photo cred: my dad

It’s time for the annual Experimental History Blog Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! Send me your best unpublished blog post, and if I pick yours, I’ll send you real cash money and tell everybody how great you are.

You can see last year’s winners and honorable mentions here. They included: a self-experiment on lactose intolerance, a story about working as a 10-year-old bartender, a takedown of randomized-controlled trials, and an economic explainer of college sports. The authors were software engineers, pseudonymous weirdos, academics, professional behavior-changers, freelancers, moms, and straight up randos and normies. That’s the whole point of blogging—you can be anyone, and you can write about anything.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some triumphs of the form:

• Book Reviews: On the Natural Faculties, The Gossip Trap, Progress and Poverty, all of The Psmith’s Bookshelf
• Deep Dives: Dynomight on air quality and air purifiers, Higher than the Shoulders of Giants, or a Scientist’s History of Drugs, How the Rockefeller Foundation Helped Bootstrap the Field of Molecular Biology, all of Age of Invention
• Big Ideas: Ads Don’t Work That Way, On Progress and Historical Change, Meditations on Moloch, Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail, 10 Technologies that Won’t Exist in 5 Years
• 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, A Chemical Hunger, The Mind in the Wheel, all of Experimental Fat Loss, all of 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?, 50 Things I Know, On Befriending Kids, Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn’t you?
• 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, If You’re So Smart Why Can’t You Die?, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

And of course:

• Last year’s winners: 100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon (1st place), What Ethiopian runners taught me about reading scientific literature, Or, how to go from overeating Italian food to winning marathons, if you’re Ethiopian (2nd place), and Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008? (3rd place)

HOW 2 APPLY

• Paste your post into a Google Doc.
• VERY IMPORTANT STEP: Change the sharing setting to “Anyone with the link”. This is not the default setting, and if you don’t change it, I won’t be able to read your post.
• Submit it here.

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 for the next year. 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 read every blog post ever written, I want to push people to either write something new or finish something they’ve been sitting on for too long. You’re welcome to publish your post after you submit it. If you win, I’ll reach out beforehand and ask you for a direct link to your post so I can include it in mine.
• One entry per person.
• 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.
• Previous top-three winners are not eligible to win again, but honorable mentions are.
• Uhhh otherwise don’t break any laws I guess??

Submissions are due June 15. Submit here.

Experimental History is yeehaw