Daily Archives: March 31, 2022

In the last year, TikTok has rapidly become one of the most influential social media platforms. The platform has also influenced publishingmainly through the community known as BookTok. BookTok consists of booksellers, authors, publishers, and (mostly) readers making videos about reading. After creators featured They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, sales of the book rose by 900%. Barnes and Noble began setting up #BookTok tables (and store TikTok accounts), and self-published books starting getting picked up by major publishers (like Olivia Blakes The Atlas Six, acquired by Tor).

Back in September, when I first covered the BookTok phenomenon, I pointed to the feedback loop from readers, then stabilized by (already super-acute) algorithms, that results in hyping up a bestselling book. When booksellers like Barnes & Noble construct these I saw it on #BookTok tables and pull from these lists, that increases the chances people will buy them. Then, readers go and engage with the same kind of content that convinced them to buy it, fueled by algorithms. Rinse, and repeat.

Im not criticizing because these books are popular. Ive read and enjoyed a handful of these authors and have some of the titles on my TBR list. Do I have a problem with them? Sure, some. Do I think there is an oversaturation of a handful of them in greater book discourse? Absolutely. Some of the obvious gaps are that the list is overwhelmingly (racially, not ethnically) white, and there is a gender disparity between fiction and non-fiction.

Authors who wind up promoted by these BookTok echo chambers often include the likes of Sarah J Maas, Holly Black, Holly Jackson, Tracy Deonn, Delia Owens (a whole mess), Madeline Miller, E. Lockhart, Leigh Bardugo, Emily Henry, and Taylor Jenkins Reid (especially her first two novels.) Non-fiction (if you even come across these videos) doesnt fare much better. Theyre (also) New York Times bestsellers from names like Bob Woodward, Robert Acosta, Malcolm Gladwell, Yuval Harai, and Robin Di Angelo.

Sometimes authors (both traditionally published and self-published) will get a boost from social media because of good luck, work ethic, and privilege. The privilege comes from the resources of being social media savvy or deemed attractive by a narrow window of white-centered beauty standards. However, many books that oversaturate BookTok are already supported by traditional publishingan industry with these same barriers (except maybe luck), is less involved. This structure extends into film/TV adaptations, book subscription boxes (like Illumicrate, Owlcrate, and Book of the Month) and celebrity book clubs (most influential to TikTok being Reeses) that work with publishers.

@books.with.lee

I appreciate those whose actually listen to BIPOC voices #readdiversebooks #diversifyyourbookshelves #RufflesOwnYourRidges #blackbooktok #bipoctiktok

? original sound - Castro??

The people that get the most views, attention, and engagement are also creators from a place of privilege. In the past, TikTok has admitted to suppressing the reach of those susceptible to bullying and harassment such as fat, queer and disabled creators. However, unconscious bias on the individual leads to people staying within their group. and their For You Page (FYP) ends up looking a lot like the people who look like them. The algorithm has everyone ending up at different lunch tables recommending the same books to the same people. People with similar interests and life experiences (including nationality) will already have similar books in common.

Good news for viewers at home! There is an easy-ish fix to this. Follow, engage, and like more videos by marginalized creators. Yes, many will still lust over a few of these titles, but they also center non-white, non-Western books in their lists and round ups all the time. For example, Black and brown creators dont wait until some viral act of racism or brutality happens to share books by these communities. And, when they do share Black books, they arent solely highlighting books centered on Black pain. This applies to many BookTokkers of color, marginalized religion (within the U.S.), gender, and sexuality.

Another group worth mentioning is the examination of books by male readers, especially for fiction. As much as Ill eye-roll and cringe at the more viral TikToks of men (particularly in the man-o-sphere and podcast land) talking about books, Ive also had great luck following some. If they mention Jordan Peterson, Robert Greene, any philosopher or dating book, take a quick left and reread the instructions because I said fiction. (There are always exceptions to this rule of course because, #NotAllMen.) If there is a particular trend based on an audio feature from a sub-community (based on a trope, genre, etc.), check there.

@bookpapi

WHERE MY DOMINICANS AT ?? #latinxbooks #latinxauthors #booktok #latinxbooktok #latinxbooktokker #dominicanrepublic #latinostiktok #avebtura #latinebooktok #bookrecommendations #latinxowned #latinxowned

? 5am ex calling - Mel?

Speaking of this audio feature, please use it. Its not just for creators but also for viewers to find other videos. Some audio trends later emerged to kinda counteract these same authors being passed around, so use it! One of the many BookTok specific ones includes the tag A Book You Have Not Seen. These interactions will help your FYP give new suggestions pretty consistently.

(image: Alyssa Shotwell, ByteDance, and various publishers.)

The Mary Sue may have advertising partnerships with some of the publishers and titles on this list.

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Always Getting Same BookTok Recommendations? Here's Help - The Mary Sue

This article offers some ways to think about the recent (voluntary) separation of some 44 executives from the civil service after the leadership assessment exercise. The matter must also be viewed in the context of the unfortunate leak, causing something equivalent of national humiliation for those who alas, missed the mark. It was interesting to observe the reactions sudden surges of sympathy, equal expressions of the event being almost poetic in its justice.

I find it very hard to completely agree with either. I wish everybody well: those who made it and those who didnt. The former now has the onus of living up to a label and great expectations. The latter, well, many of them are walking away with 2 years of pay and pension benefits, so lets not feel too bad for them, especially considering that we have many, many people to feel bad for in the current climate.

Now, we could briefly entertain the thought that perhaps, the assessment metric was flawed. But for the sake of this piece, we can proceed with the belief that the assessment tested something and many missed the mark of whatever was being measured.

The assessment may not have told us everything, but it told us something. It told us that perhaps, some individuals may have been kind and caring about their subordinates but did not really understand what the point of their job really was, or that some individuals may have been intellectually proficient but did not possess the basic traits of a competent manager that transcends cultures, languages and countries. And worst of all, some individuals may have been found to not care about their subordinates, not really understand what their job was and be incompetent managers all at once!

So what can we make of this experience in a way that is compassionate without losing sight of the things that were a problem and that needed to be addressed? Is there a middle path?

What I find fundamentally missing from the discourse is a reflection on our own complicity in feeding, maintaining, even most perversely, loving such a system. And I hope I am speaking to all, whether within or outside the civil service.

I cant help but be reminded of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who in the 20th century was sentenced to the Soviet concentration camps and wrote the Gulag Archipelago about his own as well as others experiences in the camps. According to some, the reason that this book, globally famed to bring awareness to the horrors of Soviet tyranny, is said to have struck a chord so deep that it de-legitimized an entire system, is that Solzhenitsyn first and foremost took personal responsibility for having let such a system fester. The following excerpt is from the book 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson:

. . he (Solzhenitsyn) asked himself the most difficult of questions: had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life? If so, how? . . . How had he missed the mark in the past? How many times had he acted against his own conscious, engaging in actions that he knew to be wrong? How many times had he betrayed himself, and lied?

Similarly, how many times did we feel that we should not ruffle any feathers? How many things did we decide to sweep things under the rug? How many of us convinced not only ourselves but also others that we will all put up with it until we get what we want and it isnt our problem anymore?

So I urge all of us to begin by taking some personal responsibility. Before anyone else, ask yourself, did I, in any way, personally, contribute to this event? If you are reading this article, it means that you can read and in English. If you understand this, you must be educated sufficiently to be able to comprehend some relatively complex ideas. You are also the type of person to read newspapers, perhaps on your smartphone. So you must be privileged, or at least not be at the absolute bottom rung of society to absolve yourself of the sort of agency where you are empowered to do something, anything.

This experience above all should be a mirror held up against our own images. It reflects our shortcomings, it taunts us with all that we arent and all that we could be.

Nobody has the answer to if this going to be good for us or if this is going to end up making things even worse. I would strongly caution against foretelling the future. But there is no doubt that something or some things are changing. I hope it changes for the better and I hope we all work towards ensuring that outcome.

The country is at a tipping point. The barriers such as our geography, our obscurity, our lack of integration into the global system that shielded us in the past from the worst impacts of war or economic depression do not exist anymore. But the disappearance of these barriers is also what will precisely bring us opportunities and prosperity.

It is awe-inspiring to think of the extent to which the civil service can really make a difference. All of us were witnesses to its potential as well as its eminent waste. All of us have the responsibility to demand as well as make the civil service and all of its decision-making, influence and privileges work for the people.

So let us take a leaf from Solzhenitsyn who, quoting Peterson again, . . . took an axe to the trunk of the tree whose bitter fruits had nourished him so poorlyand whose planting he had witnessed and supported.

I welcome further discussion.

Contributed by

Chencho Gyeltshen

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The breeze of change is blowing - Kuensel, Buhutan's National Newspaper

Thinking about the effect Bitcoin has and will have on the organization of human society sends one down many rabbit holes. Weve been down a few already.

In the final part of this series, were going to explore the idea of a meritocracy, alongside some flavors of that model which I believe Bitcoin makes possible.

Once again, these are thought experiments. I do not have all of the answers and in fact, may not have any of the answers the idea is that we begin thinking about these things seriously now. Projecting stupidity like dEmOcRaCy onto Bitcoin and more importantly onto a future Bitcoin standard is just a recipe for failure.

On our journey toward the age of merit, we must always remember the real struggle: The option to advance through economic means or political means.

We must remember that the real distinction between the state and anarchy can be boiled down to the contrast between the given (centralized/mandatory system) versus the gathered (decentralized/voluntary system).

Bitcoin is our opportunity to swing the pendulum away from the tyranny of the given and back to the possibility of the gathered.

I hope this series has served as a wake-up call, especially for those whove tied their identity to the idea of Bitcoin being democratic.

Now, before we kick in, lets whet our appetites with this brilliant short video I was sent last week. It reminds us why the first three parts of this series, in particular, were written:

The video links off to another short video called Sex & Taxes. You should bookmark and watch them both.

Lets begin.

I dont want to get into the metaphysics of work here, so Ill simply point out that work is the basis of productivity and productivity the basis of progress. You cant have a society without people working.

Work Productivity Progress Society

To show how broken the current world really is, contrast this basic progression with the fact that you cannot simply fly to any country and work for someone.

These democratic, politically driven institutions we call governments are not interested in economic reality or productivity, but in moronic protectionism so that the lemmings who voted to keep them in power are able to continue subsisting off welfare and handouts.

Cyberspace was the first realm to transcend the tentacles of the idiot state. It enabled people to work for others and add value, irrespective of their nationality or location.

But even with the ability to transcend space and place, the meddling of the state via its influence on the banking and payments system (as weve seen in the recent Russia-hysteria), has made that victory only partial. Your ability to get paid is dependent upon permission from your overlords, who want to tag you, brand you and file your details away so they can legally rob you of a portion of your money later.

Simply getting a bank account in a territory in which youre not a legal resident is nigh on impossible. Working is another level of impossibility that requires mountains of paperwork and months of wasted man-hours in bureaucratic processing and begging.

Once again, Bitcoin fixes this. Try it yourself. Download a wallet, secure your keys, give someone an address to pay you for your work, or product, or service. Simple. Value for value. No middlemen, no permission, no wastage of anyones precious time.

Bitcoin inverts the madness of the status quo, where you have to beg for permission first. It enables people to work, build wealth and one day, when governance evolves into fee-for-service, you will pay for that which you want like any normal customer would.

Want to live in the nicest city? No problem; its a higher membership fee. Want to live cheaper? By all means; there will be a living product for that too.

On a Bitcoin standard, this ability to live and work anywhere for anyone, without permission becomes the actual standard, both online and in meatspace.

The notion of a social security number or a work permit is thrown out the window because (a) it will be utterly unenforceable online, and (b) citadel operators are looking for more customers, and are incentivized to have productive and competent members to join the ranks of the businesses operating within their borders.

This is where were going; and where were going, we don't need roads.

Work and merit are inherently linked.

Bitcoins relationship with energy use at the network level, coupled with its cryptographic approach to preserving property rights at the meta level, result in a far deeper relationship to work than what many initially notice, and therefore also its relationship to merit.

As such, Bitcoins existence will tilt both individual human behavior and structural societal orientation more toward productivity, progress and most importantly, merit.

Its funny coming full circle to this idea because its actually how part one of the series began. My argument was that Bitcoin is meritocratic. While Ive come to realize that this statement is not entirely accurate in and of itself (Bitcoin is more complex, and not strictly meritocratic) what is accurate is that relationships and social coordination will have to adapt to more meritocratic metas in order to thrive. There is a powerful idea here. Bitcoin is almost like a specter, keeping us accountable (in all senses of the word), reminding us of the middle way.

With that in mind, what is a meritocracy?

Before we explore the answer to that question, it might be helpful to get clear on what it is not because remember: where were going, we dont need roads. If we get confused and build a bunch of metaphorical roads on metaphorical oceans, were only going to get in our own way.

Projecting the consciousness and frameworks of our current paradigm forward helps nobody.

We've all heard the term, but does anyone really understand what it means? At the risk of giving yourself a mild aneurysm, I suggest you watch the video below, not because it will help you understand the concept of meritocracy, but that it will show you why its so goddamn important to have a foundation in Bitcoin, Austrian economics or anarcho-capitalism before espousing any sort of political ideas.

I know Im being harsh, but I do it tongue-in-cheek. I actually reached out to the guy and since he made that video, he did find Bitcoin which I am happy for. In fact, if I look back on my naivety from 2014, I too wouldve believed some of the things he said. Why? Because they sound nice.

This is why the first four parts of this series were written. We all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Some of us, those who can partially recognize the problem but completely misdiagnose it, are prone to slap a series of illogical, inconsistent ideas together and become a potentially greater threat than an ally. We must be sharp and consistent in our critiques in order to attract the most able and intelligent to our cause. The alternative is being followed by the long tail of lemmings whose opinion doesnt matter in the first place.

Vague platitudes or impossible claims like equality of opportunity for everyone and the best education is a right for every young child, are signs that the necessary work has not been done yet.

Arbitrarily defining government actors as experts in their field who are driven by reason and science is not what makes something meritocratic. In fact, it is a pathway to hell as evidenced in the past two years.

In the absence of studies of morality and ethics (much of what traditional religions explore), the secular state simply becomes the new god, and obedience the religion.

Lastly, the idea of a government being an institution that can competently deliver anything theyve promised is nonsense. Government and merit are two incompatible ideas. Politics can only embody merit if it is economically accountable, and so long as politics is the realm of a government that can influence economies by virtue of issuing money, we are caught in the cyclical trap from which were now fighting our way out.

This is why even the most sound definition of a meritocracy (something akin to an anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist society), while great in theory, is impossible without Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is what makes a real meritocratic mode of organization among humans possible. There is no alternative. A meritocracy requires private property, proof of work, economic consequence/calculation, free markets and prices.

So long as mechanisms exist to acquire, accumulate and protect wealth by virtue of politics and the socialization of bad decision-making, society will always devolve into the tyranny of mindless masses.

Lets dive into what the emergence of a meritocracy may look, feel and sound like.

Despite the logical and economic consistencies of the various flavors of anarchism, they all seem to fall short in dealing with or utilizing the necessary emergence of hierarchies and power structures.

Having run businesses for over a decade, and been a focal point for group outings, I am keenly aware of the need for leadership and some level of influence (power?) over the participants in a group.

This form of power is not coercive, but it is directive and authoritative.

Ive written about hierarchies of competence in the past, and I believe they are a cornerstone for the healthy functioning of any group.

The anarchic idea that there are no hierarchies is, in my opinion, misguided.

The nuance lies in the distinction between hierarchies of competence and hierarchies of decree. The former being economic and moral in nature, while the latter being political and immoral.

Authority, I believe, is necessary. But not just arbitrary authority; it must be earned. Think about the master and the apprentice. The master has power and influence over his apprentice by virtue of the authority he has earned over the years, honing his craft.

Earned authority is related to merit. In order to become the best version of yourself, you must work on yourself. You must expend time and energy toward building, creating and outcompeting entropy. This manifestation of life that you exhibit in your pursuit of becoming more is my definition of merit and at the macro level is how I believe humans organize within a society most naturally.

To a large degree, its the underlying theme of how weve organized ourselves over millennia, similar to how capitalism has and always will exist, no matter how much politics you obfuscate it with. Humans need to eat. Competence is the ultimate selector.

The problem is, as always, how much non-meritocratic, arbitrary decree is able to infect the system and cause it to decay by countering this organic self-organization and even reversing the momentum.

Entropy is a bitch, and shes always there waiting for us to get in our own way. History is littered with stories of meritocratic empires brought down by the cancer of lies; the greatest and most dangerous lies being the economic ones we tell ourselves as we step ever-closer toward starvation and oblivion.

As shown in part three, when the political can influence the economic, you have a system that will diverge from reality inch by inch until it no longer maps onto any territory. It becomes worthless. The empire of meritocracy becomes the empire of lies.

Every great collapse is a function of the deviation from territory with false maps. And false maps are always the result of hubris and willful blindness, i.e., unbounded decrees and doctrines.

Thats where we are today. One big empire of fraud, collapsing in on itself, under the gravity of its own stupidity and falsity.

Butthe night is darkest before dawn, so its also a time of great possibility. The fork in the road we see before us, with Bitcoin, promises to help us transcend this incessant degeneration into cancerous lies by making the prime economic laws immune to politics.

On a short leash, political ideologies must adapt to the territory and sharpen their approach, or simply cease to exist. There are no alternatives. There is no room for fantasy. There is only correction and adaptation; similar to what life experiences as it evolves. As a result, politics must become smaller and function like a local strategy, not a global doctrine or mandate.

This is how I think about meritocracy, and I believe energy money in our case, Bitcoin is the necessary prerequisite for moving onto this modality of coexistence.

If Bitcoin moves us more toward greater meritocratic order, what might the actual social strata or layering of such a future society look like?

Ive discussed the idea of meritocratic feudalism on some podcasts in the past, so I will try to elaborate here.

First, lets clear up some terms and confusions.

Feudalism is generally thought of as a brutish, corrupt, elitist and outdated structure from the medieval past.

But little do the people who brandish it as such realize that were living in a technocratic-feudalist world today. They look back upon the medieval ages with disdain and a holier-than-thou sneer, while they perform their role in a modern, more corrupt version of their supposed worst nightmare. Its embarrassing.

Furthermore, because theyve not spent a minute thinking about it, and instead just swallowed whatever manure their high school indoctrinators fed them, theyre oblivious to what the actual issues with feudalism were.

Its not that there are classes in feudalism, but that these classes can become static and stale. That the constituents within each class remain there irrespective of the value they add, their productive capacity, their merit or lack thereof.

Newsflash: Thats the world we live in today!

We have literal zombie companies like IBM, Hertz and Boeing operating purely because the government bailed out their incompetent asses with money stolen from you and I. In doing so, they made classes of modern feudalism even more static and our relative positions on the hierarchy more unfair.

A functional society requires class mobility. In The UnCommunist Manifesto, Mark Moss and I discuss dynamic equilibrium as a necessary ingredient for thriving societies. The ability to climb by virtue of merit, and the possibility of falling as a result of mistakes and errors in judgment, are both absolutely critical. Its what makes the game fair; and the only way a game continues to be played is if it is fair.

There must be an incentive/disincentive structure in social hierarchies that applies to all participants across all classes in order for the system to be structurally coherent and robust. If the rules are different for different players, the game begins to break down.

This is why Ive proposed meritocratic feudalism as an idea. It embodies the organizing principles of hierarchies and classes, alongside the dynamic nature of status, effort, merit and value.

On a Bitcoin standard it seems as if this, and variations of it, are the kind of structures that will emerge.

While meritocratic feudalism looks at what the internal structure of a particular society may be, each one is encapsulated in a citadel of sorts.

This does not necessarily mean a castle with a drawbridgebut, then again, it also does not negate that possibility.

The idea that well have city states, citadels, gated communities and perhaps more broadly, an ephemeral Bitcoin citadel that transcends time, place and space (like the Jews have had for millennia) is not only compelling, but quite possible.

The more ephemeral version is in effect how weve started and places like Bitcoin Twitter are manifestations of these early citadels. Zones in which like-valued people come together and either agree or berate each other over small differences behind their keyboards may at times seem crazy, but they are integral to the formation of early alliances that may one day open the door to meatspace citadels.

These IRL extensions may start out as simple communities that are built with the intention to go off-grid, becoming ever more self-sufficient and self-reliant, or, they may be more commercial in nature such as the projects the Free Private Cities Foundation is involved in, in Honduras.

Either way, the central themes are:

And most importantly, the relationships between governor and governed evolves. If youve read my work in the past, youll be familiar with the following chart from part three of the Jordan Peterson series; Bitcoin, Bitcoiners and Citadels.

I know it sounds like a stretch, but if you dont think its possible, youve not yet spent the time to appreciate the implications that Bitcoin will have on human micro and macro behavior.

In fact, you may just be a slave to the dogma and propaganda of the current paradigm.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. Its a fascinating thing to behold.

The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both; People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didnt create in America the worlds most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration. Lew Rockwell, 2010

The idea of citadels requires you imagine a world in which idiot governments no longer exist.

I know this can be hard for some of us, either because were lacking courage, lacking imagination, lacking intelligence or are just overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of stupidity being spewed out from every screen and speaker around us.

I get it. But its our responsibility to step up in spite of these facts. If we dont rise above the madness and help ourselves, the morons in government are for damn sure not going to help us. That we can be certain of.

The status quo cannot continue. Its falling apart. You have people barely fit for a nursing home pretending to run countries and megalomaniacs cosplaying Dr. Evil telling you to own nothing and be happy with your serving of bugs and lentils.

These citadels are more than just an idea. They are necessary.

How might these citadels work? What is their economic model? How will they pay for services, defense, security and infrastructure? Will their model be bare-bones or full service?

Again, impossible for one mere mind to know what all the variations will be, let alone the intricacies and nuances that will emerge as we learn and iterate. The only mechanism we know of that can possibly work this out is the free market.

I believe the world will run multiple experiments, side by side, and the best modalities will win. Furthermore, what is defined as best will vary from region to region, between people and across cultures. I can envision an entire array of markets for living where competition and economic accountability drive them toward the provision of more novel solutions at better prices.

Notwithstanding my inability to project a precise outcome of this experimentation, I do have an idea of what sort of general economic model might outperform others.

GAAS, or Governance as a Service.

Weve used these models to revolutionize services in cyberspace, and through competition drive toward better features, more value and lower prices. Why would we not apply this sort of model to meatspace?

Think of an all-inclusive resort or hotel experience. Or membership to the Soho House. You pay a membership fee of some sort covering certain basics. You may choose to have some sort of add-ons or variations that make your contract with the service provider bespoke.

You may even have a series of memberships across multiple territories, and use them how you want. Perhaps you buy ownership, or lifetime membership in a territory early and youre able to sublet part of your rights when you need to. We could even employ a time-sharesort of model used today as an effective means of pooling resources for shared ownership of private property. Who knows? The options to scale up initial citadels, and later operate them, are not only endless, but superior.

Why would we find it strange that commercially oriented entities would somehow not be able to deliver anything an incompetent government can?

In fact, I find it absurd to think that any government, operating in an economic vacuum, could ever outcompete this kind of private-city GAAS provider. One lives by how much money they siphon out of the populace, while the other by how well they service their clients.

There is absolutely no possible argument for public government other than the fact that because they currently hold the largest stick. That does not defend their existence, but should if anything force us to think deeply about how to disempower them and bankrupt them from within, until they crumble and dissolve. Why? Because they are the ones we need to protect ourselves from most. They are the greatest possible aggressor.

NextWho might these territory operators actually be?

See the rest here:

The Age Of Meritocracy Bitcoin Is Not Democratic Part Five - Bitcoin Magazine

What people may have overlooked with last years Whitefish girls team, which finished second to Laurel at the State A meet, was how young it was beyond senior standout Mikenna Ells.

So Laurel and Columbia Falls and everyone else had better look alive.

Hands down the favorite is the Whitefish girls, Columbia Falls coach Jamie Heinz said. I thought they might have won last year, but they had some tough luck and things didnt go their way.

They return 90 percent of their team.

The Bulldogs state champion short relay team is mostly intact; the anchor is Brooke Zetooney, who as a freshman sped to first in the 100 meters at state and was fourth in the 200.

Add in senior Erin Wilde in the jumps, sophomore Hailey Ells in the hurdles and 400, sophomore Isabelle Cooke in the 800 and senior sprinter/jumper Tommye Kelly and thats a heck of a nucleus (sophomore hurdler Bailey Smith is recovering from knee surgery).

A strong freshman class, as the stories go, would give Whitefish an embarrassment of riches. Coach Kelliann Blackburn has 15 newbies out: They are a bunch of hungry girls, she said.

Meanwhile Heinz team surged to third.

We didnt have a lot of girls, but we scored, Heinz said. Things really went our way. Were adding a little depth on top of that this year, and so I think we can make some noise.

Last May, Lara Erickson provided two distance wins. She graduated, but its worth noting that the Wildkats, with senior Hannah Sempf leading the way, won their first State A cross country title in October.

Seniors Siri Erickson (second in the 1,600 and 3,200), Sempf and Julia Martin, along with junior Courtney Hoerner give Columbia Falls a deep distance crew to back up the efforts of Ally Sempf (sprints) and Alexis Green (jumps).

Dont sleep on the Whitefish boys, who have a big three in defending shot put champion Talon Holmquist, defending triple jump champ Gabe Menicke and hurdler/jumper Bodie Smith.

The Columbia Falls boys are led by vaulter Lane Clark and Jace Duval, who placed in the 200 at state.

Hell make more noise than just the 200, Heinz noted of Duval. So Im very excited about him.

Around the Northwest A, Libbys Trey Andersen is a threat in the high jump, as is Cy Stevenson in the shot; Polson sprinter Dawson Dumont helps the Pirates short relay, along with Jarrett Wilson and Lucas Targerson. Ronan has leaders in high jumper Payton Cates and hurdler Colter Cornwell.

Ronan also has two top girls in javelin thrower Rylie Lindquist and triple jumper Leina Ulutoa.

Bigforks boys were sixth at the State B meet a year ago, but the Vikings might just be moving on up.

The return of sprinters Joseph Farrier and George Bucklin, hurdlers Isak Epperly, Wyatt Johnson and Jordan Betts and Levi Peterson in the jumps gets Bigfork off to a great start.

Theres also Maddox Mater in the 400, Levi Taylor and Braeden Guse in the shot put and a distance crew of Jack Jensen, Elliott Sanford, Ryder Nollan, North Nollan and Bo Moderman. If the names sound familiar, its because they helped Bigfork win a cross country title in October.

Jensen was the long Viking to score in the distances at last years state track.

I think that might be a little different this year, coach Sue Loeffler said. Because some of them have put in the time.

The Valkyries also are aiming high, with Chloe Ratts, Afton Lambrecht and Carolyn Shillam filling up the relay teams and sprint crews.

Madison Chappuis and Zoey Albert in the javelin, hurdler Ashlyn Savik, Scout Nadeau in the discus and shot and Inga Turner in the high jump are threats, Bigfork also picked up a couple transfers in 800 runner Hannah Harris (Seeley-Swan) and hurdler Lily Tinkle (Flathead).

Area athletes to watch include Eurekas Remmi Stanger, who was third in the high jump a year ago, and teammate Maya Carvey in the long jump; the Lion boys have distance standout Taylor Lancaster, hurdler Jacob Buckingham and Caleb Utter in the sprints and jumps.

Thompson Falls sprinter Jesse Claridge could score big, as could distance man William Hyatt.

Excerpt from:

Class A track: Whitefish girls look to build on last year - Daily Inter Lake