I really loved this year's concept, but I find it funny that few of them I would call reviews -as in they mostly didn't rank their subjects on a 1-10 scale-
A lot of commenters have been saying that a bunch of the submissions weren't reviews, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on which ones were or weren't.
I definitely wouldn't consider a 1-10 ranking as a requirement to constitute a review. As far as I remember, none of the book review submissions have included one, either previous contest entrants or Scott's own.
No, but they do usually provide some kind of bottom-line conclusion on whether/why/how the book was good or bad. I guess most of the finalists also did that at least a little, but sometimes only a little.
Way harder to choose my top 3 this time than in years past. So much so that despite voting a mere minute ago I've already forgotten the order I placed 2, 7 & 10 and have regrets on not substituting for 4,5, 8, 11 or 13 for any of the ones I chose.
I've been watching the market for a while, and both of them have been really strong contenders throughout and usually the top two, but weren't previously quite this dominant. The currently-next-highest one, not counting "The Russo-Ukrainian War"*, also did well for a long time but fell fairly far fairly fast when this post went up.
* "The Russo-Ukrainian War" doesn't count because it has also consistently been the case that the most recently posted review scores disproportionately highly, and so we can't easily disentangle that from the question of whether people otherwise liked it best.
The Dating in the Bay Area one isn't that surprising. A lot of ACX readers are men who fit one of the profiles mentioned in the review and people like feeling seen and affirmed. That's the only explanation for why that one's doing so well. In terms of content, it was one of the lower-tier ones.
To the extent that I imagine myself as any of those types, I do not think I would feel very affirmed by the treatment in that review. This isn't a commentary on the merits of the review, just that that explanation seems odd.
The Dating in the Bay Area one being so high is probably a smart bet, but it's a bet that you make because you don't have an overly high opinion of the electorate.
I don't know. I didn't put it on my top three but I thought it was mostly quite well written. It wasn't on my list of things I don't see what anyone sees in them.
Here's my review of the "Dating Men in the Bay Area" review. (This was originally part of a chat conversation among friends shortly after it was posted; I've cleaned it up a little to be more self-contained.)
I gave this review a 4/10. Here's why I didn't like it:
There is a *whole lot* of armchair philosophizing about Modern Gender Roles, and it just didn't feel all that insightful or convincing. I think some amount of it is just, like, I've read more nuanced and more persuasive and better-cited versions of all these points elsewhere, by better writers.
Other readers have praised this post as a good ethnography of the Bay Area dating pool. I do not get the sense that that's what I'm reading. First of all, a lot of the post isn't even about that, see above. But even in the parts that are, she has so thoroughly suffused the entire piece with her own voice as to give the sense that I'm reading her extrapolations and judgments, rather than her observations. A good ethnographer needs to get out of the way and allow their subjects to present themselves, or rather, to create the impression of same.
While the author has identified a number of real and undesirable trends in society that are worth commenting on, her core problem is that she demands a 99th-percentile emotionally healthy and self-actualized partner and won't accept anything less, which makes it totally unsurprising that she's usually disappointed. (She gives lip service to the idea that becoming a Man Who Is Whole is a messy process that involves failures along the way, but makes clear that he'd better have already gotten all of those failures out of the way before he tries to date—and I'm not clear on how that's supposed to happen given that lack of relationship experience is *also* supposedly a red flag.) To be clear, unlike some of the commenters, I don't at all judge her for being picky! I'm probably pickier than that (though not along that specific axis, and also I'm defective in a bunch of other ways she isn't). But I think that we picky people ought to own our pickiness, and be clear to ourselves and others that the problem is with us, not our dating pools. Instead she pretty strongly implies that she views these men as Fundamentally Defective, and their prevalence in her dating pool as a symptom of a sick society. (The "it's not their fault they grew up in a sick society" shtick is trying to treat this compassionately but instead mostly comes across as condescending. This is double-extra true for the manosphere section.)
The "Man Who Opts Out" section feels like it can go a bunch of different ways and the review only acknowledges one of them; see https://thingofthings.substack.com/i/171420890/in-defense-of-the-men-who-opt-out, but also the point about how dating over 25 without a prior relationship is a market for lemons but the way to overcome it is to have had non-romantic close relationships. Like, do we have specific reasons to believe that this in particular is a decisive factor?
Her prescriptions for society don't really have anything to do with the problem that she says she's trying to solve. They are basically just the same anti-man-hating-feminist talking points from above. There are a couple places where she sort of gestures at a Thing Society Could Do Differently that's a *small* step towards actionability for the specific problems of the specific men she's talking about (promote subcultures and more aggressive therapist filtering), but she doesn't elaborate on them at all.
I mostly agree with these being its weaknesses. I think I differ in finding her not quite as bad along them as you do (and, having been a man who dates women in the bay area, it helped that I found her to be better along them than most women in the bay area, if not as good as the women I most liked dating after moving away). But broadly directionally in alignment with this meta review.
Hey, writer of "Dating Men in the Bay Area" here. Just wanted to give a very sincere thank you for taking the time to write up such a detailed and helpful critique. :)
You make some excellent points about the weaker spots, and some of your takeaways don't match my opinions/intents, which shows me areas where I probably should have been clearer. Your comment gives me lots of helpful ideas for revisions, thank you!
Full disclosure: I've never written a long-form essay before this one, and this was written in a 10-hour marathon session of writing with no time for revising before the deadline. In all honesty, I am low-key mortified it made it as a finalist, because I cringe at so many people reading my un-revised writing. (I never dreamed it would make it as a finalist, so I just submitted to keep my personal goal of participating this year. Jokes on me, lmao.) The amount of feedback I've gotten has been overwhelming, but your critique is hands down the most helpful comment I've gotten in regards to actually learning how to be a good essayist.
Also really appreciate you linking to Ozy's piece! I wasn't aware of it until now, and I really enjoyed reading her perspective and feel she's changed my mind about some elements of dating "Men Who Opt Out."
At least you didn't get professionally published from the one place that says "you always get a rejection notice first." (The guy who managed that fine little trick was a copy editor at the magazine, so... I guess the chief figured "you already gave yourself a rejection notice or five.") He, of course, had just wanted the rejection notice so he could improve the piece.
Wow, I'm honestly shocked that you found my comment helpful; I'd have been nicer and more careful if I thought you were likely to read it! Thanks for your kind words.
I should disclose that the review also induced a certain amount of anxiety/feeling-judged in me personally, which I don't think should count against its merit but might have caused me to judge it a bit more harshly than was really fair. (The original version of my comment, posted privately for friends, had a final paragraph about this that I cut for being too personal for the public internet, but it's relevant context so I'm mentioning it.)
I'm really heartened to hear that a top finalist (one of only four to get substantial share in the prediction market) is from someone who isn't already a professional blogger or similar; this inspires me to try and put more of my own writing out there too, and I really hope you keep at it and we get to read more from you.
Alphaschool was definitely a runaway first for me, but I found Joan of Arc offputting. Maybe because I have a general antipathy to taking supernatural claims seriously, so I found the focus on that side of her story (instead of the history) to be a turnoff.
Not to the same degree - I think Scott's a better writer and does better job of being skeptical at the places I would be (and unlike Joan of Arc, that's not a story where he could've chosen to focus on the interesting history instead) - but yeah, definitely at least somewhat turned off by the subject.
Looking at it now, my top 3 Russo-Ukrainian, Alpha School, and Joan of Arc are in the top 3. I wonder if Joan will get a bit of a boost from the voting opening the same day as the sun miracle post; while reading about the documentation of the sun miracle I kept thinking of the equally well documented Joan of Arc miracles
Good luck to all the finalists! This year was great!!!
> This year is back to ranked choice voting
As someone who directly benefited from approval voting last year, I feel obligated to complain about the switch back to ranked choice voting. (Jk, it's fine.)
I suppose that makes sense. I remain sad that "JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories" did not get promoted to finalist, it was brilliant and I think I'd have bet on it making the top three.
I didn't read that one during initial voting. I'll have to check it out!
My favorite of the initial submissions was the review for The Witness (the line puzzle video game). It set up a great narrative about practicing rationality skills in a legible video game overworld.
I was very disappointed that there weren't more finalist reviews of ordinary non-book media. I don't think the Ollantay review really counts, since the review centered on the historical events surrounding the play more than the play itself.
I didn't like the review of The Witness; I didn't feel that it successfully made the case that there was anything there that I should care about. It is possible that my feelings here may have been indirectly influenced by my annoyance at Jonathan Blow's bad opinions/behavior about programming language design.
I read and rated about half of the submitted reviews, mostly chosen at random. I think of the ones that I gave 9/10 or higher as the "top tier", of which there were six, and of these only one was of a work of traditional media: Kiki's Delivery Service.
For fun, here's all my ratings; this is a total rank order of how much I liked all the reviews I read, though I don't claim perfect calibration or consistency.
★★★★★ ("the best one, I hope it wins and the author leverages this to cultivate an audience and get published more"): Joan of Arc*
★★★★⯪ ("actively interesting"): The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer; JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories**; Alpha School***; Ollantay*; State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address; Kiki's Delivery Service
★★★★☆ ("contains something unusually worth thinking about"): Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research***; The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat ("Why Do We Suck?")***; We Should Never Have Gone To Mammoth Caves; My Imagination; Person of Interest; The Last Of Us, Part II; Pregnancy; The Drum Major Instinct; Adult Gymnastics
★★★⯪☆ ("thought-provoking"): Earth; Judaism; Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos; She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power; Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia***; Museum of Science; Summer Camp For Sluts / Young Swingers' Week; Skibidi Toilet; Deathbed Ballads; My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes***; Lesbian Fanfiction; Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstucke; The Aphorism "Music Is The Universal Language Of Mankind"
★★★☆☆ ("replacement-level"): On Taste; DALL-E; L'Ambroisie; Rubbermaid Products; North Korea; Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; The Soul Of Karl Friston; Pure Mathematics; 11 Poetic Forms; A New Theodicy; Disco Elysium (1, by EH); Simple Twist Of Fate; Time's Arrow; Google's Hiring Process; Gacha Games; Mountaintop; The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus; Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall
★★⯪☆☆ ("I didn't personally like it but can acknowledge its value"): Pythia; Mad Investor Chaos; School***; Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory; The Russo-Ukrainian War***; Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy; Pathologic Classic HD; Disco Elysium (2, by DC); A Dance Remix Of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club"; An American Football Game
★★☆☆☆ ("failed to make the case for itself"): The Men Are Not Alright; Identity; Einstein's World-View; The Soul Of An Anti-Woke Intellectual; The Witness; The Spreadsheet; Scientific Peer Review; Dating Men In The Bay Area***; Gender; Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art*; How Many Super Mario Games Are There; Nicotine As A Nootropic; Which Sports? Why Sports?; The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series
★⯪☆☆☆ ("fundamentally flawed"): Death (Mata Hari, Princess Di, Joan of Arc); Marriage; Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been***; Feminism; The Sermon On The Mount, Review 2; Love; Meditations on Moloch
★☆☆☆☆ ("provoked active annoyance"): The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis***; Lublin Castle; The Sermon On The Mount; Civil War; Effective Altruism / Rationalism
⯪☆☆☆☆ ("I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"): 0th Dimension
* Eventual finalist that I read and rated during the initial phase of voting.
** Eventual honorable mention.
*** Finalist that I read only after it was posted on ACX proper.
I really loved this year's concept, but I find it funny that few of them I would call reviews -as in they mostly didn't rank their subjects on a 1-10 scale-
A lot of commenters have been saying that a bunch of the submissions weren't reviews, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on which ones were or weren't.
I definitely wouldn't consider a 1-10 ranking as a requirement to constitute a review. As far as I remember, none of the book review submissions have included one, either previous contest entrants or Scott's own.
Do Scott's book (and etc) reviews ever give a number rating?
No, but they do usually provide some kind of bottom-line conclusion on whether/why/how the book was good or bad. I guess most of the finalists also did that at least a little, but sometimes only a little.
(Also, there were a bunch of other "reviews" that didn't make the finals that made no pretense of being a review of anything at all.)
Way harder to choose my top 3 this time than in years past. So much so that despite voting a mere minute ago I've already forgotten the order I placed 2, 7 & 10 and have regrets on not substituting for 4,5, 8, 11 or 13 for any of the ones I chose.
Is it intended for us to be able to vote the same thing for the 3 places or we should just not do that?
I seriously doubt it
Genuinely shocked by the prediction market! None of my top 3 are even slightly in contention if the wisdom of gamblers is to be believed, lol.
Agreed- it seems odd that those two at the top are such strong favorites according to the market.
I've been watching the market for a while, and both of them have been really strong contenders throughout and usually the top two, but weren't previously quite this dominant. The currently-next-highest one, not counting "The Russo-Ukrainian War"*, also did well for a long time but fell fairly far fairly fast when this post went up.
* "The Russo-Ukrainian War" doesn't count because it has also consistently been the case that the most recently posted review scores disproportionately highly, and so we can't easily disentangle that from the question of whether people otherwise liked it best.
The Dating in the Bay Area one isn't that surprising. A lot of ACX readers are men who fit one of the profiles mentioned in the review and people like feeling seen and affirmed. That's the only explanation for why that one's doing so well. In terms of content, it was one of the lower-tier ones.
To the extent that I imagine myself as any of those types, I do not think I would feel very affirmed by the treatment in that review. This isn't a commentary on the merits of the review, just that that explanation seems odd.
I've been betting the market, and that one is easily the most volatile. My theory is that a few really like it and a few really don't.
That much is quite clear to anyone who read the comments or other discussion surrounding that review.
The Dating in the Bay Area one being so high is probably a smart bet, but it's a bet that you make because you don't have an overly high opinion of the electorate.
I don't know. I didn't put it on my top three but I thought it was mostly quite well written. It wasn't on my list of things I don't see what anyone sees in them.
Here's my review of the "Dating Men in the Bay Area" review. (This was originally part of a chat conversation among friends shortly after it was posted; I've cleaned it up a little to be more self-contained.)
I gave this review a 4/10. Here's why I didn't like it:
There is a *whole lot* of armchair philosophizing about Modern Gender Roles, and it just didn't feel all that insightful or convincing. I think some amount of it is just, like, I've read more nuanced and more persuasive and better-cited versions of all these points elsewhere, by better writers.
Other readers have praised this post as a good ethnography of the Bay Area dating pool. I do not get the sense that that's what I'm reading. First of all, a lot of the post isn't even about that, see above. But even in the parts that are, she has so thoroughly suffused the entire piece with her own voice as to give the sense that I'm reading her extrapolations and judgments, rather than her observations. A good ethnographer needs to get out of the way and allow their subjects to present themselves, or rather, to create the impression of same.
While the author has identified a number of real and undesirable trends in society that are worth commenting on, her core problem is that she demands a 99th-percentile emotionally healthy and self-actualized partner and won't accept anything less, which makes it totally unsurprising that she's usually disappointed. (She gives lip service to the idea that becoming a Man Who Is Whole is a messy process that involves failures along the way, but makes clear that he'd better have already gotten all of those failures out of the way before he tries to date—and I'm not clear on how that's supposed to happen given that lack of relationship experience is *also* supposedly a red flag.) To be clear, unlike some of the commenters, I don't at all judge her for being picky! I'm probably pickier than that (though not along that specific axis, and also I'm defective in a bunch of other ways she isn't). But I think that we picky people ought to own our pickiness, and be clear to ourselves and others that the problem is with us, not our dating pools. Instead she pretty strongly implies that she views these men as Fundamentally Defective, and their prevalence in her dating pool as a symptom of a sick society. (The "it's not their fault they grew up in a sick society" shtick is trying to treat this compassionately but instead mostly comes across as condescending. This is double-extra true for the manosphere section.)
The "Man Who Opts Out" section feels like it can go a bunch of different ways and the review only acknowledges one of them; see https://thingofthings.substack.com/i/171420890/in-defense-of-the-men-who-opt-out, but also the point about how dating over 25 without a prior relationship is a market for lemons but the way to overcome it is to have had non-romantic close relationships. Like, do we have specific reasons to believe that this in particular is a decisive factor?
Her prescriptions for society don't really have anything to do with the problem that she says she's trying to solve. They are basically just the same anti-man-hating-feminist talking points from above. There are a couple places where she sort of gestures at a Thing Society Could Do Differently that's a *small* step towards actionability for the specific problems of the specific men she's talking about (promote subcultures and more aggressive therapist filtering), but she doesn't elaborate on them at all.
I mostly agree with these being its weaknesses. I think I differ in finding her not quite as bad along them as you do (and, having been a man who dates women in the bay area, it helped that I found her to be better along them than most women in the bay area, if not as good as the women I most liked dating after moving away). But broadly directionally in alignment with this meta review.
Hey, writer of "Dating Men in the Bay Area" here. Just wanted to give a very sincere thank you for taking the time to write up such a detailed and helpful critique. :)
You make some excellent points about the weaker spots, and some of your takeaways don't match my opinions/intents, which shows me areas where I probably should have been clearer. Your comment gives me lots of helpful ideas for revisions, thank you!
Full disclosure: I've never written a long-form essay before this one, and this was written in a 10-hour marathon session of writing with no time for revising before the deadline. In all honesty, I am low-key mortified it made it as a finalist, because I cringe at so many people reading my un-revised writing. (I never dreamed it would make it as a finalist, so I just submitted to keep my personal goal of participating this year. Jokes on me, lmao.) The amount of feedback I've gotten has been overwhelming, but your critique is hands down the most helpful comment I've gotten in regards to actually learning how to be a good essayist.
Also really appreciate you linking to Ozy's piece! I wasn't aware of it until now, and I really enjoyed reading her perspective and feel she's changed my mind about some elements of dating "Men Who Opt Out."
At least you didn't get professionally published from the one place that says "you always get a rejection notice first." (The guy who managed that fine little trick was a copy editor at the magazine, so... I guess the chief figured "you already gave yourself a rejection notice or five.") He, of course, had just wanted the rejection notice so he could improve the piece.
Wow, I'm honestly shocked that you found my comment helpful; I'd have been nicer and more careful if I thought you were likely to read it! Thanks for your kind words.
I should disclose that the review also induced a certain amount of anxiety/feeling-judged in me personally, which I don't think should count against its merit but might have caused me to judge it a bit more harshly than was really fair. (The original version of my comment, posted privately for friends, had a final paragraph about this that I cut for being too personal for the public internet, but it's relevant context so I'm mentioning it.)
I'm really heartened to hear that a top finalist (one of only four to get substantial share in the prediction market) is from someone who isn't already a professional blogger or similar; this inspires me to try and put more of my own writing out there too, and I really hope you keep at it and we get to read more from you.
Alphaschool was definitely a runaway first for me, but I found Joan of Arc offputting. Maybe because I have a general antipathy to taking supernatural claims seriously, so I found the focus on that side of her story (instead of the history) to be a turnoff.
Did you also dislike the Miracle of the Sun lit review that Scott posted yesterday?
Not to the same degree - I think Scott's a better writer and does better job of being skeptical at the places I would be (and unlike Joan of Arc, that's not a story where he could've chosen to focus on the interesting history instead) - but yeah, definitely at least somewhat turned off by the subject.
Looking at it now, my top 3 Russo-Ukrainian, Alpha School, and Joan of Arc are in the top 3. I wonder if Joan will get a bit of a boost from the voting opening the same day as the sun miracle post; while reading about the documentation of the sun miracle I kept thinking of the equally well documented Joan of Arc miracles
Good luck to all the finalists! This year was great!!!
> This year is back to ranked choice voting
As someone who directly benefited from approval voting last year, I feel obligated to complain about the switch back to ranked choice voting. (Jk, it's fine.)
What was the rationale for promoting exactly one honorable mention to finalist status?
in the intro to "school" acx said it was because it was a good counterpoint to the other finalist about alpha school
I suppose that makes sense. I remain sad that "JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories" did not get promoted to finalist, it was brilliant and I think I'd have bet on it making the top three.
I didn't read that one during initial voting. I'll have to check it out!
My favorite of the initial submissions was the review for The Witness (the line puzzle video game). It set up a great narrative about practicing rationality skills in a legible video game overworld.
I was very disappointed that there weren't more finalist reviews of ordinary non-book media. I don't think the Ollantay review really counts, since the review centered on the historical events surrounding the play more than the play itself.
I didn't like the review of The Witness; I didn't feel that it successfully made the case that there was anything there that I should care about. It is possible that my feelings here may have been indirectly influenced by my annoyance at Jonathan Blow's bad opinions/behavior about programming language design.
I read and rated about half of the submitted reviews, mostly chosen at random. I think of the ones that I gave 9/10 or higher as the "top tier", of which there were six, and of these only one was of a work of traditional media: Kiki's Delivery Service.
For fun, here's all my ratings; this is a total rank order of how much I liked all the reviews I read, though I don't claim perfect calibration or consistency.
★★★★★ ("the best one, I hope it wins and the author leverages this to cultivate an audience and get published more"): Joan of Arc*
★★★★⯪ ("actively interesting"): The Life's Work Of Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer; JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories**; Alpha School***; Ollantay*; State Of Competitive Debating (Unions) Address; Kiki's Delivery Service
★★★★☆ ("contains something unusually worth thinking about"): Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research***; The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat ("Why Do We Suck?")***; We Should Never Have Gone To Mammoth Caves; My Imagination; Person of Interest; The Last Of Us, Part II; Pregnancy; The Drum Major Instinct; Adult Gymnastics
★★★⯪☆ ("thought-provoking"): Earth; Judaism; Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos; She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power; Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia***; Museum of Science; Summer Camp For Sluts / Young Swingers' Week; Skibidi Toilet; Deathbed Ballads; My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes***; Lesbian Fanfiction; Arnold Schoenberg - Drei Klavierstucke; The Aphorism "Music Is The Universal Language Of Mankind"
★★★☆☆ ("replacement-level"): On Taste; DALL-E; L'Ambroisie; Rubbermaid Products; North Korea; Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; The Soul Of Karl Friston; Pure Mathematics; 11 Poetic Forms; A New Theodicy; Disco Elysium (1, by EH); Simple Twist Of Fate; Time's Arrow; Google's Hiring Process; Gacha Games; Mountaintop; The Beginning After The End Of Humanity Circus; Phoenix Theatre at Great Northern Mall
★★⯪☆☆ ("I didn't personally like it but can acknowledge its value"): Pythia; Mad Investor Chaos; School***; Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory; The Russo-Ukrainian War***; Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy; Pathologic Classic HD; Disco Elysium (2, by DC); A Dance Remix Of Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club"; An American Football Game
★★☆☆☆ ("failed to make the case for itself"): The Men Are Not Alright; Identity; Einstein's World-View; The Soul Of An Anti-Woke Intellectual; The Witness; The Spreadsheet; Scientific Peer Review; Dating Men In The Bay Area***; Gender; Islamic Geometric Patterns In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art*; How Many Super Mario Games Are There; Nicotine As A Nootropic; Which Sports? Why Sports?; The Pebble, Jewel of the 1960 World Series
★⯪☆☆☆ ("fundamentally flawed"): Death (Mata Hari, Princess Di, Joan of Arc); Marriage; Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been***; Feminism; The Sermon On The Mount, Review 2; Love; Meditations on Moloch
★☆☆☆☆ ("provoked active annoyance"): The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis***; Lublin Castle; The Sermon On The Mount; Civil War; Effective Altruism / Rationalism
⯪☆☆☆☆ ("I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"): 0th Dimension
* Eventual finalist that I read and rated during the initial phase of voting.
** Eventual honorable mention.
*** Finalist that I read only after it was posted on ACX proper.
For convenience:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest Announcement
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-nonbook-review-finalists-2025 Semifinals (all entries)
Immediately before Yom Kippur: random article on the Fatima Sun Miracle
Immediately ater Yom Kippur: get to voting
Truly the goat