The 2026 theme
Are We There Yet? — one set of Guiding Questions, fifteen sections. The titles are all puns. You get used to it.
The official questions live on the themes site, where each section links out to the articles behind it. Read all of it before you write any notes. Skimming in week one and coming back in week eight is the classic mistake, and it costs you two months of studying slightly the wrong things.
Below are the fifteen sections with what each one is circling, plus the Beijing Alpacas notes for that section. Split them three ways, five each, and trade when you're done.
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The warm-up. Sets out the theme's big questions before the sections get specific, and worth rereading at the end of the season when it will make much more sense.
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Progress as an idea, and the numbers we use to prove it's happening. Expect arguments about whether a metric deserves the authority everyone gives it.
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To-do lists and the people who sold them. The Ivy Lee method, the Eisenhower matrix, the bullet journal and its signifiers.
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Predictions that the end is coming. Doomsday prophets, dates that passed uneventfully, and Fukuyama announcing that history had finished.
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Drafts, revisions, and everything that never made it past version one. Good hunting ground for the unfinished-things questions.
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Journeys taken together, and what a group manages that one person can't. Teamwork, collective action, shared destinations.
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Beginnings, paths, and the infrastructure that quietly decides where you're allowed to walk.
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Prototypes, imitation and iteration. How things get designed by copying the last thing and changing one bit.
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In-between places. Waiting rooms, corridors, airports, and buildings caught between one life and the next.
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The discomfort of moving and of growing up. What travel and change cost you, physically and otherwise.
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Home against the road. Migration, nomadism, and what it actually means to leave somewhere.
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A Back to the Future joke with a real question inside it: what survives a journey when everything else gets upgraded?
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Obligation. What we owe other people, who decides, and what happens when someone opts out.
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Futurism itself. What people predicted, what they actually got, and why they were so confident about the difference.
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The wrap-up. Pulls the sections back into theme-wide arguments, which is exactly what debate motions are made of. Do not skip this one.
How to work through it
Split the fifteen sections three ways in week one. Read your five properly, which means following the linked articles instead of skimming the questions, and write half a page on each while it's still fresh.
In week three, teach your sections to the other two. Teaching is what exposes the parts you only thought you knew, and it drags all three of you up to a level where anyone can answer anything.
From week four, stop reading. Quiz each other, then argue the sections as motions against a timer. The material only becomes usable once you've pulled it out of your head under pressure a few times.