My advice to those hosting or bidding to host the WUDC in the future is to try their hardest not to be Worlds. The world championship, before this most recent competition, had no hosts come forward to bid. Chennai was accepted without the usual time frame given to the planning of this tournament. Instead of…

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Of course I would forget to mention in the last post one of the best experiences I had this past year – working with the great authors in this book I helped edit on judging BP debate. The book is available on Amazon, and pretty much anywhere where you would like to buy books. Working…

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Research Bar (Photo credit: Rice-Aron Library) Gearing up for a new semester here in frozen New York City. Just got back to town after an extended trip to Houston to hang out with my family and my new nephew. Don’t worry, we haven’t started working on prepping motions yet. That starts next year . .…

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Good theater should not look like theater. It shouldn’t feel like it either. It shouldn’t feel like anything, well, anything out of the ordinary. It should feel like you are watching people interact, react, and act. But not acting. That shouldn’t be apparent. Good acting should look like humans doing human stuff. Unless it’s a…

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This was the second year I traveled to Montana to teach debating. I love it. It’s always a great trip. I’ve been posting some of the videos I created while there.  This year it was in Helena at Carroll College, next year it will again be in Billings at Rocky Mountain College. The first night,…

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speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) It is no surprise that the media have dug deep into Ted Cruz’s life and discovered he was a college debater. Many articles, such as this one and also this are out there. There’s no shortage. Most of them mention that Cruz was a debater and speech…

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For the past two years I’ve journeyed out to Montana as a part of BP debate’s westward expansion across the US. Here’s the first video from my workshop this year, where I cover the basics of British Parliamentary debating. Since most of the audience had high school experience in a variety of American formats, I…

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Not everything I do is related to debating, and I’m very thankful for that. I like diversity and I like the flow of things to change up. But everything I do is informed by debating and my relationship to debating. It’s unavoidable. Just as my work in debate is informed by my experiences as a…

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The rear LCD display on a Flip Video camrea (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Often times at debating competitions you will see me carrying around a video camera trying to record a few debates here and there. Most of the time people are fine with being recorded. Sometimes they are not, but this number is shrinking every…

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Lincoln at a debate with Stephen Douglas. This is a photo of the original work, part of a private collection temporarily on display at the Lincoln Boyhood Memorial in August of 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Here’s my second reason why this season will be one to remember in debate history. And it’s not more praise…

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