Hello Garrison, I’m a card carrying, bona fide, lifelong liberal. But to be honest, I miss having an opposition party that’s true to their mission statement. Used to be that the Republican message could be stated simply: reduce the size of government, pass the resulting savings back to the people in the form of tax reduction and deficit reduction. Allow folks to do, in their personal, private lives, whatever they’re drawn to do, as long as the government is not asked to pay for it.

When I first started this newsletter, the Pride Profiles I shared were destined for the 2020 National Order of the Arrow Conference, which as we all know now, was cancelled due to the pandemic. In the time since, I’ve kept the Pride Profiles coming and expanded the scope beyond members of the OA. Getting to know LGBTQ+ Scouters from across the country has been a true delight for me, and I hope for you as well.

Following up on my rather popular recent rant on pseudoreplication, I here share some thoughts about proper controls in ecological experiments. This is an equally important topic (and incidentally this was also completely botched in the infuriatingly terrible preprint we recently read in lab meeting). A common misconception about controls is to do nothing, to leave the experimental unit alone, to not add anything for example. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Kim really believes he can bring five star guys here.” That’s what I was told during a visit to Providence’s campus about a month after Kim English was hired to replace Ed Cooley — at a time when so many were questioning what was ahead in Friartown. From outside of the program the departure of Cooley brought about questions regarding the future of Friar basketball. The national narratives were filled with talk of ceilings and NIL challenges for such a small school, but internally there was confidence that something substantial was established in Providence, and the Friars were built to last with their new head coach at the helm.

Over the last week and a half I’ve been working on fulfilling my dream of writing an unpublishable 1200-page novel that nobody will ever read. It proceeds apace, but I haven’t given much thought to updating this thing in the meantime. So let’s see what sort of quodlibetical gibberish I can throw together in a pinch. After invoking the concept in our last episode, I figured it would be a good time to return to and leaf through the late Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?