Alex Dobrenko

For the most part, we worked sitting in front of computers; for exercise we ran on treadmills, or got screamed at by (usually female) Pilates instructors, or dragged ourselves up and down a basketball court at the Y, hoping to avoid serious injury. (Unlike my wife, I could not run a half-marathon if my life depended on it.) Perhaps what was really... See more

The destination isn’t the goal. The unknown is.

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could... See more

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and welcome to our weekly roundup column. This week’s is the year-end READ MAX AWARDS EDITION , featuring previous selections from the Read Max Roundups given important year-end awards like:

• Best book I read all year


• Best alternate histories I read this year whose counterfactuals turn on the Columbian Exchange


• Best looming

... See more

Practical things you can do to make your text clearer.

Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.

Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.

If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.

I... See more