Yes, argues Sam Kay
The reason we spend months writing this magazine is because the fans love it. It’s cool, it’s hip, it’s Cosmo. Don’t believe me? Here’s a proof by induction.
It’s trivial that the first ever issue of Chalkdust was fun to read. If not for its great initial success, I wouldn’t be here writing!
Our ever-expanding mailbox and letters pages tells us it is safe to assume that $n$ issues of Chalkdust are fun to read.
Now, take a group of $n+1$ issues of Chalkdust and consider only the first $n$ issues. From the above assumption, these $n$ issues are fun to read. Likewise, consider the last $n$ issues of Chalkdust. These issues also have to be fun to read by the same assumption!
Since both the first $n$ issues and the last $n$ issues overlap by at least one issue, this overlapping issue will be as fun to read as the rest, and thus all $n+1$ issues of Chalkdust are fun to read.
If $n$ issues of Chalkdust are fun to read, then we have proven that $n+1$ issues of Chalkdust are also fun to read. And we already noted that the first issue was indeed fun to read. By induction, any issue of Chalkdust we release will be fun to read. So we probably should release another.
No, argue the rest of the team
Have you seen the magazine?!
Sure, we have a lovely selection of articles by lovely authors, and you lot are a lovely audience… but have you seen the pages between the articles? It’s all low effort trash, placeholder text we forgot to update, inconsistent use of Oxford commas, and repeating the word ‘lovely’ multiple times in the same sentence.
Surely by now, a decent publication would have accidentally come up with at least one good joke.
Half the reviews are of one-off events that you’ve missed.
The letters that Dirichlet receives aren’t even real.
We’ve been on Have I Got News For You—the ultimate aim of any niche publication—but where else is there to
go? In the bin.
We realised early on that they’ll let you print anything, but should they really be printing this?!
Then again, printing this is quite fun, and we already have one passable pun for Dear Dirichlet 21. Better write the rest of the magazine then.
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