Alex Dobrenko

I’m so happy to hear that these friends’ stories made you feel that way. A colleague of mine says he strives to report on people who are “extraordinary but anonymous,” and I feel that’s a perfect description of the people in my book. Which makes it hard to just share one partnership, but I’ll do it.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.


2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.


3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.


4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.


5. Start as close to the end as

... See more

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly — R. Buckminster Fuller

if I wanted to use the web in a personal way, it seemed better to do so through social media. But this felt like a job too! Everything in social media is explicitly quantified with likes and shares and retweets. All the platforms have a notification bar to show you which random utterance of yours was gaining in popularity, implying that you could... See more

But we can also ask the opposite question: Are there regions that are more active among bad readers and whose activity decreases as one learns to read? The answer is positive: in illiterates, the brain’s responses to faces are more intense. The better we read, the more this activity decreases in the left hemisphere, at the exact place in the cortex... See more