Give my Blog a name
Save lives cost-effectively AND get your name on the building.
A younger me was on record saying he’d sooner sit in a bath of beans than run a marathon. Sacrificing a portion of dignity still seems preferable to sacrificing both knees. These days, though, I’m more based, so I’m putting something more precious than my knees or my dignity up for sale to the highest bidder.
Who really knows why we do what we do. I’m reasonably confident that for me it has something to do with the gift of having been read a lot of Winnie the Pooh as an infant and reading Moneyball as an adolescent. Off the back of that, I’m somewhat confident I didn’t get into this racket to improve my own retirement prospects. Blogging, for all its virtues, is not on the nest egg glidepath, and the Blog with No Name (working title) will be free for the foreseeable.
I’m supremely confident it’s a good use of the limited resources available to me to help other people help other people as much as humanly possible.1 In particular to help you save someone else’s child’s life as cost-effectively as possible.
Remember Mo Salah, our Most Valuable Prophet. Remember his teaching about how it costs only £150 ($200) to give Grandma another year with her granddaughter. You’ll never know her face or her name, yet it costs only £6000 ($8000) to save that infant’s whole life.
And remember just how much blog names matter, at least to me.
Naming rights are as sporting as sportswashing. The Emirates Stadium, North London. Guaranteed Rate Field, Chicago. Crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles.2 The people who paid millions of dollars for these grotesque billboards know how frivolous it is to treat either speech acts or sport as inconsequential.
Pope John Paul II, patron saint of being right sometimes, said that of all the unimportant things, football is the most important. Jurgen Klopp, a messianic figure in his own lunchtime, he who married heavy metal football with humble compassion, liked to echo JP2. They needn’t have narrowed their claim to any one sport. They all matter as much as people believe they matter, and for an awful lot of them and for an awful lot of us that’s an awful lot.
Of course, sport is in some ways silly. It is not, as Jurgen’s predecessor Wry Bill Shankly surely knew, more important than life and death. Grown-ups go around golf courses saying birdie and bogey to each other with straight faces. Albatross, the word for scoring 3-under par on one hole, captures the absurdity of the best possible outcome being vanishingly rare, requiring of no little skill and a shedload of luck. And as your correspondent knows all too well, taking sports or the application of their lessons to “real life” too seriously can be a burden hung around one’s neck.3
Nevertheless, sport is a model that can help us. Save us, even. It can inform the words we say and the actions we take as we try to solve the most important problems in what might be the most important century.
Sporting decision makers made better decisions after they got serious about learning from analytical models of their games, models that often began life as blogosphere passion projects. In this front office, we believe that can happen again, one level up: sports themselves as the model for decision makers playing games with real lives and deaths. We can have all sorts of fun picking apart the rigour and the glorious randomness. The competitions and complex collaborations. The regulations and unwritten rules. The ingenious and idiotic strategies.
Models that break the Internet and serve it back to us in shards are irrevocably changing our minds, and with them the world. Those who knew their arse from their Elbow were forewarned that how we see things could change overnight, the moon made mirrorball, and that the morning after, the streets would be our empty stage. Whether that means desolation or opportunity is up to us.4 There’d better be a mirrorball, wrote the greatest lyricist of our generation, as he contemplated the importance of there being lightness in dark times, of putting on a show, to stave off our despair and to help us see things clearly, even, or especially, if that means taking them - or ourselves - apart and putting them back together again.5
Every song referenced by the Blog with No Name, past, present, and future, is on the Soundtrack.
Call me by your name
I’d like to call the Blog something like Mirrorball, or Albatross, or Most Important. Even after longlisting more than 200 names, though, eliminating three-fourths of them for failing Distinctiveness or Durability tests, and developing a rubric scoring the shortlist by Legibility, Territory, Tone, Thesis and Layers, I’m still not ready to say what I’d choose if it was up to me. In any case, it isn’t up to me. Not yet at least.
It’s up to you and the highest number you’re kind and brave enough to write on this form today, or at least between now and deadline day, Sunday 26 April.
Exclusive naming rights to the Blog with No Name will be sold by blind auction.
The highest bidder wins the right to name the Blog for the month of May, or for four posts (whichever takes longer). The second highest bidder is the first of the losers. The proceeds will go to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund.6
The reserve price is one year of life (£150 ($200)).
The bidding has begun.
Training data
📖The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (2013). If you thought the Sapiens chapter about money being a construct was eyebrow raising, this book will melt your face off.
🎵One Point Perspective (2018). “Singsong Round the Money Tree” / This stunning documentary / That no one else unfortunately saw / Such beautiful photography / It’s worth it for the opening scene / I’ve been driving round listening to the score.”7
🎙️‘Mad Men,’ S4E7: “The Suitcase” | Best TV Episodes of the 21st Century (2018). When Don says to Peggy, “I give you money, you give me ideas,” I think what he means is, “I give you money, you give me ideas and the money to people who need it much more than either of us.”
🎙️How to Do the Most Good (2021). Ezra Klein and Holden Karnofsky walk the streets from GiveWell to preventing catastrophic risks from AI.
📝⏜ Our radical plan to replace the NBA draft ⏜ (2026). Maybe everything should be an auction? OK, except healthcare. And access to your regulator maybe? Taylor tickets, though, why wouldn’t you auction those?
My editor said to tell you I meant to say that twice. I don’t know whether that’s a lack of trust in me or a lack of trust in you.
RIP FTX Arena, Miami.
Wild Beasts, the first band I ever took someone to see, had a track called Albatross. Foals’ Albatross is a deep cut from What Went Down, the album that spawned the most euphoric series of crowd experiences of my career. Fleetwood Mac wrote their Albatross before either of them, a lyricless coda that became one of their greatest hits.
A perfect note I stumbled into: Elbow’s Mirrorball was broken down and reflected back by Peter Gabriel’s orchestra on his album Scratch My Back, and in turn his Mercy Street was Elbowed on And I’ll Scratch Yours. Game recognises game. Everything is derivative, and nothing was the same.
Did you think I’d forget about Taylor? I’m nobody’s idea of a Swifty, but I, like Taylor, stan for the National, and so when National guitarist Aaron Dessner got involved co-authoring folklore, I had to get more involved myself. Between their mirrorball - “I know they said the end is near / But I'm still on my tallest tiptoes” - and their performance peaking with the last great american dynasty, it’s clear they absolutely get what we’re all about here in the clubhouse. And if you believe this wasn’t directly influenced by the prior art from Elbow and the greatest lyricist of our generation, I have a bridge to sell you. (And if you’ve never noticed that National frontman and messianic figure Matt “Jurgen” Berninger looks and acts like Jurgen Klopp, look now, and never look back.)
Ed. and I reserve the right to reject names that might get us cancelled before we've even got going. A tie would be broken by a re-up re-auction. If you accidentally submit a bid you realize is too low, you can bid again. And the better this goes, the more likely we are later to auction off a longer-term deal..
“…Or maybe I just imagined it all / I've played to quiet rooms like this before / Bear with me, man, I lost my train of thought.”