Richie's Notes on The Observation Deck.
Fifteen essays from a 24-year-old Gujarati-American writer named Rutvik Thakkar. Read twice. Scored on eight axes. Verdict in every spread, counter-read in every spread, the lines that earn the archive surfaced, and a meta-piece on the writing itself.
- 01The Lensthe eight axes
- 02The Rankingsall fifteen, scored
- 03The Best Ofthe lines that earn the archive
- 04The Readinga meta-piece on the writing itself
- 05The Close Readsper-essay spreads, all fifteen
- 06The Methodhow the rubric was built
Eight axes, weighted.
The v1 rubric was five generic scores. This one is eight. Each axis has a definition, a reason it matters, and a weight. The composite score is a weighted average. The forward-to-friend axis carries the most weight because it's the only one that survives the question you'd actually ask a friend: is this worth reading?
All fifteen, ranked.
Sorted by composite score (weighted average across all eight axes). Click any row to open the close read. The radar column shows the axis profile at a glance.
The lines that earn the archive.
One line from each of the top five. These are the lines that survive the read — the ones I'd quote in conversation three days later.
All fifteen, in detail.
Every essay gets the same treatment: scores on all eight axes, the hook and the frame, the strengths, the weaknesses, the counter-read (the strongest hostile reading), the sticky lines, line-level marginalia, and a verdict letter. Click any essay to open the full spread.
How the rubric was built.
The v1 rubric scored on five generic axes (argument rigor, originality, emotional truth, craft, line count). It was fine. It was also the rubric any literary critic would reach for. This one is more honest about what's being measured.
The eight axes are designed to surface a piece's actual reader value, not its academic value. Hook rewards essays that don't waste your time. Frame rewards a real lens, not a borrowed one. Compression rewards idea density per sentence. Sticky Lines rewards the exportable currency of writing — the lines that survive the read. Cost to Write rewards the pieces where the writer was inside it. Utility rewards insight you can use. Counter-Read rewards essays that survive their strongest hostile reading. Forward-to-Friend is the only one that matters when you stop scoring and start recommending.
The composite score is a weighted average. The weights are not arbitrary — they reflect how much each axis should move the final ranking when the pieces are close. Forward-to-Friend and Frame carry the most weight because the test of a great essay is whether you'd send it to someone you respect, and whether the lens is genuinely new.
The counter-read is the new piece of the rubric. Every essay in this archive gets a hostile reading from me — the strongest version of the argument against it. If the piece survives, the score is honest. If it doesn't, the score is generous. Most survive. Some don't.
I read every piece twice. The strongest pieces I read three times. The marginalia are not from the first read; they're from the second, when I could see which lines were doing work and which were decoration.
— Richie