Here's my listening report for May: https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/month/5
Lots of Charli XCX and who can blame me after the great tour clips on social media and her amazing Coachella performance?
In the Bin podcast is on a regular Wednesday schedule, once a week. I feel like that's the most sustainable model I can do at the moment! It's also on YouTube, so here's the link if you would like to start listening over there (I'm sure you listen somewhere already!)
In the latest episode of my podcast In the Bin, I ask why we don't just teach people how to debate instead of trying to avoid debate. Substituting debate with another form of discourse is stealing from ourselves.
Here's the episode. First time doing a video podcast so let me know what you think!
Last weekend I was so lucky to be able to participate in an event at the University of Rochester celebrating Prof. Sam Nelson who has been a debate coach and teacher for a very long time.
His old students and assistants from all over the U.S. attended the surprise and shared their stories of how Sam transformed their lives. It was really an honor to be present for all of that testimony.
This is the vlog I made of my perspective of the trip and everything I did and thought about when I was there. This really inspired me to think about debate (what doesn't you might ask) from a variety of different perspectives.
It was so good to see Sam and to catch up with some of the old friends and students from my time working there. I was coaching at the University of Rochester from 2001 - 2002, and again from fall 2003 through 2004. From the Fall of 2002 to the spring of 2003, I lived in Syracuse, NY and attended Syracuse University. I did stop by from time to time to say hi to the folks working there at the time and Sam.
I'm looking forward to visiting Rochester again already!
It took forever - blame Taylor and Francis because, well, it's most likely their fault - but I finally got another essay out about debate theory and history.
This was a special issue that was supposed to come out a long time ago about the so-called 'joint championship' of Wake Forest that year, winning both the CEDA and NDT championship tournament. If you don't know what that means, that's fine - that was the point of the special issue. So join the club: What does it mean? What should it mean?
I reread my piece and it seems ok, however I prefer the one I originally wrote which bled a lot to bring this version to the publication. I'll present them both here for you to take a look at and determine which version of the essay you think is your preference. I wrote them both so I'm happy with however you feel about it.
In the age of digital everything, why don't we have a public "track changes" way of sharing our research and work? Seems like there would be a lot of value in there for those commenting on our work or moving forward in the areas we research and write about. Comparing versions of documents is easy and interesting, yet in most publishing we only see a "final version" as if it fell out of the sky. It can really be a great source of invention for an essay to ask the question "Why was that section removed or moved?" "When did that citation first get placed?" I figure sharing the first and last version might be a good starting place. Here's the original draft:
