Alex Dobrenko

Under these conditions, in which strategy is constantly privileged over passionate feelings and deeply felt principles are constantly misread as strategy, emotional divestment from public life becomes not just tempting but unavoidable.

For most of my elementary years, I got two dollars a week — one dollar I could spend however I wanted (usually on baseball cards) and one dollar went into “savings.” And all of it was in cash, if not quarters. As I got older, I know my allowance grew, but my primary source of funds at that point was (cheap) babysitting. Allowance was for chores. It... See more

Everyone is imperfect, and we just have to choose the imperfections we can love.

Do we ask the point of knowing what Einstein thought? Do we make a great puzzle of why Mozart is played in so many adverts or why Vermeer stops everyone in their tracks? Do we need to be reasoned into reading our way through hundreds of pages about behavioural economics or the history of early humans? Do we wonder whether seeing a work of... See more

My rule is never to take instructions on how hard I should work from someone who hasn’t burned out before. Very few people take this seriously enough.

What’s Google’s motive for providing free email? Is it that they just want people to be able to communicate easily with one another, or is it that a major advertising conglomerate with a twelve-figure annual revenue stands to benefit tremendously by consuming and using all of your inbound and outbound communication? In comparison, Fastmail is a... See more

Our economy isn't one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage

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