight my fellow science editors. I was really excited to see what Hasna would do for Nationals after enjoying her previous work, and she produced an excellent biology category for this set! She executed so many great biology questions on a variety of topics probing classroom and labwork knowledge, but I really love her questions that engage with social/structural issues of biology. I hope to see more of this in quizbowl! Adam has been a staple of upper canon quizbowl science for a while, and even edited this set after working on last year's Nationals! And had his questions done so early! I don't know how he does it. Despite writing for a while, he continues to bring fresh approaches to his categories. Thank you both for not muting the science channel in the Discord, providing feedback throughout the past year or so, and for being science editor union buddies :)

I don't have much of a way of an overarching philosophy, but I do strongly believe quizbowl is a game for interested amateurs. I tried to make my categories reflect that. I wanted to balance technical questions that reward the deep knowledge of scientists with questions that both scientists and a wider audience could enjoy. I also highly value prose when writing, and I tried to make my science questions (even the ones with "science score clues") easy for staff to read and easy to aurally comprehend. The only other thing of note is that I had an explicit goal to not overshoot on difficulty. I will no doubt be learning to estimate difficulty for as long as I write/edit, as there were definitely difficulty issues in my categories, in particular on my medium parts. Despite some oversights and errors in my questions, I am pleased with how the set came out.

Seeing players compete at a national championship on questions that I had labored over for nearly a year was the highlight of my quizbowl career. Hats off to all players I saw and heard about getting great buzzes (which at Nats is really anywhere, including the FTP) and pulling difficult bonus parts.

[VSCOelasticity]

I'd like to highlight submissions I enjoyed for one reason or another (novel content asked in a difficulty-appropriate way, straightforward canonical questions that were executed well, or other reasons like me just liking the topic), but was unable to include in the set for practical reasons. I did not include answers/question conceits since I think there is a plan to read rejects.

Harvard A: physics tossup
MIT A: any science/math bonus
UNC A: other science bonus
South Carolina: other sci tossup and physics bonus
OSU A: other science tossup
Duke: other science bonus
McGill: other science bonus
John Hopkins A: physics tossup, other science bonus
Purdue B: computer science bonus
Florida B: other science bonus
Berkeley B: physics bonus, other science tossup
Yale A: other science tossup
UF A: other science bonus
Imperial: physics tossup
Northwestern A: physics tossup
Virginia: other science tossup
Chicago A: physics tossup, physics bonus
Indiana A: physics tossup, other science bonus
Claremont Colleges: other science bonus
Stanford: physics tossup
Edinburgh: other science bonus
Penn State A: other science bonus
Rutgers B: physics bonus, other science bonus
Houston: other science tossup, other science bonus
Brown: physics bonus, other science bonus
Chicago B: other science bonus
Columbia A: other science bonus
Maryland: other science bonus
Yale B: physics bonus

Thank you to all the teams for your submissions! It's always hard to use questions due to feng shui and subdistributional constraints, so make sure to submit early to maximize the chance that your questions get in a set :)

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Working on Geography, Current Events, and Other Academic for ACF Nationals this year was kinda like a Dostoyevsky novel: its a few hundred pages of pain, anguish, realizing how dumb you are while reading, constantly forgetting the names and things on paper you just wrote about a few minutes ago, spending hours on what you think is a fruitful endeavor just to barely make a dent in the product, and other emotions. But the last 5 pages make the entire thing worthwhile. I felt emotional seeing our set be played and really stand out because of the polish and hard work of the dozens of people involved on the set.

It was really rewarding, not just for the raw time I spent on Nationals, but what it went to me. My first editing job was doing Other from ACF Fall 2019. As I’ve grown as a member of this community, that subject didn’t leave me: I did Other for ACF Winter 2020, ACF Regionals 2022, and now ACF Nationals 2023. So being able to really show off what I’ve learned, what I care about, and what this category is able to be was really important to me. I hope you all have enjoyed the past four years (!) of my work on ACF sets and I look forward to more hopefully in the future.

But this set wouldn’t have been anywhere if it wasn’t for leadership. I remember last year at this time as the ACF board was sort of scratching our heads thinking of who could be a new head editor, before all silently turning to Taylor Harvey, who took up the role with excellence. Taylor is everything you want from a head editor. He’s incredibly smart and gives solid, constructive feedback across the set. He’s a perfect blend of being a teacher open to experimentation and change but also firm when it means supporting the set’s goals. His time management and organizational skills were essential for the scheduling that made this set’s production work so well. And ultimately, I consider him a great, trustworthy friend and one of the most talented people I know. His great questions on the mighty quagga and Tintagel Castle helped kickstart my editing on this set.

My categories wouldn’t have come together without the incredible talent of the freelancers I had write for me. Zach Foster had a real knack for finding ideas I had never thought of or would never be able to turn them into delightful ideas. The Russian healthcare TU, Dakar Rally bonus, and fox hunting TU were all fresh and got excited reactions out of the players who heard them. Mike Bentley similarly offered awesome commonlinks that were both expansive and narrow in scope. His TU on blankets from Native American culture, an entire TU on chop suey (!), and his Brussels TU took from a variety of sources and put together a great, new idea. Jonathan Magin came in late to the writing process but produced two of my favorite tossups in the set on Ulster loyalism and the Chamber of Commerce. When I see a message from Magin, I know its going to be a phenomenal idea.

I owe many of the great questions to you: the players! I plan on making a more substantive list of the great submissions I have after the rejects are made this week, but some of my favorites in the set were South Carolina’s TU on Marrakech, Virginia’s TU on Meta, Harvard’s bonus on South Korea semiconductors, and Claremont’s TU on the zoot suit that got molded into a bonus.

I wanted to specifically highlight one submission though: Florida B’s TU on “the yips.” This idea eventually was edited into the TU on “performance anxiety” which was humorously played at the start of the finals series. The reason this question was great was because it was original, fresh, and had lots of ideas that I could work off of. Overall, I was very pleased with the general quality of submissions. I would be happy to give specific thoughts and feedback if contacted.

Nationals wouldn’t have been as enduring of a project if it wasn’t for the team that was behind it.

Hasna Karim was my voice of reason throughout the set. She would always push me to make my questions better with suggestions and answerlines, even if I thought they were OK. Her vision is how diverse and new subjects such as the languages of Pakistan through Coke Studio and Nepal’s chhaupadi came to fruition. Similarly, her own TU on wombs through ancient interpretation was one of the best-written questions in the set. ACF National’s expansive content is largely due to her, and she knocked her own category out of the park. I feel guilty that the most feedback I could give on bio was an occasional funny picture of an animal…but alas.

I still thrash around in bed having nightmares that every time I had a novel idea, I would go on qbreader and Will Nediger would have already written it. Working with Will was like Raphael working on a fresco while his young assistant struggled to finger paint in the corner. He just gets it. He gets what is unique, fun, important, difficult, and overall exciting. He makes me want to read the books he writes about. His sly sense of humor and great feedback was reassuring for a set as big as Nats.

Speaking of books I want to read, Caroline Mao has once again proven why they are the best literature writer in quizbowl. Their great job of picking out the disregarded parts of the canon and important facets of literature not yet covered by quizbowl, but still buzzable in a competitive field is mindboggling. All of this while also producing an amazing program AND bullying Grant! Caroline is a great friend who joined ACF at the same time I did: I’m happy we made it across this figurative “finish line” together and look forward to future projects.

I had to ease into talking about Grant Peet…but now that I can, the word that comes to mind is “impeccable.” Grant’s attention to detail, dedication to finding the important and crucial clues balanced in his questions, and overarching vision are something that I really took for “granted” until I saw how ARCADIIA came together this year. Behind the occasional whimsey and crookedness, there’s a thoughtful writer leaving a legacy for future writers to study. Thanks for the journey from Regs to Nats over these last two years, my friend.

Sameer Apte is someone I didn’t know before working on the set. But there’s nothing I appreciate more than a master at their craft showing off what makes their category shine, and Sameer did that with his thoughtful approach to AFA. Ophir often shares his list of the dozens of different clues you could include for these questions…and I think Sameer did a phenomenal job of hitting the category from a dozen different angles, all with his own experience woven into the fabric of the writing.

Jon Settle is always a joy. Jon embodies another element of what I think makes good writing: making it accessible for amateurs to the category and constantly bringing up new, innovative content that players from all walks can buzz on - especially in their categories of science. For example, I can’t buzz or even 10 or 20 most of Jon’s bonuses. But have I ridden an oil well in rural Texas? Yes. Could I buzz on that tossup early? Oh yeah. Moments like that excitement and make me want to learn more about what’s come up. I think having a balance between challenge and introductions at Nats is how Jon put together a great oeuvre. Thanks for all the laughs and Bucc-ee’s jokes along the way.

Adam Silverman is a stalwart. At the same time he was assembling his questions for this Nats, Adam was plowing through his categories for the NSC, all the time with (what I hope to be) a smile and can-do attitude. He’s incredibly thoughtful towards feedback and the bigger picture of how players will handle the questions and enjoy their work. His work is perhaps some of the most underappreciated in all of quizbowl. Yet without Adam, his categories across dozens of sets wouldn’t have the same finesse and cleanliness. He’s a role model for me and should be for you too.

Three years ago, William Golden really stepped in and helped me finish my categories for ACF Winter when I was overwhelmed with life. It’s the only time I’ve had to ask for that help, and I am forever appreciative of his work. Nats this year was an opportunity to show off William’s pure talent at finding interesting and diverse subjects and putting them into some of the most enjoyable questions of the tournament. His one-liners were impeccable and I am forever envious of his knowledge and his jokes.

Michael Kearney radiates power - even when he’s not lifting at the gym. He made me want to buy sweaters! That’s crazy! In leadership, he’s direct, focused, and authoritative yet never obtuse or cruel. In writing, his clue choice always feels like its something I should know and is important, even if I’m completely out of my depth in the subject matter. But he’s also relatable, down to earth, and someone who was really crucial in bringing the people together for this set.

I remember seeing Nick Jensen at the hotel for Nats and feeling like I should bow down. I like to say I started off trying to get my questions like Nick’s, but instead found by own niche and style. Nick was so crucial in proofing this set, making sure it was playable from the ground up, making sure our style was constant across a few hundred pages of dense writing, all the while providing feedback on literally everything in the set, even writing the pharmaceuticals TU that was the last I needed for my categories. I still believe that Nick is one of, if not, best, hard-working editors in all of quizbowl and is a wonderful friend to have too.

I’d like to thank the proofers and army of playtesters for their help as well. JinAh Kim asked a lot of thoughtful questions while proofing which helped me iron out mistakes before they happened. Michael Coates demolished my questions and gave really insightful feedback on a variety of subjects. I owe it to Jason Golfinos for an expert’s opinion on my legal bonuses.

Thank you to the logistics team for the excellent tournament and for the many others mentioned in Taylor’s post for getting this set across the finish line.

I’d like to offer my brief philosophies on my categories.

Geography at Nationals level has a wide space to cover dozens of aspects of the experience on our planet. I tried to blend different aspects of physical, cultural, animal, and human geography into questions, with some favoring different balances of those fields. Questions inherently should answer the “Why should I care about this?” question. Any question can do this. It’s more a matter of finding the right clues and theme to make it interesting to play.

As someone who works in politics, working on Current Events was very fun. I try to take a more policy-driven approach: the TU’s on South Africa and Russia were designed to clue the policy with the broad umbrella of an answerline to make it playable. Bonuses could afford to be more adventurous, with the native law bonus, independent state legislature theory, and food deserts bonus being ways to talk about these big issues like someone involved in them would.

Oh sweet sweet Other Academic. Overarching, I like to reward how people interact with the world around them. My questions here were more often than not grounded in things like activities, culture, or the study of them. But at the end of the day, I approached every question with the first thought “Is this something players are going to want to hear and will remember?” This category more than most others has room to be adventurous, new, and exciting. I hope I accomplished this while highlighting diverse aspects of the world around us.

Thank you again for playing the set - godspeed and see you all next season!

[adamsil]

I don’t have much to say about my goals for this set’s Chemistry, which were broadly the same as last year’s. So instead, I want to thank and recognize my outstanding science co-editors, Jon and Hasna.

First, selfishly, they provided constant detailed feedback on my questions, especially where my areas bled away from our conventional classification of chemistry into more applied areas of engineering, biology, materials science, and physics, i.e., topics closer to their expertises than my own. Nats has had a big science team for two years, and that’s a trend that ought to continue. In a category that relies so heavily on blending coursework, active research, and “stuff that has come up before”, a group of people with diverse academic backgrounds (and more stake than a playtester) who weigh in on pyramidality and difficulty is instrumental. This is maybe especially true for chemistry, a subject that turns dour without a definition broad enough to encompass questions on droplet microfluidics and semiconductor fabrication.

Second: the creativity and execution in the physics, osci, and biology in this set was incredible—so many cool ideas, themed and executed well. Two of my favorites were “cross section but only formula clues” and “vaginal microbiome.” My response to Jon and Hasna’s questions was nearly always, “I wish I’d thought of writing that” (or, “I wish I was playing this!”)

My sincerest thanks also to Taylor, for managing this huge project extremely well; Nick, for knowing everything and bringing a keen eye to every question; and Eric, who wrote a lot of freelance questions for the category (particularly useful, because he seems to have very complementary academic interests to my own!). And a huge thanks to the rest of the team as well. I couldn’t have picked out most of my co-editors out of a lineup nine months ago. It was a terrific group of brilliant and fun people to work with.

If you would like feedback on your submitted chemistry qs, let me know and I will be happy to respond!

[knife emoji]

If you’d told me four years ago that I’d be two years out of college editing ACF Nationals, I would not have believed you; somehow, here I am anyways. Working on Nationals has been incredible, so I wanted to take the chance to thank all the people who made it so and briefly touch on the thought process behind my work for this set.

Many thanks to Taylor for being infinitely patient with my slow work and for so ably leading this enormous project. Thanks to Jon and Adam (Silverman) for forming a wonderfully supportive science editors union, for their endless rounds of feedback, and for their unflagging enthusiasm for and dedication to the most hated-on of quizbowl categories. Thanks to all the editors, as well, for forming such a lovely, brilliant community to work with and be part of. Thanks to Eric Mukherjee, Shan Kothari, and Kevin Thomas for freelancing me well-researched questions. Thanks to all the playtesters, and specifically to Rohith Nagari, Billy Busse, Shan Kothari, Eric Mukherjee, Jason Golfinos (notwithstanding French bullying), and my mom for their careful feedback on my categories. And finally, thanks to Humyra, Haseeba, Michael, Ganon, Annabelle, and Adam (Fine), whose moral support is always deeply appreciated.

My biology distribution, I hope, speaks to my priorities: I wanted to get at the many ways people do and know biology—including through experience as patients, which is knowledge that is frequently and unfairly dismissed. I’ve tried to honor the work of marginalized scientists (never successfully enough), and I’ve tried to balance deep cuts on foundational content (e.g. PFK, beta-galactosidase) with content that might interest even the non-scientists playing this set. Most importantly, though, I believe that science—and perhaps most especially biology—is too often treated as if it exists removed from society and its many problems. I hope my work has situated the science in its social context and has highlighted that scientific knowledge can be just as subjective and fallible as the people who participate in its creation. I hope this set’s biology has encouraged people to reflect on our responsibility to perform research and explain our findings in ethical ways.

Finally, I want to thank Taylor again for letting me cut into his religion work to do just the Islam. As always, I've tried to represent canonical currents of Islamic thought lost in popular imaginings of Islam and practices that feel true to my and others' experiences as Muslims.

[caroline]

Hi! I edited the American and World Literature. I don’t have anything particularly novel to say in terms of philosophy, and usually I prefer to let my questions speak for themselves (although I’m happy to chat about my editorial decisions if anyone has anything specific they’d like to discuss). I tried to keep the questions diverse in all the ways I could think of: time periods, regions, answerline types, minority writers, types of clues, types of literary knowledge, and many different freelancer/submitter voices (no editor is an island). Basically, I focused on asking a lot of different literature that’s all important in various different ways, and making it clear why you should care. Hopefully, there was something at this tournament for you.

Thanks to the following writers, who wrote me at least one question: Henry Atkins, Jordan Brownstein, Taylor Harvey, Nick Jensen, Hasna Karim, Rahul Keyal, Jonathan Magin, Grant Peet, and Chandler West. I would also like to thank my fellow editors (and especially our head editor), as I would not have survived the production process without their patience, diligence, kindness, and grace. (Except Grant.)

And of course, thank you to all the submitters. I tried to use as many submissions as I could while keeping a reasonably balanced subdistribution; out of my 48 questions in the submission-based packets, 33 were submissions, which I’m happy with. If your submission made it into a packet, you can assume I liked it, or else I wouldn’t have included it (though I will note I particularly enjoyed the submissions from Vanderbilt and Toronto). As such, I’ll shout out some questions I liked which unfortunately couldn’t make it into the packets:

Berkeley B: Minnehaha TU, speculative memoir bonus
Chicago A: Dada poetry bonus
Chicago B: Death and the Maiden TU, Jesus’ Son TU
Claremont: The Illustrated Man TU
Columbia A: Puerto Rico TU
Columbia B: Three Body (the game!) TU
Maryland: the hotel in The Night of the Iguana TU, steamboats in Melville/Twain TU
McGill: labyrinths in Borges TU
Rutgers A: Parable of the Sower TU
Rutgers B: The Fire This Time (by Jesmyn Ward) TU, “The Feather Pillow” TU
Toronto: Sayaka Murata TU, Antigone bonus
WUSTL B: golden shovel TU
UIUC: Galápagos TU, Xiaolu Guo bonus
UMN A: “Recitatif” TU
UMN B: Ocean Vuong TU, Adichie/Emezi bonus
Western: people turning into animals TU
Virginia: Paris in Cortazar TU (downconverted into a bonus)
Yale B: Paula Vogel TU

If you’d like feedback on your submission, feel free to contact me on here, email (carolinemao36 at gmail) or Discord (northcaroline#0050). :)