The Summer 2024 Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree

yeehaw

photo cred: my dad

I am proud to announce the Experimental History Summer 2024 Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Submit your post now!

A THEORY OF BLOGS

As a genre, blogging is under-appreciated and under-theorized.

Most culture is produced by committee. Books, movies, music, video games, op-eds, scientific papers, etc. all have to pass through a gauntlet of editors, producers, reviewers, lawyers, and algorithms before they’re allowed to reach your eyeballs. Committees cost money, so they have to produce things that please enough people to turn a big profit, or else the committee will starve. And so they try to reduce variance, risk, and weirdness, and in raising the floor, they also lower the ceiling. The culture they produce is unlikely to offend or repulse, but it’s also unlikely to challenge or enchant. It’s usually fine and rarely sublime.

(This is why most of popular culture is reruns, repeats, sequels, and spinoffs.)

And that’s all right. It’s fun to numb your brain every once in a while by watching an Avengers movie or reading a New York Times op-ed about why this Donald Trump guy might not be all he’s cracked up to be.

But the committees leave lots of weird little niches unfilled. They can’t contemplate strange ideas, they can’t countenance obsession or self-indulgence or idiosyncrasy, and they can’t risk confusing people or pissing them off. Unfortunately, doing interesting work often requires a dash of all those things.

That’s where blogging comes in. When you don’t have a committee to feed, you can afford to be weird. You can allow yourself all of the excesses that are necessary for producing something that rearranges the furniture in someone’s mind. The lack of quality control means that blog posts are usually bad, but they’re occasionally magnificent. That’s fine by me—finding good stuff to read is a strong-link problem.

Recently, however, that problem has started feeling harder. I’m not sure what happened, but for the first time ever, I don’t have enough good stuff in my queue. Content, content everywhere but not a thing to read!

So I want to prime the pump, discover some new writers, and hopefully help them reach more people. It can be a grueling slog when you’re just a lil weirdo starting out. Good stuff does tend to spread on the internet, but it has to reach a certain critical mass of attention first. I got a couple key boosts early on that helped me keep going, so I’d like to do the same for the next generation.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR

Truly, I have no idea. I wanna be surprised. (If I knew which blog posts I wanted to see, I’d write them myself.)

But here, as inspiration, are some triumphs of the format:

• Book Reviews: On the Natural Faculties, The Gossip Trap, Progress and Poverty, The Education of Cyrus

• Deep Dives: Dynomight on air quality and air purifiers, The big alcohol study that didn’t happen: my primal scream of rage (also Dynomight), Higher than the Shoulders of Giants, or a Scientist’s History of Drugs

• Big Ideas: Ads Don’t Work That Way, On Progress and Historical Change, Meditations on Moloch, Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail

• Personal Stories/Gonzo Journalism: No Evidence of Disease, It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, adventures with the homeless people outside my house, My Recent Divorce and/or Dior Homme Intense, The Potato People

• Scientific reports/data analysis: Lady Tasting Brine, Fahren-height, Experimental Fat Loss, How relationships change over time, The Egg and the Rock

• How-to and Exhortation: The Most Precious Resource Is Agency, How To Be More Agentic, Things You’re Allowed to Do, Are You Serious?

• Good Posts Not Otherwise Categorized: The biggest little guy, Baldwin in Brahman, The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, Bay Area House Parties (1, 2, 3, etc.), Alchemy is ok, Ideas Are Alive and You Are Dead

Here’s one thing I’ll say—being courageous and idiosyncratic isn’t just bloggers’ comparative advantage; it’s their duty.¹ I shed a tiny little tear whenever I see someone on Substack trying to do an impression of The New Yorker or Buzzfeed. What a waste! You’re never gonna play their game better than they do, and why would you want to? It’s like trying to cook a Big Mac at home—you can get the perfect version down the street for $6. Meanwhile, there’s a dish you can make that the industrial kitchens never could, and dammit, I wanna taste it.

(See also: Brain training begins in the hips.)

So please, write and submit! Sate my ravenous brain-hunger!

HOW 2 APPLY

• Paste your post into a Google Doc.

• Make sure that sharing setting is “Anyone with the link”

• Submit it via this form.

PRIZES WOW

First place: $500
Second place: $250
Third place: $100

I’ll also post an excerpt of your piece on Experimental History and heap praise upon it, and I’ll add your blog to my list of Substack recommendations.

(You’ll retain ownership of your writing, of course.)

RULES 2 LIVE BY

• Only unpublished posts are eligible. As fun as it would be to have every blog post ever written sent to my email, I want to push people to either write something new or finish something they’ve been sitting on for too long.

• One entry per person. Multiple authors are fine, but each person should only be an author on one post.

• There’s technically no word limit, but if you send me a 100,000 word treatise I probably won’t finish it.

• You don’t need to have a blog to submit, but if you win and you don’t have one, I will give you a rousing speech about why you should start one.

• Uhhh otherwise don’t break any laws I guess??

Submissions are due July 1. Submit here.

1. For more on this argument, see my friend Daniel Yudkin’s post “You Have a Moral Obligation to Let Your Freak Flag Fly.”