How Many Subscribers Does "Mormon Interpreter" Have?

[_Lemmie]

Tom, I noticed this at the link you just posted:

It’s the 357th Friday in a row on which we’ve published at least one article.  We’ve existed for 358.5 weeks.

So, no the record is no longer for Fridays in a row where Interpreter has published a "new" article, then?

Speaking of this quest Peterson has to defy Bond's prediction, I've often wondered if his insistence on publishing every Friday ultimately is what sank the Interpreter subscriptions. If I am understanding this correctly, the Friday publication push guarantees that most of the articles are online well before the Volume is published, right? Why subscribe to a printed volume when not only are the articles online for free, but they are online well in advance of the actual Volume publication itself?

[_Tom]

Tom, I noticed this at the link you just posted:

It’s the 357th Friday in a row on which we’ve published at least one article.  We’ve existed for 358.5 weeks.

So, no the record is no longer for Fridays in a row where Interpreter has published a "new" article, then?

I'd need to perform some independent research to determine how the Interpreter Foundation's president has described the streak over time. Certainly some of the journal's published articles have not been "new." For example, Davis Bitton's 2004 FAIR address titled "I Don't Have a Testimony of the History of the Church" was first published in FARMS Review and then published again in Interpreter in March. The latter version, which featured some additional citations and annotations, did not acknowledge that the address had been previously published. Why?

Speaking of this quest Peterson has to defy Bond's prediction, I've often wondered if his insistence on publishing every Friday ultimately is what sank the Interpreter subscriptions. If I am understanding this correctly, the Friday publication push guarantees that most of the articles are online well before the Volume is published, right? Why subscribe to a printed volume when not only are the articles online for free, but they are online well in advance of the actual Volume publication itself?

There's a definitely a time lag between completion of a volume online and Interpreter making the volume available to order and download in paperback and digital formats. For example, volume 31 was completed on March 29, but it was not available for ordering and downloading until May 15. This page states that "[a]nnual print subscribers have priority access to our print editions, before they are made available to the general public on Amazon." I don't know if priority access means a few days or a few weeks. In any case, I print the PDF versions of each volume's articles and have them bound in the finest faux leather.

[_Lemmie]

Tom, I noticed this at the link you just posted:

It’s the 357th Friday in a row on which we’ve published at least one article.  We’ve existed for 358.5 weeks.

So, no the record is no longer for Fridays in a row where Interpreter has published a "new" article, then?

I'd need to perform some independent research to determine how the Interpreter Foundation's president has described the streak over time. Certainly some of the journal's published articles have not been "new." For example, Davis Bitton's 2004 FAIR address titled "I Don't Have a Testimony of the History of the Church" was first published in FARMS Review and then published again in Interpreter in March. The latter version, which featured some additional citations and annotations, did not acknowledge that the address had been previously published. Why?

Thinking back, I'd say somewhere in summer of 2018 the Interpreter stopped saying Friday's articles were "new."

(And not to be a stickler, but in the publishing world, to re-publish something without indicating that it was previously published, even if by the same author on the same site, is considered a form of...ahem.. plagiarism. )

[_Doctor Scratch]

Tom, I noticed this at the link you just posted:

It’s the 357th Friday in a row on which we’ve published at least one article.  We’ve existed for 358.5 weeks.

So, no the record is no longer for Fridays in a row where Interpreter has published a "new" article, then?

Speaking of this quest Peterson has to defy Bond's prediction, I've often wondered if his insistence on publishing every Friday ultimately is what sank the Interpreter subscriptions. If I am understanding this correctly, the Friday publication push guarantees that most of the articles are online well before the Volume is published, right? Why subscribe to a printed volume when not only are the articles online for free, but they are online well in advance of the actual Volume publication itself?

It's because this particular arm of what Interpreter does is a vanity press. Interpreter will, as demand arises, print bound copies for those who want them--at cost, as Peterson said. And as we know, it's a very small number of people who are paying for this service: most likely, it's authors who've contributed and who want that actual, physical copy--sort of like hefting the Gold Plates, eh?--to show their friends and neighbors.

But what this really says is that Interpreter is such a ramshackle, cheapskate organization that they don't even both providing contributor's copies to their "peer reviewed" authors. "You want a damn hard copy?? Pay for it yourself!!"

[_Kishkumen]

It's because this particular arm of what Interpreter does is a vanity press. Interpreter will, as demand arises, print bound copies for those who want them--at cost, as Peterson said. And as we know, it's a very small number of people who are paying for this service: most likely, it's authors who've contributed and who want that actual, physical copy--sort of like hefting the Gold Plates, eh?--to show their friends and neighbors.

But what this really says is that Interpreter is such a ramshackle, cheapskate organization that they don't even both providing contributor's copies to their "peer reviewed" authors. "You want a damn hard copy?? Pay for it yourself!!"

Although I am not in your scholarly league when it comes to Mopologetics, Doctor, I feel the need to raise a question that does not seem to have gotten the press it deserves. What does the revelation of Robert "Bob" Gay's long patronage of Mopologetics do to revise our understanding of the stature of Mopologetics and the condition of its finances?

Think of it: Robert "Bob" Gay is the president of the Seventies and on the board of governors for BYU. He just got the chair he funded moved from the Maxwell Institute to ANEL.

When I read words like "ramshackle" and "cheapskate," they don't jibe with the trickle of evidence I have seen over the years of substantial money at play. Sure, it may not be deployed in the places we might expect, and it may not be easily accounted for, but there does seem to be substantial support for Mopologetics out there.

John Gee is a prime example. For all of his Egyptological acumen, he has played fast and loose with the truth on the Book of Abraham, and he has been rewarded handsomely to do so. Where else could an Egyptologist who with a straight face argued for the antiquity of Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham in the most dubious terms hope to be able to skate from an institute of Mormon Studies to a regular department, with his chair, in the aftermath of being in full rebellion against the institute?

Power is exercised in the furtherance of Mopologetics when it is needed. The Gee situation shows this in spades. Remember that one thing at issue in the dissolution of classic FARMS in the MI was the funding apologists were bringing into MI. Where do we think those donors sent their money afterward? Did it stay with the MI, or did it go elsewhere? If elsewhere, where is it? With Interpreter? With someone else?

[_Physics Guy]

The journals in which I normally publish do not give out free author copies, but then again nobody reads the paper versions nowadays anyway.

In the old days (like, last century) one normally paid for a hundred or so reprints of each article one published. Each copy was just your article on a few stapled sheets, not the whole volume in which your article appeared, but it was all nicely typeset. The journal shipped you your stack of reprints and you put them on a shelf in your office. Professors would normally have a whole office wall filled with stacks of reprints going back decades. The stacks slowly shrank as copies got given away to visitors, so the old stacks might be thin. When people started running out of shelf space they might combine the older stacks into boxes or something. You could see a person's whole lifetime research output right there on their wall.

Younger people might have only a few stacks, all high, but they'd keep a lot of empty shelves to show ambition. If you were still moving around as a post-doc, you humped your boxes of reprints around the world with you. And everyone kept massive files of reprints or preprints that other people had given them, and you dragged them around with you, too. At least you only had one copy each of them, but they accumulated. Senior people would have banks of filing cabinets with organization schemes only they understood.

Then screens and printers got good enough that all of that quickly died.

[_Doctor Scratch]

It's because this particular arm of what Interpreter does is a vanity press. Interpreter will, as demand arises, print bound copies for those who want them--at cost, as Peterson said. And as we know, it's a very small number of people who are paying for this service: most likely, it's authors who've contributed and who want that actual, physical copy--sort of like hefting the Gold Plates, eh?--to show their friends and neighbors.

But what this really says is that Interpreter is such a ramshackle, cheapskate organization that they don't even both providing contributor's copies to their "peer reviewed" authors. "You want a damn hard copy?? Pay for it yourself!!"

Although I am not in your scholarly league when it comes to Mopologetics, Doctor, I feel the need to raise a question that does not seem to have gotten the press it deserves. What does the revelation of Robert "Bob" Gay's long patronage of Mopologetics do to revise our understanding of the stature of Mopologetics and the condition of its finances?

Think of it: Robert "Bob" Gay is the president of the Seventies and on the board of governors for BYU. He just got the chair he funded moved from the Maxwell Institute to ANEL.

When I read words like "ramshackle" and "cheapskate," they don't jibe with the trickle of evidence I have seen over the years of substantial money at play. Sure, it may not be deployed in the places we might expect, and it may not be easily accounted for, but there does seem to be substantial support for Mopologetics out there.

You raise an interesting point, Reverend. I think you're correct that "substantial money" is "at play" in some respects, and I also think you're right that it "may not be deployed in the places we might expect." Still, it terms of what's visible--i.e., in comparing, e.g., the Maxwell Institute, FIRM, and Interpreter... Well, which of these organizations at least *seems* richer? The FIRM people's book--i.e., the one Smoot is currently smearing on his blog--has sold tens of thousands of copies. What can Interpreter compare that too? And didn't someone recently pony up the money to buy a new building for the Maxwell Institute? (My recollection is that DCP did not like that characterization, and quickly rushed in to say that the building will house other departments/programs, too.) Meanwhile, I don't think that Interpreter even *has* a building.

But I don't think there's any denying that there are benefactors out there who have helped the apologists out at times. It makes me wonder, again, who is helping to fund this "Witnesses" film.

John Gee is a prime example. For all of his Egyptological acumen, he has played fast and loose with the truth on the Book of Abraham, and he has been rewarded handsomely to do so. Where else could an Egyptologist who with a straight face argued for the antiquity of Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham in the most dubious terms hope to be able to skate from an institute of Mormon Studies to a regular department, with his chair, in the aftermath of being in full rebellion against the institute?

Power is exercised in the furtherance of Mopologetics when it is needed. The Gee situation shows this in spades. Remember that one thing at issue in the dissolution of classic FARMS in the MI was the funding apologists were bringing into MI. Where do we think those donors sent their money afterward? Did it stay with the MI, or did it go elsewhere? If elsewhere, where is it? With Interpreter? With someone else?

All very good and valid questions, Reverend. I wonder the same things myself.

[_Gadianton]

Good points Rev and Professor. I think we're seeing the demise of tier 2 apologetics. The Old Guard tried many angles, and a serious contender was the tier 2 approach, which was the route Ritner was quoted as noticing: Getting Phds to legitimize one's work. But that's only the beginning, true tier 2 apologetics has chairs like Gee's, where Gee is 95% a top-tier academic, and 5% apologist. Meti was in the same category performing a real scholarly service, and the whole idea was to make FARMS a hub for students of antiquity. That would indirectly sell the apologetics. Seems like a good idea, but the Church has passed on Gee's work, as Fence Sitter pointed out, and while there may be serious dollars still backing fragments of the old dream, there just isn't a demand for it. The Rev mentioned Charisma, and that might be the best candidate for an explanation. We know by default it's not going to be the legitimacy of the ideas, and so it must in some way come down to marketing. Meldrum doesn't just sell books, they have huge right-wing events where their partnered with all kinds of other stuff.

[_Kishkumen]

Yes, Dean Robbers. This is the Nibley model, and Gee was not the first to follow Nibley’s path. He was the rising star of my generation, to be sure. In my father’s generation it was perhaps Wilfred Griggs. I remember Nibley’s half-hearted roll out of Griggs. It happened while I was at BYU. In any case, Gee was perceived to be the “chosen one” by the Nibley enthusiasts while I was at BYU. Tales of his feats of eidetic memory were making the rounds. It seems that Griggs was kind of passed over in favor of Gee. That was my impression, at least.

Smoot was perhaps marked out to be Gee’s successor, but I am not sure he will continue with his studies.

Anyhow, the key thing to understand is that Mopologetics is a self-selecting system, to a degree. Those people who discover their affinity and talent for it may choose to pursue this path. If others see they have the chops, loyalty, and deference to their seniors, they have a real shot. The real problem is staying on message as a demonstration of loyalty. There is a high price to pay in order to stay within the good graces of the powers that be.

What are the benefits? The satisfaction of knowing you are keeping your covenants, defending the kingdom, and helped out in other ways here and there to keep you afloat. This is the economy of the kingdom. It is not about getting rich; it is about giving your all and being taken care of in return. So, we should not expect to see a trail of big money. We should expect to find strategically exercised assistance when it is necessary.

[_kairos]

Yes, Dean Robbers. This is the Nibley model, and Gee was not the first to follow Nibley’s path. He was the rising star of my generation, to be sure. In my father’s generation it was perhaps Wilfred Griggs. I remember Nibley’s half-hearted roll out of Griggs. It happened while I was at BYU. In any case, Gee was perceived to be the “chosen one” by the Nibley enthusiasts while I was at BYU. Tales of his feats of eidetic memory were making the rounds. It seems that Griggs was kind of passed over in favor of Gee. That was my impression, at least.

Smoot was perhaps marked out to be Gee’s successor, but I am not sure he will continue with his studies.

Anyhow, the key thing to understand is that Mopologetics is a self-selecting system, to a degree. Those people who discover their affinity and talent for it may choose to pursue this path. If others see they have the chops, loyalty, and deference to their seniors, they have a real shot. The real problem is staying on message as a demonstration of loyalty. There is a high price to pay in order to stay within the good graces of the powers that be.

What are the benefits? The satisfaction of knowing you are keeping your covenants, defending the kingdom, and helped out in other ways here and there to keep you afloat. This is the economy of the kingdom. It is not about getting rich; it is about giving your all and being taken care of in return. So, we should not expect to see a trail of big money. We should expect to find strategically exercised assistance when it is necessary.

i wish someone would explain how woody midgely worked mostly mopolegtics yet got a paycheck from being a political science professor- seems he mentioned once he had apostolic or GA cover telling the political science dept to "pay the man"!

just wonderin
k