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Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.
Saturday December 13^th, 2025 at 4:21 PM

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“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.”

— Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston

“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.”

— Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.

“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’”

— Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.

Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.

Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.

Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.

We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.

More than 2,000 people responded.

Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.

Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.

Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.

These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.

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Students using excerpt-based curriculums are often assigned snippets of classic novels, which they access through a web interface. This program, StudySync, offers an 859-word segment of “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison. Credit...StudySync

Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.

By the time teachers get through their required curriculums and prep students for exams, they often have little or no time left to guide classes through a whole book.

Andrew Polk, 26, teaches 10th-grade English in suburban Ohio, not far from where he grew up. As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

But as a teacher, Mr. Polk must use StudySync, which centers on excerpts. Many colleagues do not believe students will read whole books, he said, though he noted his own experience had not borne that out.

He still assigns several longer works each year, and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns,” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just a matter of setting those expectations.”

When whole books are assigned, they are most often from a relatively stagnant list of classics, according to research from the scholars Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.

Here are the most frequently assigned books through the past six decades, according to their forthcoming study.

2009

On the cover of Mark Twain's novel, the book title 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' appears below his name. Above this text is an illustration of two boys standing at a riverbank in front of a small boat.

Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Hamlet' appears above his name atop a watercolored aqua background.

Hamlet William Shakespeare 1623

On the cover of William Shakespeare's play, the book title 'Julius Caesar' appears above his name atop a textured blue background.

Julius Caesar William Shakespeare 1599

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Macbeth' appears above his name atop a purple watercolor texture.

Macbeth William Shakespeare 1623

On the cover of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, the book title 'The Scarlet Letter' appears below his name. This text sits atop an ornate, red calligraphic capital letter A.

The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850

On the cover of Charles Dickens's novel, the book title 'A Tale of Two Cities' appears below his name. This text sits atop an oil painting of a crowded city square in Paris in the 1800s.

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859

On the cover of Charles Dickens's novel, the book title 'Great Expectations' appears above his name. Below this text is an illustration of a woman in a ball gown.

Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1861

On the cover of Thornton Wilder's play, the book title 'Our Town' appears above his name, atop a scene of houses silhouetted against the night sky.

Our Town Thornton Wilder 1938

On the cover of Stephen Crane's novel, the book title 'The Red Badge of Courage' appears above his name. This text sits atop an illustration of two Union soldiers at a Civil War encampment.

The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895

On the cover of George Eliot's novel, the book title 'Silas Marner' appears above his name. Above this text is an oil painting of a gray-haired man holding a girl in his lap with a blanket wrapped around them.

Silas Marner George Eliot 1861

On the cover of Mark Twain's novel, the book title 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' appears below his name. Above this text is an illustration of two boys standing at a riverbank in front of a small boat.

Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Hamlet' appears above his name atop a watercolored aqua background.

Hamlet William Shakespeare 1623

On the cover of William Shakespeare's play, the book title 'Julius Caesar' appears above his name atop a textured blue background.

Julius Caesar William Shakespeare 1599

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Macbeth' appears above his name atop a purple watercolor texture.

Macbeth William Shakespeare 1623

On the cover of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, the book title 'The Scarlet Letter' appears below his name. This text sits atop an ornate, red calligraphic capital letter A.

The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850

On the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, the book title 'The Great Gatsby' appears above his name on a black background. Between the two pieces of text is are the headlights and grille of a luxury car from the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925

On the cover of Harper Lee's novel, the book title 'To Kill a Mockingbird' appears above her name atop a dark red and black background. Below the title text is an illustration of a tree.

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960

On the cover of William Golding's novel, the book title 'Lord of the Flies' appears above his name atop a dark red region bordered by an illustration of thick jungle foliage.

Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954

On the cover of John Steinbeck.'s novel, the book title 'Of Mice and Men' appears above his name atop a textured beige background. Above this text is an illustration of two farmers cutting and baling grain.

Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Romeo and Juliet' appears above his name atop a textured pink background.

Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare 1597

On the cover of Mark Twain's novel, the book title 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' appears below his name. Above this text is an illustration of two boys standing at a riverbank in front of a small boat.

Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884

On the cover of the novelized version of Arthur Miller's play, the book title 'The Crucible' appears above his name atop an orange and beige background. Near this text are illustrations of a kettle full of boiling liquid and a rag doll with a needle impaling its torso.

The Crucible Arthur Miller 1953

On the cover of William Shakespeare's play, the book title 'Julius Caesar' appears above his name atop a textured blue background.

Julius Caesar William Shakespeare 1599

On the cover of Elie Wiesel's novel, the book title 'Night' appears above his name atop a background of beige and gray. Below this text is an illustration of a line of barbed wire.

Night Elie Wiesel 1960 (In English)

On the cover of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, the book title 'The Scarlet Letter' appears below his name. This text sits atop an ornate, red calligraphic capital letter A.

The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850

On the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, the book title 'The Great Gatsby' appears above his name on a black background. Between the two pieces of text is are the headlights and grille of a luxury car from the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925

On the cover of Harper Lee's novel, the book title 'To Kill a Mockingbird' appears above her name atop a dark red and black background. Below the title text is an illustration of a tree.

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960

On the cover of William Golding's novel, the book title 'Lord of the Flies' appears above his name atop a dark red region bordered by an illustration of thick jungle foliage.

Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954

On the cover of John Steinbeck.'s novel, the book title 'Of Mice and Men' appears above his name atop a textured beige background. Above this text is an illustration of two farmers cutting and baling grain.

Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Romeo and Juliet' appears above his name atop a textured pink background.

Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare 1597

On the cover of Ray Bradbury's novel, the book title 'Fahrenheit 451' appears above his name atop a mustard yellow background. Above and below this text are abstract illustrations of embers."

Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953

On the cover of the novelized version of Arthur Miller's play, the book title 'The Crucible' appears above his name atop an orange and beige background. Near this text are illustrations of a kettle full of boiling liquid and a rag doll with a needle impaling its torso.

The Crucible Arthur Miller 1953

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Hamlet' appears above his name atop a watercolored aqua background.

Hamlet William Shakespeare 1623

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Macbeth' appears above his name atop a purple watercolor texture.

Macbeth William Shakespeare 1623

On the cover of Elie Wiesel's novel, the book title 'Night' appears above his name atop a background of beige and gray. Below this text is an illustration of a line of barbed wire.

Night Elie Wiesel 1960 (In English)

On the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, the book title 'The Great Gatsby' appears above his name on a black background. Between the two pieces of text is are the headlights and grille of a luxury car from the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925

On the cover of Harper Lee's novel, the book title 'To Kill a Mockingbird' appears above her name atop a dark red and black background. Below the title text is an illustration of a tree.

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960

On the cover of William Golding's novel, the book title 'Lord of the Flies' appears above his name atop a dark red region bordered by an illustration of thick jungle foliage.

Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954

On the cover of John Steinbeck.'s novel, the book title 'Of Mice and Men' appears above his name atop a textured beige background. Above this text is an illustration of two farmers cutting and baling grain.

Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck 1937

On the cover of William Shakespeare's novel, the book title 'Romeo and Juliet' appears above his name atop a textured pink background.

Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare 1597

Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class. - The New York Times

What may have changed most is the number of these classics students have read. During the 2008-2009 school year, one survey found high school English teachers assigned an average of four books annually, with a significant minority assigning seven or more books.

A 2024 survey of English teachers by Dr. Perrillo and Dr. Newman found they assigned an average of 2.7 whole books per year. The results will be published in 2026.

Some educators explained the decline by pointing toward the Common Core, a set of national standards for English and math that most states adopted in the early 2010s, and that continues to heavily shape classroom practice.

The Core was intended to better prepare students for college, and introduced more nonfiction reading and thesis-driven writing into schools. It also suggested a more culturally diverse array of authors, and pointed educators toward a long list of titles characterized by “historical and literary significance.”

Many school districts responded by requiring teachers to closely adhere to curriculum products that took an anthology approach — exposing students to dozens of writers and many genres, but through shorter readings. StudySync, for example, includes a single chapter of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club,” 1,179 words of “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah and James Madison’s “Federalist Papers: No. 10.”

Sandra Lightman, an education consultant who helped to develop the Common Core, agreed that students should be reading whole books but argued it was wrong to blame the Core, which she said had been misinterpreted.

Advocates for the Core had pointed out that some novels commonly assigned to teenagers, like “The Grapes of Wrath,” were not challenging in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. They were akin to a second- or third-grade reading level, despite being thematically rich.

“We never intended that should be banned, only that it shouldn’t be the sole source of reading,” Dr. Lightman said. She argued that overall, curriculum products include higher-quality, more interesting reading material today than they did 20 years ago, before the Common Core.

There are other reasons some schools prefer excerpts. It can be more expensive to purchase books than to assign a variety of shorter works, which are not subject to copyright restrictions and can be easily read on a laptop or tablet.

In addition, with more than 20 states passing laws over the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, using excerpts allows schools to avoid passages dealing with banned themes.

Laura Henry, the teacher in Houston, noted that StudySync offers a 988-word excerpt from “Enemies, a Love Story,” a darkly comic 1972 novel by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”

Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels. The current dominant approach — reading one or two full books per year as a class, alongside many excerpts — “makes great sense,” he said, as a way to introduce students to a wide array of writing.

Still, some young adults are frustrated by the lack of book reading in their schools.

Ella Harrigan, 22, of San Francisco, said she read only one book her freshman year, “The Hate U Give.” “I opted out and did an online course instead, where I read a book about every two weeks,” she said.

Parents who responded to the questionnaire complained, too, even when their children were enrolled in advanced classes at some of the most highly regarded public schools in America, including specialized high schools in New York City and affluent suburban schools in Montgomery County, Md.

Both districts said they encourage a mix of whole books and excerpts but give high school principals and teachers significant latitude in how often to assign longer works.

Kasey Gray, a spokeswoman for Imagine Learning, the company that develops StudySync, noted that the curriculum offers some units based on full-length novels. But Ms. Gray acknowledged schools using the program may not incorporate whole books.

“We understand the real constraints educators face — limited time, assessment pressures and diverse student needs,” she said in a statement.

StudySync is distributed by McGraw Hill, and the materials come with a disclaimer of sorts:

Please note that excerpts in the StudySync® library are intended as touchstones to generate interest in an author’s work. StudySync® believes that such passages do not substitute for the reading of entire texts and strongly recommends that students seek out and purchase the whole literary or informational work.

Companies that publish competing products centered on excerpts, including Savvas and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said they, too, encouraged teachers to assign whole books.

H.M.H.’s Into Literature includes one full-length play in each year of high school. In response to requests from school districts, the company is developing more daily lesson plans built around whole novels, said Jennifer Raimi, a senior vice president for product development.

There are many schools, educators and publishers defying the trend away from whole books — even if they have to bend the rules to do so.

“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a veteran high school English teacher in Albuquerque. Over the past year, she has assigned her juniors and seniors “Hamlet,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Life of Pi” and “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

Her students, she said, have told her they much prefer reading print books than reading on a screen.

There are some smaller players in the curriculum market, like Great Minds and Bookworms, that emphasize full books. So far, much of their business is in younger grade levels. But John White, chief executive of Great Minds, said the company is exploring expanding into high schools.

Dr. White previously served as state superintendent of education in Louisiana. Policymakers can shift classroom practice, he said, by creating new standardized tests that require students to write about books they have read during the school year, instead of just responding to short passages contained within the pages of the test booklet.

A major benefit of a whole class reading a whole novel together is the muscle it builds for citizenship and debating big ideas, Dr. White argued.

“Maybe most important is the common project,” he said, “of engaging other young people in a conversation about a book that is open to multiple interpretations.”

Your "Yukon Gold" Potatoes Probably Aren't Yukons—Here's Why
Tuesday December 9^th, 2025 at 3:02 PM

Ingredient Guides - Serious Eats

I didn't expect to be investigating potatoes this fall. That's until I started looking for Yukon Golds for a sheet-pan chicken recipe I was developing. This popular yellow-fleshed, Canadian-born variety is the potato I often default to because it's thin-skinned, naturally creamy, and still manages to hold its structure when cooked. It's also the recommended potato for many other Serious Eats recipes. But when I went to buy them, they were nowhere to be found in Brooklyn or Manhattan—not at the many mainstream grocery stores I tried, not at Whole Foods, not at specialty food stores.

I eventually resorted to Instacart, relieved to see Yukon Golds listed as available for delivery from several stores. The listings were clearly labeled "Yukon Gold," so I ordered them—three times, from three different stores. And three times, completely different bags showed up: Golden Rush, Klondike Goldust, Yellow Gold—names I'd never seen before and initially assumed were knockoffs. After the third delivery, it stopped feeling like my own little potato conspiracy and more like something was actually going on with my beloved Yukons.

"I often look for Yukon Gold potatoes in grocery stores but almost never find them," Dr. Gefu Wang-Pruski, a molecular biologist at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University who specializes in potato genetics, told me in an interview. And really—if a potato scientist can't track down Yukon Golds, what hope do the rest of us mere mortals have?

What I eventually learned is that Yukon Golds aren't just quietly disappearing—they're being pushed aside. Growers across the US and Canada have largely stopped planting them, citing low yields, disease susceptibility, and poor storage performance. Meanwhile, a growing roster of European yellow-fleshed varieties has taken over fields and supermarket shelves. They're more productive, resilient, and far more profitable. In reporting this story, I spoke with molecular scientists, breeders, retailers, and chefs to understand why the potato so many cooks rely on is losing ground, what's replacing it, and whether Yukon Golds have a future in American kitchens at all.

What Are Yukon Gold Potatoes?

The Yukon Gold, named after a territory in northwestern Canada, was developed at the University of Guelph in Ontario, first bred in the late 1960s by potato breeder Gary Johnston, and officially released in 1980. It was created by crossing a North American white potato with a yellow-fleshed Peruvian variety, bringing the color and creaminess common in South American potatoes into the North American market for the first time.

Yellow-fleshed potatoes aren't new—Europeans have cooked with them for generations, and South America has cultivated a wide range of yellow varieties for centuries. But in the United States and Canada, where white potatoes like russets dominated supermarket shelves for decades, the Yukon Gold was the first yellow potato to gain real traction. For many North American cooks, it was the first yellow-fleshed potato they ever encountered in a grocery store.

A true Yukon Gold is easy to recognize once you know what to look for: a small-to-medium, round-to-oval potato with thin, lightly netted skin and a deep yellow interior. Its most distinctive marker is the pale pink ring around the eyes—a soft blush caused by the plant pigments anthocyanins inherited from its Peruvian lineage.

What sets Yukon Golds apart from russets is their balance of starch and moisture. Unlike russets, which can turn chalky and crumbly when cooked, Yukons hold their shape in soups and braises, becoming tender without disintegrating. They're also prized for dishes that rely on a creamy-but-cohesive texture—tortilla española, tartiflette, crispy roasted potatoes—where they deliver richness without turning dry.

That combination of flavor, texture, and versatility made them a favorite among home cooks and professionals alike.

Why Are Yukon Golds Disappearing?

The deeper I dug, the clearer the pattern became.

Yukon Golds are beloved in the kitchen but problematic in the field. "Low yield, sensitive to disease, and poor storage performance," is how Wang-Pruski summarizes it.

The variety is also unusually prone to two major threats: common scab and potato virus Y, which causes significant crop losses. Both can undermine a harvest before it ever leaves the ground, Dr. Mark Clough, a potato researcher at North Carolina State University, told me.

Yukons are notorious for late-season defects too: rot, hollow heart, and internal necrosis. In the kitchen, they behave predictably. In the field, they rarely do.

Dr. David Douches, a potato breeder at Michigan State University, explains that Yukons "can be difficult to keep in storage without quality loss," a major liability for farmers who depend on long-holding, consistent varieties. Even during the growing season, he told me, Yukons require a narrow band of conditions to avoid defects—hardly ideal in a climate increasingly defined by droughts, heat spikes, and unpredictable storms. Many of the issues consumers never see, he said, "are exactly the ones that make growers walk away."

And outside agricultural circles, the shift has been strangely quiet. One of the few people to write about it was journalist Owen Roberts, who devoted a 2016 "Urban Cowboy" column in GuelphToday to the growing scarcity of Yukons in Ontario. But beyond that, the online conversation is remarkably thin. When I went looking, the most active discussion I found was a single Reddit thread from 2023 titled, "Where are all the Yukon Gold potatoes?" The replies were bewildered but resigned—some chimed in to complain they couldn't find them anywhere, while others could find them but at exorbitant prices.

Serious Eats / Daniel Gritzer

For a recent Friendsgiving, Daniel, our editorial director, managed to find Yukon Golds at a local farmers market in New York—something I hadn't been able to do for weeks. The win was short-lived: When he cut into them, several revealed a blackened hollow heart. And while it sounds like an excellent name for a heavy-metal band, it's an actual physiological defect—an empty cavity that forms when the potato grows too quickly after a period of stress, often leaving a dark or blackened interior. It's also exactly the kind of late-season problem growers cite when explaining why Yukons have become so unreliable.

What Comes Next for Yukon Gold and Its Kin?

The more I spoke with breeders and researchers, the clearer it became that the Yukon Gold doesn't have an heir apparent. Instead, as noted above, it has been eclipsed by an entire wave of newer European yellow-fleshed potatoes—varieties that yield more, resist disease, store reliably, and still offer the creamy texture cooks love about Yukons.

Dr. Benoît Bizimungu, a potato breeder and research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, says his team developed a new yellow-fleshed variety called AAC Canada Gold-Dorée. This variety, which was licensed in 2017 in Canada and the US, was bred specifically to address the weaknesses that make Yukon Golds so difficult to grow. It produces higher yields, resists disease—including potato virus Y—and was designed to closely match the Yukon Gold's flavor and texture. It's mostly available as seed for now, he says, with early production happening in Canada and in limited acreage in Colorado. While it isn't yet showing up in supermarkets, those first plantings suggest it may eventually become a real contender once it spreads beyond the seed stage.

Bizimungu adds that even if the Yukon Gold loses ground commercially, it remains valuable as breeding material. Its flavor, texture, and cooking quality make it a strong parent in new crosses, so researchers continue to preserve and use it in Canada's national gene bank. Other breeders are moving in the same direction: using the Yukon Gold in conjunction with other varieties to try to create a super yellow potato. Douches said his team is developing new yellow-fleshed varieties that retain the Yukon's cooking quality while addressing its agronomic flaws.

Dr. Walter De Jong, a potato breeder at Cornell University, pointed me to a national seed acreage data from the Potato Association of America showing that Yukon Gold plantings have undergone a steady decline since the early 2000s, while newer varieties like Gala already exceed Yukon in seed acreage and Soraya is close to or matching it in some years. In addition to Gala and Soraya, Agata, Colomba, Satina, Belmonda, and Natascha are among the European varieties replacing Yukons. That same decline in Yukon Gold planting is visible in Canada, too. Bizimungu notes that Yukon Golds once appeared reliably in the country's annual list of the top 50 potato varieties by seeded acreage. In the last year or two, he says, it slipped off the list entirely.

NC State's Clough went so far as to say that growers in North Carolina have "pretty well stopped raising Yukons" altogether, turning instead to varieties like Colomba, Soraya, Natascha, and Golden Globe. His observation reflects what other breeders and retailers described to me as well: Yukon Golds drifting into obsolescence, European yellows filling the gap, and stores gravitating toward whichever high-yield, disease-resistant varieties move most cleanly through the supply chain.

And while most American shoppers have never heard of any of these varieties, they've likely been eating them for years. As Douches explains, the US retail system almost never labels yellow potatoes by variety. If the skin is smooth and the flesh is yellow, it's sold simply as "gold" or "yellow"—indicating a color category, not a cultivar. Which means a bag labeled "gold potatoes" may contain Colomba or Agata, even if the shopper assumes they're getting "the Yukon kind," as Douches puts it.

Retailers see the same pattern. Lauren Jangl, a representative for the New York–area online grocer FreshDirect, told me that customers rarely seek out Yukon Golds by name; they shop almost entirely by color. As long as a potato is labeled "gold," it sells. That habit has real consequences behind the scenes, because true Yukon Golds cost more to produce, which translates into higher wholesale prices. When consumers treat all gold potatoes as interchangeable, Jangl explains, there's little incentive for retailers to prioritize a variety that's harder and more expensive to keep in stock when the European ones move just as quickly.

If this all sounds a little somber, I get it. The Yukon Gold earned its reputation: the potato for silky pommes purée, for buttery potato salad, for those creamy-centered, crisp-edged roasted pieces we all chase. Its slow death is worthy of a moment of silence—for the tuber we've leaned on for decades without ever imagining we'd have to replace it.

When I asked Jeremiah Stone, chef and co-owner of New York's Wildair and Bar Contra, whether Yukon Golds ever show up on his menus, he told me he's never relied on them. Stone prefers highlighting potatoes Americans encounter less often, like Chipperbec or Norwis, and sees no reason to narrow his options when so many excellent varieties exist. Supporting diversity in the potato supply, he said, is far more interesting than building dishes around a single standby.

For years, I was one of many recipe developers who insisted on Yukon Golds for certain dishes. But their disappearance has nudged a reset. The gold rush days of the Yukon may be over, but that doesn't mean we're without yellow potatoes. In fact, breeders in both the US and Canada are developing new yellow-fleshed lines that retain the Yukon's beloved cooking qualities while avoiding its agronomic pitfalls, and many of the European varieties already replacing it—newer ones like Agata and Satina, as well as older standbys like Nicola—deliver excellent results in the kitchen. When I asked Stone whether he'd encountered the elusive Yukons recently, he answered honestly: "I haven't thought too much about the Yukon."

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The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History
Sunday November 30^th, 2025 at 9:38 AM

Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”

Thomas Carlyle famously claimed that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” In his view, history only really “progressed” when a “great man” through his actions ushered in a new epoch. Napoleon was the archetype for this model, a man who seemingly came from nothing to leave an indelible mark on world history. This model places extreme focus on individuals and thus on elite politics. The theory does not account for mass politics or leave room for the histories of those far from the levers of power. The clear deficiencies of a focus on “great men” lead to its abandonment in favor of broader subjects of history, more interested in historical forces than in personalities. This historiographical turn led to the exploration of many important and previously neglected areas.

Yet, “history from below” came with problems of its own. By emphasizing the role of structural forces, it deemphasized the role of individuals. In these works, the course of history begins to appear inevitable. If it was the social and political forces of the French Revolution that made Napoleon successful, the logical conclusion is that it would have made no difference to the course of history should he have, say, suffered a fatal stroke in 1801, a premise few would accept. It is also clearly untrue when applied to specific cases. Not only who ends up in power, but the specific decisions they make are deeply consequential. Who would contend that the 20th century would remain unchanged had Hitler been killed in WWI?

This synthesis position is what I call here the “mediocre man” theory of history. The idea of this mediocre man theory is that history is not just shaped by great men or by mass sociological forces that make individual irrelevant. Instead, while it is shaped by structural forces, but also by ordinary people who end in positions of extraordinary importance. Sometimes those people have the vision and character to try to impose that on the world and become the “great” figures of history. Some are complete incompetents you wouldn’t trust to run a lemonade stand. Ultimately, history is not shaped by the talented alone and mundane failures may be as consequential as grand successes. Dilettante monarchs neglect crucial reforms, awkward diplomats reinforce prejudices, military thinkers become set in their ways, etc. These idiosyncratic, average figures shape history not necessarily any less than their more talented counterparts.

Perhaps no one better illustrates the concept than German Emperor, Wilhelm II. After all, it would be extremely difficult to call the Kaiser a “great man,” even in the loosest sense. However, the impact of his rule and the personal decisions he made on world history is undeniable. A simple counterfactual demonstrates this: If Wilhelm II had been more like his liberal father or his passive grandfather, it is near impossible to imagine the path the twentieth century would have taken.

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Yet, his actual influence is harder to pin down. During WWI and in its immediate aftermath, the Kaiser was understood as the “brute of Europe,” a tyrannical warlord who was responsible for German aggression and bringing about the war. Before long, however, this image was replaced with one still popular today, that of a “shadow Kaiser.” A figure more influential than a traditional constitutional monarch, but one whose power was rarely felt compared to the prestigious military and overwhelming modern state. In this view, the Kaiser contributed, but was merely a small player in the making of German policy.

More recent research (particularly from John C. Röhl and Annika Mombauer) has established that Wilhelm, far from being a mere “shadow emperor” succeeded in centralizing power following his accession. While not a traditional autocracy, his power over personnel and the need for royal assent ensured the Kaiser’s ability to shape policy. Germany’s constitution made it particularly susceptible to this kind of “personal rule.” A Chancellor, not a prime minister, headed the government. The Chancellor ruled by confidence of the monarch, regardless of the makeup of parliament. The military owed no allegiance to the civil state, only to the monarch, allowing Wilhelm to flex his influence as supreme arbiter between institutions.

What’s more, advancement in both the armed forces and the civil service required the emperor’s approval. Promotion was impossible without royal assent. At the highest levels, nothing mattered more than his confidence and indeed friendship. Wilhelm was to rule out candidates on the basis that they weren’t tall enough to cut an impressive figure. In fact, the Younger Moltke owed his appointment to Chief of the General Staff less to his famous name, and more to his personal friendship with Wihelm and his conformity with what the Kaiser thought a soldier ought to look like.

This power had extreme effects on the behavior of Germany’s ruling bureaucrats and officers. To incur the Kaiser’s displeasure meant the end of a career. As such, those that attained influence at court were those who could judge which topics were safe to broach in front of his majesty. There was no question of discussing harsh truths.

Wilhelm certainly brought Europe closer to the precipice of war through his actions and rhetoric, yet he was far from the warmongering brute often imagined. In fact, the Kaiser was far more peaceably inclined than many of his advisors, particularly Chief of the General Staff Moltke (the Younger) and War Minister Falkenhayn who strongly pressed for “war, the sooner the better.” Wilhelm, in keeping with the theme of mediocrity, was thoroughly ambivalent. At times, he raged, declaring his desire to crush Germany’s enemies. During the Boxer rebellion, he ordered Beijing to be razed in revenge for murdered German dignitaries. He was convinced to rescind this order, which is illustrative of the manner in which he was given to flights of fancy and malicious rage. When he spoke to foreign representatives or even the foreign press, he expressed the most fervent desires for cooperation and cordial relations. But the moment he felt slighted, particularly by the English, he seethed, calling for a humbling war.

At the same time, the Kaiser’s commitment to peace was sufficiently strong as to frustrate even those who did not actively desire preventative war. During the First Morocco crisis, the Chancellor and Foreign Ministry sought to use the threat of war to break up the untested Anglo-French Entente. This attempt was completely undermined when the Kaiser declared publicly that he was utterly unwilling to take Germany to war.

Likewise, when the Balkan wars broke out, many of Germany’s leaders saw an opportunity either for preventative war or at least using the risk of it to break the Entente. However, the Kaiser was immediately opposed to even the possibility of taking Germany to war over a Balkan affair. It was only after much haranguing that his mind was changed. With his typical capriciousness, he raged against England. Yet, ultimately, nothing was to come of the incident, much to the disappointment of those in favor of war. For all his immature rage and harsh words, the emperor had the sense to balk in the face of war.

Understandably, there has been much speculation as to Wilhelm’s mental fitness. Both amongst historians and contemporaries, it has been marked that Wilhelm possessed a perpetual immaturity. He had great difficulty in taking matters seriously, and tended to fixate on surface level details that caught his fancy to the neglect of the heart of the matter. He spoke without preparation or consideration, seemingly unaware of the consequences this brought about. His insistence on giving innumerable speeches left his advisors perpetually frustrated. He also had a tendency to fly into rages in which he would completely lose control over himself, deeply disturbing even his intimate companions. While we may no longer be able to diagnose Wilhelm, even sympathetic contemporaries could not avoid considering that the Kaiser was deeply unwell.

Germany’s diplomatic isolation was almost entirely a product of the Kaiser. While the other powers of Europe were certainly concerned about its growing power, the near total isolation that made it willing to risk war in 1914 was by no means inevitable. It is unlikely either the Russians or French would have been willing to undertake a war of choice on the other’s behalf. However, the influence of the Kaiser on German politics made Germany’s isolation inevitable. A byzantine court system where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy was not a credible partner. The Chancellor might say one thing, the diplomatic service another, military aides still a third, and then all may at any time be overruled by the Kaiser.

This, even more than Germany’s increasing power, was why the Entente powers formed an encircling pact against it. Germany’s interests were incomprehensible and thus there was no option other than to balance against this rogue state in the heart of Europe. Wilhelm’s unsuitability was not fully understood, but the incoherence of German foreign policy led its contemporaries to assume the worst.

This was not entirely unjustified. While Wilhelm himself may have balked at throwing Germany into a Great War, his power over personnel meant that he was the one that appointed officers that pressed for it and diplomats that were willing to risk it. When war finally did come, the Kaiser eventually found himself truly sidelined. The army, understandably fearing his interference, did its best to inform him of developments in a vague manner that would insulate him from exercising his authority. Nevertheless, Wilhelm retained decisive influence in the power of personnel. The unpopular Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, architect of the Battle of Verdun, was sustained in his position by Wilhelm for years after he had fallen from favor among the high command. Even to the end of the war, as army high command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff consolidated power, candidates for replacing the Chancellor were subject to the Kaiser’s approval. Those who he personally disliked were summarily removed from consideration or never even offered. So long as the German government stood, the Kaiser’s views, no matter how facile, had to be accommodated.

Ultimately, Kaiser Wilhelm II was not a great man. At times, he was certainly pathetic, but he was also possessed with considerable willfulness. He was far from a historical nonperson, and cannot be regarded as a mere tool of either more savvy operators or historical forces. The politics of Europe before WWI cannot be understood without an understanding of his character and the form of governance it produced. There was a saying of the Kaiser in Vienna, that Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.” It is difficult to believe that such a man could nevertheless have extreme influence on the course of history. Even today, while the age of powerful monarchs has ended, personal rule is still present in many autocracies. The case of the last German Emperor is a sharp warning against the human impulse to over-rationalize events. Social and economic factors drive history, certainly. Likewise willful individuals may stamp their signature in the book of history. But no less often do the mere whims leave their mark.

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13 days ago

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Boston, MA

Baseball and the free city
Thursday November 27^th, 2025 at 3:24 PM

https://transcendloneliness.substack.com/

I became an Angeleno years ago but am not a Dodgers fan. Being a Dodgers fan would be spiritually wrong. Early in life, as a native Missourian, the furies reached through the veil and decided I would root for the Royals. This is how I learned from a young age that life is tragedy. (Why was I so hopeful about Mark Teahen at third base? Why are Cardinals fans so smug?) Switching teams, or dolloping on more fandoms, would ruin the point of sports, which is to suffer. The embrace of agony is what makes baseball a civic religion, with Old Testament clergy who excommunicate fans for insufficient offerings of stadium development tax credits.

But sometimes baseball’s proper proportions of “mass suffering” to “fleeting ecstasy” fall out of celestial balance: Your team wins, a lot. Somehow my friends and neighbors in L.A. get to root, over and over again, for winners. With the game’s greatest-ever player, Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers seized victory again last night thanks to a completely different Japanese phenom, Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Watching good players make my city happy creates a sense of disorientation. Where did these guys even come from? Will we ever run out of fireworks? Oh it seems like LAPD brought out those riot horses really fast? The story of L.A. baseball fandom is that the face that meets the police baton was deliriously happy.

The ungovernability of Los Angeles and the beauty of its baseball make strange alchemy in 2025, the pride of the free city under siege. The big stars are immigrants while masked federal agents creep around the corner. At any moment, our streets become a fourth branch of government. In Pericles’ famous consolatio for Athens mourning its war dead, the civic openness against danger marks a great city of the world:

We have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; our homes are beautiful and elegant; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish sorrow. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own. … Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands.

There’s that word, “we,” the most powerful incantation of immigrant republicanism. “We” is such a put-together concept. The Dodgers team itself fled Brooklyn, same as I am a migrant from the Midwest. The world flows into Los Angeles. There’s so much sun here, it’ll make you think there’s rest for the weary.

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16 days ago

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Boston, MA

Val Town 2023-2025 Retrospective by Tom MacWright
Thursday November 27^th, 2025 at 2:23 PM

Tom MacWright

It’s the end of 2025, which means that I’m closing in on three years at Val Town. I haven’t written much about the company or what it’s really been like. The real story of companies is usually told well after years after the dust has settled. Founders usually tell a heroic story of success while they’re building.

Reading startup news really warps your perspective, especially when you’re building a startup yourself. Everyone else is getting fabulously rich! It makes me less eager to write about anything.

But I’m incurably honest and like working with people who are too. Steve, the first founder of Val Town (I joined shortly after as cofounder/CTO) is a shining example of this. He is a master of saying the truth in situations when other people are afraid to. I’ve seen it defuse tension and clear paths. It’s a big part of ‘the culture’ of the company.

So here’s some of the story so far.

Delivering on existing expectations and promises

Here’s what the Val Town interface looked like fairly early on:

Val Town user interface in mid-2023

When I initially joined, we had a prototype and a bit of hype. The interface was heavily inspired by Twitter - every time that you ran code, it would save a new ‘val’ and add it to an infinite-scrolling list.

Steve and Dan had really noticed the utter exhaustion in the world of JavaScript: runaway complexity. A lot of frameworks and infrastructure was designed for huge enterprises and was really, really bad at scaling down. Just writing a little server that does one thing should be easy, but if you do it with AWS and modern frameworks, it can be a mess of connected services and boilerplate.

Val Town scaled down to 1 + 1. You could type 1 + 1 in the text field and get 2. That’s the way it should work.

It was a breath of fresh air. And a bunch of people who encountered it even in this prototype-phase state were inspired and engaged.

The arrows marketing page

One of the pivotal moments of this stage was creating this graphic for our marketing site: the arrows graphic. It really just tied it all together: look how much power there was in this little val! And no boilerplate either. Where there otherwise is a big ritual of making something public or connecting an email API, there’s just a toggle and a few lines of code.

I kind of call this early stage, for me, the era of delivering on existing expectations and promises. The core cool idea of the product was there, but it was extremely easy to break.

Security was one of the top priorities. We weren’t going to be a SOC2 certified bank-grade platform, but we also couldn’t stay where we were. Basically, it was trivially easy to hack: we were using the vm2 NPM module to run user code. I appreciate that vm2 exists, but it really, truly, is a trap. There are so many ways to get out of its sandbox and access other people’s code and data. We had a series of embarrassing security vulnerabilities.

For example: we supported web handlers so you could easily implement a little server endpoint, and the API for this was based on express, the Node.js server framework. You got a request object and response object, from express, and in this case they were literally the same as our server’s objects. Unfortunately, there’s a method response.download(path: string) which sends an arbitrary file from your server to the internet. You can see how this one ends: not ideal.

So, we had to deliver on a basic level of security. Thankfully, in the way that it sometimes does, the road rose to meet us. The right technology appeared just in time: Deno. Deno’s sandboxing made it possible to run people’s code securely without having to build a mess of Kubernetes and Docker sandbox optimizations. It delivered being secure, fast, and simple to implement: we haven’t identified a single security bug caused by Deno.

That said, the context around JavaScript runtimes has been tough. Node.js is still dominant and Bun has attracted most of the attention as an alternative, with Deno in a distant third place, vibes-wise. The three are frustratingly incompatible - Bun keeps adding built-ins like an S3 client which would have seemed unthinkable in the recent past. Node added an SQLite client in 22. Contrary to what I hoped in 2022, JavaScript has gotten more splintered and inconsistent as an ecosystem.

Stability was the other problem. The application was going down constantly for a number of reasons, but most of all was the database, which was Supabase. I wrote about switching away from Supabase, which they responded to in a pretty classy way, and I think they’ve since improved. But Render has been a huge step up in maintainability and maturity for how we host Val Town.

Adding Max was a big advance in our devops-chops too: he was not only able to but excited to work on the hard server capacity and performance problems. We quietly made a bunch of big improvements like allowing vals to stay alive after serving requests - before that, every run was a cold start.

What to do about AI

Townie

Townie, the Val Town chatbot, in early 2024

Believe it or not, but in early 2023, there were startups that didn’t say “AI” on the front page of their marketing websites. The last few years have been a dizzying shift in priorities and vibes, which I have had mixed feelings about that I’ve written about a lot.

At some point it became imperative to figure out what Val Town was supposed to do about all that. Writing code is undeniably one of the sweet spots of what LLMs can do, and over the last few years the fastest-growing most hyped startups have emerged from that ability.

This is where JP Posma comes in. He was Steve’s cofounder at a previous startup, Zaplib, and was our ‘summer intern’ - the quotes because he’s hilariously overqualified for that title. He injected some AI-abilities into Val Town, both RAG-powered search and he wrote the first version of Townie, a chatbot that is able to write code.

Townie has been really interesting. Basically it lets you write vals (our word for apps) with plain English. This development happened around the same time as a lot of the ‘vibe-coding’ applications, like Bolt and Lovable. But Townie was attached to a platform that runs code and has community elements and a lot more. It’s an entry point to the rest of the product, while a lot of other vibe-coding tools were the core product that would eventually expand to include stuff like what Val Town provides.

Ethan Ding has written a few things about this: it’s maybe preferable to sell compute instead of being the frontend for LLM-vibe-coding. But that’s sort of a long-run prediction about where value accrues rather than an observation about what companies are getting hype and funding in the present.

Vibe coding companies

There are way too many companies providing vibe-coding tools without having a moat or even a pathway to positive margins. But having made a vibe-coding tool, I completely see why: it makes charts look amazing. Townie was a huge growth driver for a while, and a lot of people were hearing about Townie first, and only later realizing that Val Town could run code, act as a lightweight GitHub alternative, and power a community.

Unlike a lot of AI startups, we didn’t burn a ton of money running Townie. We did have negative margins on it, but to the tune of a few thousand dollars a month during the most costly months.

Introducing a pro plan made it profitable pretty quickly and today Townie is pay-as-you-go, so it doesn’t really burn money at all. But on the flip side, we learned a lot about the users of vibe-coding tools. In particular, they use the tools a lot, and they really don’t want to pay for them. This kind of makes sense: vibe-coding actual completed apps without ever dropping down to write or read code is zeno’s paradox: every prompt gets you halfway there, so you inch closer and closer but never really get to your destination.

So you end up chatting for eight hours, typically getting angrier and angrier, and using a lot of tokens. This would be great for business in theory, but in practice it doesn’t work for obvious reasons: people like to pay for results, not the process. Vibe-coding is a tough industry - it’s simultaneously one of the most expensive products to run, and one of the most flighty and cost-sensitive user-bases I’ve encountered.

So AI has been complicated. On one hand, it’s amazing for growth and obviously has spawned wildly successful startups. On the other, it can be a victim of its own expectations: every company seems to promise perfect applications generated from a single prompt and that just isn’t the reality. And that results in practically every tool falling short of those expectations and thus getting the rough end of user sentiment.

We’re about to launch MCP support, which will make it possible to use Val Town via existing LLM interfaces like Claude Code. It’s a lot better than previous efforts - more powerful and flexible, plus it requires us to reinvent less of the wheel. The churn in the ‘state of the art’ feels tremendous: first we had tool-calling, then MCPs, then tool calling writing code to call MCPs: it’s hard to tell if this is fast progress or just churn.

As a business

When is a company supposed to make money? It’s a question that I’ve thought about a lot. When I was running a bootstrapped startup, the answer was obviously as soon as possible, because I’d like to stop paying my rent from my bank account. Venture funding lets you put that off for a while, sometimes a very long while, and then when companies start making real revenue they at best achieve break-even. There are tax and finance reasons for all of this – I don’t make the rules!

Anyway, Val Town is far from break-even. But that’s the goal for 2026, and it’s optimistically possible.

One thing I’ve thought for a long time is that people building startups are building complicated machines. They carry out a bunch of functions, maybe they proofread your documents or produce widgets, or whatever, but the machine also has a button on it that says “make money.” And everything kind of relates to that button as you’re building it, but you don’t really press it.

The nightmare is if the rest of the machine works, you press the button, and it doesn’t do anything. You’ve built something useful but not valuable. This hearkens back to the last section about AI: you can get a lot of people using the platform, but if you ask them for money and they’re mostly teenagers or hobbyists, they’re not going to open their wallets. They might not even have wallets.

So we pressed the button. It kind of works.

But what I’ve learned is that making revenue is a lot like engineering: it requires a lot of attempts, testing, and hard work. It’s not something that just results from a good product. Here’s where I really saw Charmaine and Steve at work, on calls, making it happen.

The angle right now is to sell tools for ‘Go To Market’ - stuff like capturing user signups of your website, figuring out which users are from interesting companies or have interesting use-cases, and forwarding that to Slack, pushing it to dashboards, and generally making the sales pipeline work. It’s something Val Town can do really well: most other tools for this kind of task have some sort of limit in how complicated and custom they can get, and Val Town doesn’t.

Expanding and managing the complexity

Product-wise, the big thing about Val Town that has evolved is that it can do more stuff and it’s more normal. When we started out, a Val was a single JavaScript expression - this was part of what made Val Town scale down so beautifully and be so minimal, but it was painfully limited. Basically people would type into the text box

const x = 10;
function hi() {};
console.log(1);

And we couldn’t handle that at all: if you ran the Val did it run that function? Export the x variable? It was magic but too confusing. The other tricky niche choice was that we had a custom import syntax like this:

@tmcw.helper(10);

In which @tmcw.helper was the name of another val and this would automatically import and use it. Extremely slick but really tricky to build off of because this was non-standard syntax, and it overlapped with the proposed syntax for decorators in JavaScript. Boy, I do not love decorators: they have been under development for basically a decade and haven’t landed, just hogging up this part of the unicode plane.

But regardless this syntax wasn’t worth it. I have some experience with this problem and have landed squarely on the side of normality is good.

So, in October 2023, we ditched it, adopted standard ESM import syntax, and became normal. This is was a big technical undertaking, in large part because we tried to keep all existing code running by migrating it. Thankfully JavaScript has a very rich ecosystem of tools that can parse & produce code and manipulate syntax trees, but it was still a big, dramatic shift.

This is one of the core tensions of Val Town as well as practically every startup: where do you spend your user-facing innovation energy?

I’m a follower of the use boring technology movement when it comes to how products are built: Val Town intentionally uses some boring established parts like Postgres and React Router, but what about when it comes to the product itself? I’ve learned the hard way that most of what people call intuition is really familiarity: it’s good when an interface behaves like other interfaces. A product that has ten new concepts and a bunch of new UI paradigms is going to be hard to learn and probably will lose out to one that follows some familiar patterns.

Moving to standard JavaScript made Val Town more learnable for a lot of people while also removing some of its innovation. Now you can copy code into & out of Val Town without having to adjust it. LLMs can write code that targets Val Town without knowing everything about its quirks. It’s good to go with the flow when it comes to syntax.

Hiring and the team

Office Sign

Val Town has an office. I feel like COVID made everything remote by default and the lower-COVID environment that we now inhabit (it’s still not gone!) has led to a swing-back, but the company was founded in the latter era and has never been remote. So, we work from home roughly every other Friday.

This means that we basically try to hire people in New York. It hasn’t been too hard in the past. About 6% of America lives in the New York City metro area and the Northeast captures about 23% of venture funding, so there are lots of people who live here or want to.

Stuff on the window sill in the office

Here’s something hard to publish: we’re currently at three people. It was five pretty recently. Charmaine got poached by Anthropic where she’ll definitely kick ass, and Max is now at Cloudflare where he’s writing C++, which will be even more intimidating than his chess ranking. The company’s really weirdly good at people leaving: we had parties and everyone exchanges hand-written cards. How people handle hard things says a lot.

But those three are pretty rad: Jackson was a personal hero of mine before we hired him (he still is). He’s one of the best designers I’ve worked with, and an incredibly good engineer to boot. He’s worked at a bunch of startups you’ve heard of, had a DJ career, gotten to the highest echelons of tech without acquiring an ego. He recently beat me to the top spot in our GitHub repo’s lines-changed statistic.

Steve has what it takes for this job: grit, optimism, curiosity. The job of founding a company and being a CEO is a different thing every few months - selling, hiring, managing, promoting. Val Town is a very developer-consumer oriented product and that kind of thing requires a ton of promotion. Steve has done so much, in podcasts, spreading the word in person, writing, talking to customers. He has really put everything into this. A lot of the voice and the attitude of the company flows down from the founder, and Steve is that.

Did I mention that we’re hiring?

In particular, for someone to be a customer-facing technical promoter type - now called a “GTM” hire. Basically, who can write a bit of code but has the attitude of someone in sales. Who can see potential and handle rejection. Not necessarily the world’s best programmer, but who can probably code, and definitely someone who can write. Blogging and writing online is a huge green flag for this position.

And the other role that we really need is an “application engineer.” These terms keep shifting, so if full-stack engineer means more, sure, that too. Basically someone who can write code across boundaries. This is more or less what Jackson and I do - writing queries, frontend code, fixing servers, the whole deal. Yeah, it sounds like a lot but this is how all small companies operate, and I’ve made a lot of decisions to make this possible: we’ve avoided complexity like the plague in Val Town’s stack, so it should all be learnable. I’ve written a bunch of documentation for everything, and constantly tried to keep the codebase clean.

Sidenote, but even though I think that the codebase is kind of messy, I’ve heard from very good engineers (even the aforementioned JP Posma) that it’s one of the neatest and most rational codebases they’ve seen. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, see for yourself!

What we’re really looking for in hires

Tech hiring has been broken the whole time I’ve been in the industry, for reasons that would take a whole extra article to ponder. But one thing that makes it hard is vagueness, both on the part of applicants and companies. I get it - cast a wide net, don’t put people off. But I can say that:

For the GTM position, you should be able to write for the internet. This can be harder than it looks: there are basically three types of writing: academic, corporate, and internet, and they are incompatible.
You should also be kind of entrepreneurial: which means optimistic, resilient, and opportunistic.
For the application engineering role, you should be a good engineer who understands the code you write and is good at both writing and reading code. Using LLM tools is great, but relying on them exclusively is a dealbreaker. LLMs are not that good at writing code.

What the job is like

The company’s pretty low drama. Our office is super nice. We work hard but not 996. We haven’t had dinner in the office. But we all do use PagerDuty so when the servers go down, we wake up and it sucks. Thankfully the servers go down less than they used to.

We all get paid the same: $175k. Lower than FAANG, but pretty livable for Brooklyn. Both of the jobs listed - the Product Engineer, and Growth Engineer - are set at 1% equity. $175k is kind of high-average for where we’re at, but 1% in my opinion is pretty damn good. Startups say that equity is “meaningful” at all kinds of numbers but it’s definitely meaningful at that one. If Val Town really succeeds, you can get pretty rich off of that.

Of course, will it succeed? It’s something I think about all the time. I was born to ruminate. We have a lot going for us, and a real runway to make things happen. Some of the charts in our last investor update looked great. Some days felt amazing. Other days were a slog. But it’s a good team, with a real shot of making it.

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chrisamico

16 days ago

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Boston, MA

How Craig Jones Is Trolling the Culture Warriors Taking Over His Sport
Wednesday November 26^th, 2025 at 12:38 PM

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The Athlete Trolling His Way Through Jiu-Jitsu’s Culture Wars

Brazilian jiu-jitsu has been increasingly embraced by right-wing influencers. Craig Jones is an unlikely counterforce.

Credit...Photo illustration by Mark Harris

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A rift is growing in a sport that, depending on whom you ask, is either a bone-crushing, tendon-ripping martial art or just a bunch of people in weird costumes rolling around on the floor. Jiu-jitsu cuts across divides of class, race and creed: Mark Zuckerberg does it, but so do doctors, HVAC technicians and street kids in favelas in Rio de Janeiro. My own training partners over the past six years have included an F.B.I. agent, a glass blower and a doorman at a brothel. For us, the gym is a romper room, a place to exercise our brains, work up a sweat and forget the world. This used to be easy, because no one took jiu-jitsu seriously. Storied matches unfolded before audiences smaller than those at a high school play.

Lately, though, a new faction has appeared: modern-day gladiators, flat-earthers and vaccine skeptics, guys who thrill at the mantra “I am a shark, the ground is my ocean, and most people don’t even know how to swim.” They agree with Andrew Tate that “men’s life is war,” but because they can’t or won’t take up arms in a real conflict, they take their warrior ethos into the training room.

Their hero is Gordon Ryan, maybe the best athlete the sport has ever seen, who marries supreme control on the mats with alarming levels of vulnerable narcissism and hard-right politics. In his prolific internet posting, obnoxiousness is the point: Not only has he taunted his rivals, he has also encouraged one of them to commit suicide; he has belittled the homeless and, on YouTube, has driven his truck to the Southern border with a rifle to joke about “picking off illegals.”

Standing opposite him is Craig Jones, the self-proclaimed “world’s second-greatest grappler,” a quick-witted Australian known for prancing around in tiny bathing suits and tie-dyed T-shirts with the motto “Keep Jiu-Jitsu Gay” on the front. Though the two are former teammates, Jones split from Ryan’s squad acrimoniously in 2021, and social media bickering quickly ensued. Jones’s taunts included challenging Ryan to an I.Q. test, insinuating that he can’t read and having witches curse him in Romania. Ryan couldn’t resist firing back, generally in long tirades full of grousing. Ryan has thrice bested Jones in competition; online, you could argue he hasn’t won a confrontation yet.

Jones summed up his philosophy regarding rival athletes on his own podcast: “Their full-time job is jiu-jitsu; that’s their passion in life. My passion in life is [expletive] with people on the internet.” He has used social media to skewer the self-regard of almost everyone who has crossed him and in the process has brought the sport back down to earth. Denouncing the “weird cultlike figures and leaders in the sport,” he urges fans to “stop listening to your Navy SEAL podcast, get out of the ice bath” and enjoy their “adult karate.”

Both athletes face a problem: As a pure sport, jiu-jitsu will always struggle for attention. For most viewers, the matches are too complicated and too boring; I’m currently watching a four-hour instructional video on “scientific gripping,” to give some sense of the tediousness of its small movements. Ryan’s approach, apart from technical prowess, has been to go all-in on reactionary white-male grievance. This won him almost a million Instagram followers and an invitation to Donald Trump’s inauguration, but it has also made him the butt of Jones’s mischief. Jones has gibed about Ryan’s alleged sexual preferences and raffled off Ryan’s former car after clandestinely buying it. When Ryan posted about a stomach ailment with a photo of himself looking haggard, Jones used it to plug his sponsor, the hormone-therapy company Evertitan.

Jones’s provocations flip the scripted approach of, say, the W.W.E., with real-life drama bringing eyes to bona fide competition. His humor isn’t for everyone — he once went viral for introducing U.S. audiences to “nose beers,” the Australian slang for cocaine. But while his clowning may not be wholesome, it’s a much-needed corrective to the “epidemic of alpha males” he sees threatening to take over jiu-jitsu.

It once felt virtuous to be the kind of person who said, “I don’t care about drama on the internet.” Later, it looked like a leftover luxury from when old mass media still reigned. Nowadays, it’s a kind of dereliction. The internet is where our moral battles are fought — in politics, in sexual ethics, in visions of the good life. And it’s time to admit that with this shift comes the end of subtlety, deliberation and notions of civility. Only a better troll can beat a troll.

In recent years, many have accepted that being informed means paying attention to political influencers like Hasan Piker on the left and Candace Owens on the right. But is that reason enough to care about the chronically online figureheads of a sport whose main demographic, to quote another Jones zinger, is “recently divorced guys trying to get back in shape”? Yes, I’d say: Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts are among the many subcultures that increasingly regulate the vibes flowing into politics, rather than the other way around. And if Gordon Ryan is going to push George Floyd conspiracy theories and inveigh against immigrants, it’s important to have a Craig Jones working the social media levers from the other end.

Labor rights, gender equality, the nefarious effects of monopolies — these affect sports as they do society, and Jones’s trolling addresses all of them. For years, promoters used “visibility” as an excuse to underpay athletes. These same people paid women far less, claiming without proof that they didn’t attract viewers. To show them up, Jones started his own tournament, the Craig Jones Invitational, with $2 million in prize money, dream matchups for hard-core fans and the first “intergender world championship,” pitting Jones against Gabi Garcia, jiu-jitsu’s most decorated female competitor. Not only did his athletes get compensated, but other organizations were compelled to do better.

C.J.I. is now on its way to becoming the most successful franchise in jiu-jitsu. (The U.F.C. has a knockoff with better numbers, but some suspect that it artificially inflates views.) In the meantime, Jones has stepped away from the mats to promote his work with the Guardian Project, which runs gyms for poor children across five continents. Taking on the role of a “low-I.Q. Anthony Bourdain,” he has vlogged from more than a dozen countries, including the Philippines, Ethiopia and Peru. One day, he’s dressed as Santa in fur-trimmed booty shorts giving gifts to kids in Balinese slums; the next, he’s getting shot at in Ukraine, where he has given charity seminars to raise money for soldiers. Some wear their politics on their sleeve; Jones has his on his thigh, where he got an MS-13 tattoo as a “travel hack” for an “all-expenses-paid trip to El Salvador” in mockery of Trump’s deportation policies.

Jones’s health has suffered from years on the road, steroids and valiant ingestion of drugs, and after the second edition of C.J.I., he threatened to disappear for a while. The limelight must have been getting grim, and the stresses of promoting began to show. Jones quit his former team, posting fan art of himself as a deadbeat dad running out on his family. A brief social media silence followed, and fans feared that the fun might be over. But he soon popped back up in Culiacán, the home base of the Sinaloa cartel, posing as the fictional narcotraficante “El Gringo Blanco Loco” and training with the local kids. A fan said she had followed him for his “business journey” but now wanted “to do copious amounts of blow and take shots of taka vodka in the back seat of a stranger’s car in Vietnam.” This probably won’t land Jones on a Wheaties box, but in jiu-jitsu, you take the heroes you can get. Rarely have devotees of a sport been so grateful to someone who has worked so hard to make an absolute joke of it.

Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary translator and the author of the novel “My Father’s Diet.”

Source photographs for illustration above: Screenshot from YouTube; Gregory Payan/Associated Press; Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC, via Getty Images; iStockphoto/Getty Images.

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