Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. For this one, I’m joined by historian of science Dr. Alex Wellerstein.
I’ve been a fan of Alex since at least his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, which came out in 2021. But I was first introduced to Alex’s work, like many people are, through his NUKEMAP project, which is a web-based nuclear weapons effects simulator. It’s a great—and terrifying—teaching tool, and just one of many projects that Alex has worked on as not only a historian but also a computer programmer. Alex is an associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and he’s currently also a visiting researcher at the Nuclear Knowledges program at the Center for International Studies in Paris. You can also find Alex’s writing on his blog and his Substack newsletter, both of which I’ll link in the show notes. He has also written extensively for popular publications. Today, we’re talking about his brand-new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age. This was a fascinating and wide-reaching conversation into how Alex researches and writes and how he sees his work. You’ll hear about everything from why he does not recommend programming your own research database to why he has to talk himself out of italicizing every other word when he writes.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Alex Wellerstein, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (HarperCollins, 2025)
- Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
- Alex’s Substack Newsletter, Doomsday Machines
- Alex’s longstanding blog, Restricted Data: A Nuclear History Blog
- NUKEMAP
- John McPhee
- OneNote
- David Lilienthal’s journals
- Martin Amis, “Thinkability,” an essay in his book Einstein’s Monsters
- Richard Hofstadter
- Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
- Video game project, Oregon Road ’83
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Before I introduce this episode's guest, I have a favor to ask you. I am putting together a year end round-up episode of the best history books that listeners read this year. If you're listening to this before December 22, 2025, go to draftingthepast.com, click on the little tab that says "send voicemail" on the side or bottom of your screen, and record a short message telling me who you are and the best history book you read this year. I'll compile the responses into one epic reading list episode to send us out this year. Okay, on to today's episode. For this one, I'm thrilled to be joined by historian of science, Dr. Alex Wellerstein.
Alex Wellerstein 0:45
I'm really pleased to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:46
I’ve been a fan of Alex since at least his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, which came out in 2021. But I was first introduced to Alex’s work, like many people are, through his NUKEMAP project, which is a web-based nuclear weapons effects simulator. It’s a great—and terrifying—teaching tool, and just one of many projects that Alex has worked on as not only a historian but also a computer programmer. Alex is an associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and he’s currently also a visiting researcher at the Nuclear Knowledges program at the Center for International Studies in Paris. You can also find Alex’s writing on his blog and his Substack newsletter, both of which I’ll link in the show notes. He has also written extensively for popular publications. Today, we’re talking about his brand-new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age. This was a fascinating and wide-reaching conversation into how Alex researches and writes and how he sees his work. You’ll hear about everything from why he does not recommend programming your own research database to why he has to talk himself out of italicizing every other word when he writes. Here's my conversation with Dr. Alex Wellerstein.
Alex Wellerstein 2:04
I wasn't really much of a writer. I'm not sure I still am. You know, I had one of those, I think typical American public school experiences, where, because you're not a problem, they don't really hold you very accountable. And so like you're I got by on my cleverness throughout a lot of my academic career, and it wasn't until I got to graduate school that it suddenly became clear, like I don't really know grammar. I'm writing with enthusiasm, not with style. Fortunately, my wife is a good writer, and I had some other academics colleagues who were willing to spend time and teach me good English. In a funny way, I've been a historian longer than I've been a writer, I guess is what I'm saying. Because it was much more recently, even while into the PhD, that I decided, that I sort of came around to the idea of taking the writing as a craft seriously and things like that. This fuels, by the way, my belief that writing is a skill that can definitely be taught, because it certainly wasn't inherent for me.
Kate Carpenter 3:09
So how has that panned out for you career wise? I mean, if you started taking writing seriously in graduate school, did that translate in your dissertation, your first book?
Alex Wellerstein 3:17
It's been a really interesting aspect of the scholarship. It's made me, and I think coming to it a little later, and maybe it not being so obvious, I see it as a definite skill to learn and to hone. It's made me, a lot of it comes from being a better reader, like really trying to pay attention if, if you read something and it really affects you, what's going on. How do they do that? How do different writers work? One of my favorite writers for this is John McPhee, the journalist, because he has such a style, and it's so John McPhee. You can spot John McPhee from a mile away. And so for me, it's not like, I don't know, the English classes I did have were about, like, finding your voice, and I don't, that doesn't help me very much. For me, it was like, What's he actually doing to make that style? And it's things like sentence length, word choice, paragraph length, things like this. And so I've tried to do that in my own work. I'm not sure I'm always successful. I will say, as a writer, one of the things I appreciate is a good editor, and they go sort of silently, participating in these things and and they get none of the credit, and we get all of the credit. But some of my stuff, all of my stuff that's really well written, has had another person taking it and monkeying with it, and then that causes me to take it and monkey with it a little bit more myself. I think it's made me more deliberate and also more appreciative of the craft. I guess I'll say, if it came easily, I think it would be easy to think of it as like, well, of course, one writes well, and as somebody who did not start writing well until he was well beyond the point in which he ought to be writing well, I'm very appreciative of good writing, and I'm also very appreciative when I write something and I'm like, ooh, that's great. That's a good kicker. That's a good Oh, my God, perfect ending. Good job, you. I, none of it's natural, and I think there's a positive thing to that.
Kate Carpenter 5:08
Well, let's talk about practical stuff. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Alex Wellerstein 5:12
You know that has changed with time in really dramatic ways, and some of that is about changing context. So like, I used to write in coffee shops, and I like coffee shops because I'm the kind of person who needs a little bit of distraction at all times. If I have too much distraction, it's too much. But if, if it's really just like a hermetically sealed bubble, I'll get bored, and then the procrastination or bad habits or whatever kick in, or just my imagination will kick in about something I'm not supposed to be working on, right? And so, like a coffee shop is sort of ideal in that you can people watch, but you don't talk to the people. You're just getting enough stimulation so that you can go from, I'm a little bored, okay, I see something interesting. I'm back to writing, right? But then covid happened, and I stopped going to coffee shops like everybody else. And not only that, this was, we were living in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is very close to Manhattan. And then we moved because, for a variety of reasons, moved to Jersey City, which is a little further away, and like it became much more of an ordeal to go into Manhattan or to go to a coffee shop. And I got used to not going. And I went from going to coffee shops in Manhattan, like once a week to going, like, three times a year, right? Like, like, really dramatic change. And I know we all went through different habit changes, and I got more used to working at home, which was something I could basically not really do before. So now a lot of my writing is at home. Home is usually the kind of place I write. I don't like working in offices. I do, I mean, I do like it, but if I get bored, I seek out other people to talk to. I distract myself. I like coffee shops, but I got out of the habit of going to them. So I think in my ideal world, it would be a coffee shop, but I've, I've, the pandemic, after years of staying at home, trained me basically how to do the equivalent at home. And what that is for me is having three or four places in the house that I can cycle between as I get overly bored or need to change a project or need to that became the sort of habit of doing it. I will say one little writing, crafty thing that I do, that I started doing years ago, when we write academic papers, we usually use like the default word settings, or we change them to whatever the default word settings were in our youth, like so I put a Times New Roman, because I cannot stand these new fonts. And I realized when I did some work with more popular venues that they don't do that a lot of the time. They shrink the margins dramatically because they want to mirror what it's going to look like in a magazine or something like this. And I when I'm writing for that kind of audience, I shrink the margins. I even put it in a font that looks I put it in like, basically like Garamond or something that looks very new yorkery. And I feel like that psychologically changes how I write. My paragraphs get shorter. I can't do these long half page academic paragraphs, because you can see like, oh, that's insane. That looks terrible. And if it's only a three inch column or something, and I think of it less as a DR academic paper draft and more of like, a magazine article. So like, that's the kind of thing. If I'm writing for that kind of audience, if I need to write for academics, I get those margins out. I start using these gigantic paragraphs. So for this book, which was a trade book, I wrote a lot of it with not maybe a fully, you know, magazine style, but with the different margins. And again, this sounds stupid, but my sense anyway, with me is that that 100% changes the way I write, just that little simple tweak to it.
Kate Carpenter 8:50
Okay, so we've talked margins a little bit. What other tools do you use in your writing? You write in Word, I take it?
Alex Wellerstein 8:57
I write in Word, which I know there's other tools, but honestly, I know word the best. I know it's problems the best. I actually had a job before grad school where I had to use Microsoft Word as a desktop publishing software for the job, for a really irregular sized publication. And this was still in the days where every computer word was on, the pagination would be different, and it had to be consistent. And I learned the deep lore of how to use Microsoft Word and how to use sections and how do you how to do all the stuff that like, if you know how to do it, it's actually a pretty powerful program. And if you don't, it's just the source of frustration. It's still a source of frustration. But, yeah, I've tried some of the other things, and honestly, they don't do what I needed to do. I can't believe that Google Docs doesn't let you, like, modify the style settings. Like, I've talked to somebody at Google about this, a friend of mine, and he was like, Oh, we don't care about that. I was like, obviously, right, but you can't do serious, this is my pro tip for any writers who are not doing. Learn how to use the Styles in Word. If you do it, it will make your life 1000 times easier. Invest that time, because then if you do everything in consistent style sheets, and they come back to you and they say, oh, we need to change them. Great, you hit two buttons and it's done. You don't have to redo anything anyway. I use word. I do not use any citation management software. I've tried it, it made me feel like I'm just doing data entry, and it didn't speed me up, and it didn't help me. So one of my other jobs before graduate school, I was a in charge of manually formatting footnotes for a journal. And so I got really good I'm really good at, like, I've memorized Chicago style for anything I need it for. And so I just do straight, you know, raw footnotes and text, which I know there's controversy over that, but honestly, I find that easier and a little meditative, and I don't mind redoing footnotes if I need to. It's like gives me one more excuse to check for stuff I don't trust the machines. The hardest part, from a practice point of view, is I deal with just 1000s and 1000s of pages of PDFs, just gigabytes upon gigabytes of PDFs, finding a way to organize the research so that I'm not spending all of my time organizing the research, but I can still find what I want and cite it and remember where it's from. That's been the challenge in every project. I've been doing it a little differently because I just don't want to take the time that's required to do again, the most recent book had something like 700 footnotes, right? And some of those footnotes have multiple, multiple documents. I don't want to put in that. And of course, that's only a subset of the research. So, like, I if I spent the time to actually enter in, I don't know, 5000 PDFs that would be a really cool database after the fact, but like, I would not be getting any writing done while I was doing it. So that, for me, has been the tension the whole time. It does help that I'm a database programmer. It does help that I'm very computer savvy, so like, I have ideas on how I am not just just winging it, but like, that's the tension that I've struggled with, especially with these books.
Kate Carpenter 12:04
What's your solution? I mean, how are you approaching that organization?
Alex Wellerstein 12:08
No good solution for the most recent book, I used that really famously great product, Microsoft OneNote. Say this with full sarcasm. It's really inadequate in so many ways. But what I wanted was something that would give me a little structure and a lot of formatting flexibility you can just like, format the stuff, like it's word, and then allow me to throw in things really quickly and then get the information back out really quickly, and also being able to highlight my notes and highlight what I'm putting in there, and I just use that. And honestly, like my file system, and so you just have to be very religious about it. Where it's like, I always put the name of the file in the thing, and if there's any question of where it's from, I write that down somewhere so that I can find that. Again, I try to save the files and folders that are somewhat descriptive of either what's in it or where it's from or whatever. But that, to me, has been the most useful compromise I've tried, all the way on the height. You know, what's the most structured version you can do? I've made my own databases. I did that for my dissertation. I made this whole database, and it took like half my life to make the database. And I said, Never again. I'm not going to this is a terrible solution. Don't program your own database. And I've tried everything at the other end, which is like, well, what if I just have one big word file with all my notes in it? That's a that's a mess, right? So what I like about OneNote is it's like, what if you could make a lot of little word files and put them under sort of vague subject headings and then give them a title which, if you format it correctly, is sortable by date, if you do it as, like, year, year, year, month, month, date, date. And so I could make these sort of subject headings and then sort them all for, like, a bunch of documents, and then just go through them all. And that was, is the sort of most useful way. I'm not saying this is the final solution. That's what I ended up on this last that was the compromise place. I would love it if there was a market for database software for historians that was of the kind that I want. My experience is that we are a tiny nothing market, and that all the software for this is either basically citation management or it's like hardcore qualitative research analytics. I don't want that. I want something that's like, the equivalent of taking a bunch of note cards, but is a little bit more organized than that. It would be lovely if I could attach a PDF directly, but, like, I haven't found it.
Kate Carpenter 14:30
I'm deep in the weeds here. Have you used tropy or obsidian? Do you feel like either of those works?
Alex Wellerstein 14:35
I've looked at them both. They both for one reason or the another. They don't handle my workflow, which I don't criticize them for. One thing I did some years ago is I asked all my historian colleagues, what's your workflow? How do you deal with documents? And the answer is, everybody is making it up as they go, and it's very specific to the type of work with the documents they're doing. So like a medievalist does not use documents the same way that I do a modernist like myself. My problem is I have too many documents. And I have, like, multiple of the same document, but they're declassified from different sources, and so I need to be able to, like, cross reference, like, Oh, can I piece together the whole document? I have almost a wealth of documents. My problem is document control and figuring out what's going to end up in the final piece. That's a different problem from somebody who's ringing their whole book out of like one really rich document or something. And so it makes sense that it would be different. But I have tried some of these things. I've written some of my own software for certain types of tasks. So one of my issues with PDFs, you get these PDFs that are maybe you took pictures with your camera, maybe somebody else scanned them. They have too many colors. They're a giant file. I've had these PDFs where you, like, try to manipulate them, and they balloon up to be 100 gigabytes, and your computer barely opens them anymore. So I've made a whole little set of and again, this is not software anybody else can use. It runs on my computer. Sometimes software that will, like, allow me to, like, bake down PDFs and restructure them internally and so that I can OCR them better, because I get so frustrated with some of these kinds of problems, or download things automatically on the internet. I won't say which sites, but there are sites that let you read the books, but you're not supposed to download them, but I want to download the book, so write software that lets me do that. This is where the advantage of being a computer programmer comes in is if I get really frustrated with a task like this, I can just make my own software. But that just now adds another layer of work to my workload, which is like not getting the book done. Yeah, I've tried most things. It's not that they're bad. It's just that how much investment of time do I have to do to get it to work usefully for me, depending on the software, that's either not that much, but it might not do that much, or it's you have to learn a whole new way to think about your work and the sources, and again, anything that makes me feel like I'm doing data entry for a living. Oh my god, right. I do not want to write down every citation in the thing so that I can later pay oh my gosh, right. Like, that's not the fun part of the job at all. I'm not sure the software that would work for me exists, and I'm not sure if it did work for me it would work for anybody else.
Kate Carpenter 17:12
Well, where in all of this research process do you like to start writing?
Alex Wellerstein 17:16
Starting is the hardest, of course. This is one of those pieces of advice that I always give and I'm hard to take, which I always tell people, just got to start writing. You just got to start putting something out there, or else you'll have nothing, and you'll you'll build it up in your head. And once you start, it's pretty easy. I usually start somewhere that feels comfortable, in the sense that I already know what I'm going with a piece. So not usually the beginning, beginning, but somewhere, you know, in this book, I think I probably rewrote chapter three over and over again, and I think I had to rewrite it. I don't know it was three or four, but not one. One was written much later, once I already sort of knew. But there were some of those chapters in the beginning which both were what I used for, like the writing sample for the publisher and things, but were also me trying to find the right voice for the book. This book is a trade press, and so that's a different voice than an academic one. And I wanted to like, put thought into it, and I tried it one way, and I hated it, and I tried it another way, and I hated it, and I tried to edit it, and I hated it, and I ended up writing and rewriting and rewriting and overthinking and then trying to like and then I just ended up redoing it and tried not to think about it too much. And I'm not sure that was the perfect answer, but I found that the more I tried to overthink it, the worse it got, and the more miserable I was. And I had faith that I editors would make it sound a little better if it was terrible, or at least tell me if it was. But that's usually, that's where I start. It's something comfortable, where I know the evidence. I know the narrative. I'm not figuring out while I'm writing later parts of the book I do figure out while I'm writing, in part because, like you're writing and you're generating questions for yourself, or you'll write yourself into a narrative whole and wonder, how do I get out of this? What happens next? Oh, and you'll have to figure that out. But when I start, I try to start with something really familiar, just so I can my experience is that if I get anything started, then it becomes pretty easy to continue, and if I don't, then it builds up in my mind how big this task is going to be, and it also has infinite potential. And it's so miserable when you start to see its potential becoming very well defined anyway, that's usually.
Kate Carpenter 19:22
What does revision look like for you?
Alex Wellerstein 19:24
It varies. It depends on where I am. It depends on the what I've been working on. Some stuff, it's revised as I go. Some stuff. It's a draft. Some stuff. It's because the editor told me to the editor will come back. The Editor comes back and says, You need to cut 10% like, really, that feels arbitrary, but Okay, right? Like that's the magic number every time, and that's when I'll, like have to really do the hard choices of what needs to be here versus what would be nice to have here for cutting. I always write too much. That's my you tell me a word limit. I'll probably write two. Twice as much, and then we'll pare back from there. I always have too much to say. It's my style I, for better or worse, cannot relate to writer's block. It's always the opposite. But that's its own kind of torture, having to cut my technique for that as an aside, is I for like the book, I did this with my first book as well. I make an inventory of how long every chapter is, just page count. And then for each I go through and figure out, okay, if I need to cut 10% what would the idealized normal average for each chapter be? And then how far off of that is each chapter? And then I force each chapter to justify itself. Is this really so important that it's 20% over the over the budget, because if it is fine, there's chapters that are like, well, this issue is really important, and there's no way to do it. Okay, great. But if it's one where I'm thinking, even I don't find this that interesting, that's when I start going through with the knife and just saying, I'll do something else with this. I will say with revision, especially cutting. My philosophy is always nothing is wasted, nothing is gone, put in another file, called out, takes or something. And there will be some excuse for that later. There will be some reason to dredge up that old piece of research or writing. You never know when Don't worry, and it's also part of the process. So you know, it's not you're not even killing your darlings. You're just sort of putting them in jail for a little while, and maybe you'll let them out later.
Kate Carpenter 21:21
I want to ask a little bit more about your sort of publishing trajectory. As you've mentioned, this book is with a trade press. Your first book was with the University Press, the University of Chicago, although I thought of that book as more of like a crossover book. I don't know if the press saw it that way, but that's how I read it. Can you talk a little bit more about that publishing trajectory, how you decided to go with the trade press this time.
Alex Wellerstein 21:42
You're right. You're right that the first one was intended to be crossover enough, and that was deliberate on my part. The press was happy enough to go along with that as well, of course. But some of that's just me and my audience, which I mean, I identify as a historian of science. The history of science is pretty small as a field, and they're interested in a lot of stuff other than nuclear weapons. Shockingly, in fact, very few of them are interested in nuclear weapons. On the whole, I get much more readership from political science, international relations. Those people are much again, this is not against my historian of science colleagues. Those people are much more interested in my work than historians of science are, because they build these sort of theories of how things work out of the history. And so when I show up and say, Actually, the history is more complicated than this, or look, here's a story you didn't know, they're very impressed by this. And so making sure that the work is understandable to them is very important and useful to them. Not just understandable they can understand it, but not just addressing questions that only historians of science find interesting. So that's definitely the first book was, was deliberately crossover in a sense, but it was still an academic book, and it was still a GET ME tenure book, right? So, like, it had to follow certain conventions. I de jargonized. It's not, I'm not a big jargon guy anyway, but the press, even the editor, are like, don't use the word rhetoric. Okay? So we, I found ways to try to express these things that didn't involve defining terms all that often or referencing them. Yeah, the new book is a trade book, totally different. You know, the audience is everyone. It's the audience is people who read books about World War Two and and the atomic bomb, which is not everyone, it would be nice if I think it's a book that lots of people would find interesting beyond just like military history buff types, though, definitely the marketing is trying to make sure those people know that they should read this book. For better and worse, this was very deliberate on my part. I did not want to write this as a academic only book, though, because I thought it was a topic that had not just like a market interest, though, again, it'd be nice to sell some books, but a lot of it is about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Truman's role in that, right? And that is a fundamental part of how Americans think about their history, and it's one that I've both through my research, but also in general, I think the fact that Americans base a lot of their almost like national, historical, even moral identity around that issue like it's how we teach the morality of a massacre in elementary school in High School. It's a very specific kind of moral framework that we use for this, and I think it's fundamentally not a good one. For one thing, I'm not a fan of consequentialism, right? Judge the goodness of an act by how many hypothetical lives you save versus how many you took, or something like that. I think this is a bad moral philosophy, and one that is really conveniently used to justify American atrocities, or at least American killings of civilians. I think that's problematic. But separate from that, it seemed to me that we are at a time where we're ready for another intervention in this area, the last big. The expression of publishing on the atomic bomb was maybe 1520, years ago, about 20 years ago, I would say early, early, 2000s and so it felt like, oh, the culture, the mindset, is right to, like, come in and try and move the needle a little bit on how people think about the atomic bomb. Now, whether I'll be successful or not, I don't know, but, like, this was part of the motivation of it being a trade book, it's part of the motivation of trying to get it out this year. So it's the 80th anniversary still, and of course, that that puts limits on what, how long the book can be, the tone it can use. There's parts of the book, to me feel like I don't know. They're not as they're not written in the same way I would write it academically, and hopefully that works, right? But at the same time, it's also very much trying to persuade with evidence and do the academic thing and be interesting to academics as well as non academics. And that's, I don't know, it's a tricky, a tricky path to wind.
Kate Carpenter 25:54
Was the actual publishing process, did it feel really different than working with the university press?
Alex Wellerstein 25:59
Surprisingly, not, except in the sense that they were more hands on the trade press than the university University Press. They were great. I have no complaints, but they sort of wanted the whole manuscript, and then they wanted me to cut a bunch, and then they did a bunch of copy edits. And they did make me rewrite the university book I had. They made me rewrite the introduction like four times they were like, not good, make it better. And they would say, more of this, less of that, more of that. And finally, I just rewrote it again, and they said it was good enough. So the trade press did not do this. They did more editing. They cut a bunch, and some of it I restored, and some of it I said, Okay, I can see why you wanted to cut this whole section, because it's not as exciting as some of the other sections, but we cannot narratively like one of the areas they were not as interested in, which I get. It's not the most exciting part of the story is like the UN negotiations about international control I get it. That's not the most exciting thing for me. I know from teaching that puts students to sleep, even though it's important and interesting, and I've gotten better at teaching it over the years, because I know that for whatever for whatever reason you start talking about United Nations treaties, and their eyelids go to half mast, and okay, we got to find a better way to frame this. That was a place where I they cut a whole thing and they said, That's not important. I was like, it is important. It doesn't make any sense. We're going to bring this up later. We have to show why this fizzles out. But I agree, we need to get from here to here much quicker. And I went back, and I ended up interpolating it with another set of material, so that it wasn't just all treaty stuff. It was like treaty and then this other thing, a tree. So we'd like zip in and out, so that, like we you have to get a little bit of the treaty stuff, because otherwise, other stuff in the future won't make any sense. It's not the kind of thing you can just sum up with one sentence. And it didn't work. That's not really the point of it. That's the kind of stuff that the trade press was more interested in. And in the end, I think it's a better book from all those editorial interventions. I want to make very clear now they were very good. The trade press people were also more persistent than the Academic Press people. I think the Academic Press people are more used to working with academics and academic schedules, and I had a contract for years before I turned in the manuscript. I was just always behind on the academic one, and they were occasionally would check in, how's it going? I'd be like, well, it's going all right. They say that's good. They didn't really seem to care that much the trade press people care about deadlines, and they will call you on the phone in that terrifying way that I hate answering, and want to know when the next chapter is coming, and I'd have to promise them something, oh, I'll have something by tomorrow, and then I'd have to get to something by tomorrow. And in the end, that was really helpful, because for me, I sort of need somebody demanding for a long term project that I turned it in if it's going to get done. And they did that. They also have better, more. Well, I don't say better. They're, yeah, better. I'm not saying this is a negative thing. They clearly have, like, more investment in marketing the book. And so there's, like, people, there's like, a little team. And like, they, if somebody wants to do a review, they find them and send them the book, and they set things up. They asked me what I think about doing this or doing that and and like that is definitely not the University Press experience. I like the university press a lot, but a lot of the all of that was sort of me on my own type stuff. Interesting to have other people involved with it.
Kate Carpenter 29:13
I asked Alex to read an excerpt from his new book to give us a sense of how we approach the writing. This is Dr. Alex Wellerstein reading from Chapter Eight of The Most Awful Responsibility. For a little context, just before this passage, President Harry Truman has just made a statement to the press announcing the use of the first atomic bomb.
Alex Wellerstein 29:32
The statement (written by others, in Truman’s name) continued, briefly describing the work of making the bomb and the need for continued secrecy. And though Truman read the statement with a neutral expression, in the B-reel from the announcement he can be seen grinning and laughing. This has frequently been pointed to as an indication of callousness on Truman’s part. But consider again my interpretation, that Truman was unaware that Hiroshima was a city. Nothing in the statement he read suggests even for a moment that the bomb had been used on a city, and instead only describes Hiroshima as ‘an important Japanese Army base.’ The statement promised that the bomb would be used on cities, in the future: ‘We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: We shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on the earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.’ Consider how the above would be understood by someone who believed that he had authorized the first use of the atomic bob to be against ‘a purely military’ target, as Truman had written after his meeting with Stimson less than two weeks before: as a promise for what would happen if surrender did not occur, and not a description of what had already begun in part. For a few brief days, Truman’s conscience on the atomic bomb seemed utterly clear. There is an utter lack of defensiveness, and no telling signs that there was anything that needed to be justified. There was not yet any standard narrative about how the use of the atomic bomb was done in order to save lives—rather, as with the press release sent out under Truman’s name, the justification was that Japan had started a war, rejected the ultimatum from Potsdam, and thus reaped the consequences. The question of casualties did not yet come into it. Indeed, other than the initial reports from the Enola Gay and its observing escorts, there was no real sense of what the damage to Hiroshima yet was, as the smoke caused by the bombing obscured the city from aerial observation.
Alex Wellerstein 32:12
You can see, by the way, that if it was up to me, there would be a lot more italicized words in everything I write, because this is how I talk and how I think about it, and I try to be very judicious about when I put that into the text, because for me, every other word is like emphasized. I understand that's not what anybody wants to read. It's also why, again, I don't read the audio book.
Kate Carpenter 32:35
Well, I appreciate your reading of it. What went into writing these paragraphs?
Alex Wellerstein 32:39
So this part of the book is a tricky one, because I'm I'm actually, I'm not just telling the narrative. I find that very easy. It's one of the things I like about writing history is like, there kind of is a narrative, and I'm finding it as one way to think about it. And so like, I'm telling a story, but for these parts of the book, I'm having to engage the reader directly and saying, Remember my argument, remember my interpretation. Imagine that I'm right and how you would read this thing. And I'm trying to get them to read it like I read it, and to read it again, very self consciously through my thing that I've already talked about, this idea that Hiroshima might he might not have known it was a city, and that I find much more tricky. I don't usually like to engage the reader, and I think from a writing perspective, it's trickier because Hello there, fellow reader, right? Like it can feel false, it can feel silly, it can feel like I'm making some kind of weird appeal. And in academic work, we almost never do this kind of thing, or if we do, it's either very stylized or very sparing. So for that one, those pages and those chapters were, that's one the only places where I feel like I have to do that a lot, because I'm having I'm trying to, like, pull the reader through my train of logic. I think the tricky thing about this book, and will determine whether or not people find it persuasive or not, to some degree, it is telling a very different narrative and using a very different interpretation, and I feel this need to constantly make sure that the reader is on the train with me to some degree, because I'm this isn't a topic that people don't already have preconceptions about. If this was something where it was writing about something totally different, I wouldn't feel the need to, sort of like, directly address the reader and directly appeal to them. Like, think about this from this perspective. Note the language. Reader right? Like, I would more trust the reader to see these things, or at least experience them in the story, but for something where I'm really trying to make a very specific argument and be compelling and make them see, like, Okay, we have the interpretation. Read this piece of evidence with the idea that maybe he doesn't understand it's a city. Is there anything in here that would make you think he bombed a city? In fact, all of the language is about how they're going to bomb cities, but they haven't bombed cities. And that's you could see how he would not. He could read a statement like. This and not understand what had actually happened. So for me, that was a very tricky part of this chapter, and I maybe the one before it, or whichever these chapters where I'm trying to, like, make that case, it's not my normal writing voice to say, dear reader. What it is more is my teaching voice. So that is what I try to do, but not sound condescending and not sound like I'm the professor, because, like, that's a different that's a different role, but it is similar to how I teach, much more so than how I usually write.
Kate Carpenter 35:29
I think it's working really well, at least from my perspective as a reader, in part, because, as you say, you know, for all historians have this challenge of trying to remind the reader that our historical actors don't know the future, right? We don't. They don't know what's coming. We have to put ourselves back in that moment where they don't know what's next. And that's even more true when we have something of this scale that we all have been taught so much about, and have, like, really baked in narratives. And so I think it makes a lot of sense that you just end up addressing it really directly did that.
Alex Wellerstein 36:01
Just to piggyback, they don't even know the present, much less the future, right? Like, I mean, that's, that's, that's what a lot of the book is about, is like, they don't even know what's going on that moment, much less exactly what's going to happen the future. I will say, a lot of this kind of writing, I hadn't really thought about it till you asked the question. So thank you. It comes out of my experience in giving papers on this and teaching this in classes, which is to say, I find it relatively easy to persuade people who are in front of me that I'm not lying to them and I'm not trying to pull a fast one on them, and that, like, indeed, this is a strange interpretation, but like, look, I've got evidence. I've got reasons for thinking this, and I'm not some kind of raging ideologue who are trying to make you believe one thing or the other. I'm a professional historian in person. That works pretty well, because, you see, I'm a human. I see you're a human. I talk like a human. I don't talk like I'm on a big pedestal or something like this. I don't have a gigantic academic vocabulary that I'm deploying is very deliberate, right? I'm very and it's also who I am, but it's also like, I'm trying to be relatable, so that you find that you can trust me. And there's been a million studies that show that, like, you can convince people of all sorts of things, person to person. Problem is, how do you scale that with something like writing and getting that right and having that voice work. That's a real struggle for me, because it's not the same medium, not the same idiom. If I put in italics every other word like I speak, it wouldn't work, right? It would look very strange and affected and and just to even go all the way back to your first question, one of the reasons I was not very good writer, I was writing like somebody speaks, which is not the same. And so figuring out the difference between writing and speaking and that this is a different type of language you need to deploy, and you need to approach your sentences differently and your diction differently, especially if you want to be persuasive, this has always been the struggle. So these sections are me trying to again duplicate an in person experience in writing, we'll see how it works.
Kate Carpenter 38:03
I had a particularly hard time picking an excerpt from this book for you to read, and I think it's because the argument is so tightly structured in this book. I mean, almost like a court, you know, you're really establishing one piece of evidence on top of the other, which is great. It makes for a great read and a great book, but then makes it hard to just pull pull a part of it out of context. Was it difficult to write that way? Did you have to do a lot of sort of outlining ahead of time to get that in place? Or did you just understand the argument so well that you could put it together?
Alex Wellerstein 38:35
I had a advisor when I was an undergraduate, Cathryn Carson at UC Berkeley. She's great. She's still there, historian of science, and she was a very, she really wants an argument to fit together, more than any other professor I've ever had. Many historians. They like the big argument. They like to take the big leaps, which I enjoy, too. But Cathryn, like really wants, she would make this face kind of wrinkle her nose at any time something didn't feel like it logically followed, or you were stepping beyond what the evidence could say. I thought that was great. I like the rigor of that. And so she lives in my head. There's, there's like a logical flow being always applied to the argument. And if there's a piece missing, I have to figure out what the piece is. Or if there's something where contradictory information or a contradictory argument, or somebody says, Well, if he didn't know it was a city, why did he stop the fire bombing? Great question. Let's figure that out. Just do a whole chapter on what they did and did not know, or think about the fire bombing, because that's interesting. Having that need has been really valuable for me as a historian. The whole time, my other professors, I have many others who were very helpful. They were always the ones maybe pushing to go beyond just the logical flow, make the argument big, make it interpretive, see what you can get. And so I do think of myself as being a balance of these two forces. And I try to do both. No, I mean, that's kind of how I think about history. Is these tightly wound logical sequences. For better and worse, sometimes you find something and you have to figure it out, or you find out that what you thought was the sequence is not the sequence, but that. That's the part I find pretty straightforward. I did very little outlining. What I do for these things is I go for a long walk, often with my dog, and I think about the chapter that I need to write, and I think about all the things that ought to go in that chapter, and where it ought to start and where it ought to end, and what is the logical pathway that needs to go through. And sometimes there'll be a puzzle, how do you insert this event into this other chapter about other things? And that's a writing problem, right? That's a little puzzle to solve. And once I've done that, once I've got this, like, mental map of it, the outline I do is usually like, literally six words. It'll be like statement. I know what that means at that point, right? Okay, we're gonna go over the statement. We're gonna go over this. We're gonna go over that. I forget what comes next in the chapter, but it's like this, that this, that Berlin airlift, this, that you know, whatever. And then when I sit down to write, I use that just to remember where it's going to go. And occasionally you're writing it out and the logical chain doesn't work. It's missing a piece, or you're missing something. Chronologically, you realize, oh my gosh, I jumped a year. What happened to this issue at that point? And then you have to go back and figure out either what the answer is, or sometimes you just don't have any any sources, and you just have to sort of come up with a thing that says, well, doesn't seem like they worked on this for, you know, admit that, yeah, there's a little, there is a gap there, or restructure, or whatever. And so especially for some of the chapters that were not as well, the early stuff, the Manhattan Project stuff, a lot of that ties into my previous book, the statement stuff. I went over that whole statement thing in the first book endlessly, so I know that story inside and out. The later stuff, especially the Korean War stuff, I've never really worked on the Korean War. I am not that interested in the Korean War. There are a million long books written about the Korean War and every battle and every strategy. And I don't, I don't really care about all that, except for where Truman comes in personally. And so that was the stuff where I would have to make sure I went over and like, Okay, what's going on? All right, so you're going this way, and then that way, and then this happens, and then that happens, and what exactly is happening at this moment. That was the stuff that I would frequently find that I had logic myself into a corner where I just like, didn't really know what was going to happen, and I'd have to go figure that out, and then figure out how the whole flow worked.
Kate Carpenter 42:30
You have called this an atomic biography of Truman, which is a formulation I really like. How did you think about the narrative arc and structure for this book?
Alex Wellerstein 42:39
So when I planned it out, I knew I wanted it to be more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both because that's there's only so much I want to even say about that, but also because, to me, the whole the real payoff of the Hiroshima Nagasaki stuff that I do in the book is what comes later. I had done some academic research on the Hiroshima Nagasaki stuff already, that was already, you know, very academic and papers and published and all that kind of stuff. And in that, I sort of gesture towards the later stuff, the custody dispute, the Korean War stuff, the H bomb stuff, things like that, and some of that, I had an okay idea when I was starting with that arc would be, I knew that the non use of nuclear weapons would be sort of the second climax of the book. There's kind of two, there's the use, and then there's this kind of lull period, and then there's would it be used again? Korea is the other sort of climax. But I didn't really know where that was going to go when I started it. I had a sort of an idea of where it probably was going to go, and I had some sense of how it was going to end. I knew that it's going to end with a contrast with Eisenhower, for example, but some of it was as I was writing it. I was figuring that out. I mean, especially that latter part of the book, figuring out exactly like especially the Korean War stuff, because I did not know that super well when I started it when I started writing the book, not knowing the answer to some of the puzzles. And I just figured, well, I'll figure it out. An answer. One of the big ones in there is, if Truman's so anti bomb, why does he give the military nine nuclear weapons and 1951 why nine? What's going on with this? And I did a bunch a bunch of research on this, and there had been some other writing on this, and I got a bunch of documents, and I ended up with a conclusion that I thought, Oh, what a nice thing. This actually reinforces my original idea, which is, of course, a little suspicious, but it feels honest come by, like, oh, this actually fits into my argument really well in ways I did not anticipate when I started, and as a better story than I anticipated when I started. Like, the reason it's nine is because they destroyed one of the non nuclear assemblies on accident. And like, oh, that's fascinating. So that gives you a whole other little chapter you can write about that one that got blown up and killed the general and all that kind of stuff. And that gives me more things to Okay, I'll get a copy. Copy of the accident report from the you know, we have more, more things we can talk about here. So I had a loose sense of the outline, but I will say there were parts when I was writing it, I'd already been under contract when I was not 100% sure how it was going to resolve. And also, especially, like, how do you end a book like this? I don't, well, the reason I call it atomic biography, is because I'm really not trying to pick up the burden of writing a whole biography of Harry Truman right, born on a farm. I don't care, right? Like that isn't what I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in him other than the bomb. So I don't really want to do a whole thing about the campaign of 48 like this is not interesting to me at all. And I wanted it to be really laser focused on the bomb throughout his presidency. So where do you end it? You can't end it with him dying. That doesn't work. He's not dead by the time the book ends. I was saved by some of these passages from David Lilienthal's journal, who I loved, if anybody is interested in nuclear or anything. David Lilienthal's diaries, which are published are amazing, and they're just one of the best primary sources I've ever had. They the gift that keeps on giving, and they're fun to read. And he's really human. He's the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. At one point, his dog dies. And he's just like, be Reft. And he's like, supposed to be running this major thing. And he's just like, I'm so sad. I'm so sad I cannot go to work. I'm saying, you're like, oh my god, so relatable. It's amazing. But he has a whole section in there during the election of 48 in which he talks about why he basically thinks Truman is misunderstood by everybody, because everybody thinks he's going to lose this election, and Lilienthal thinks he's going to lose two and his own party doesn't like Truman. Is running against two challengers from the Democratic Party, one from the far right, the Dixiecrats, one from the far left, the progressives and the Republicans. This is a recipe for losing an election, and nobody's have nobody likes Harry Truman, and he ends up winning. But Lilienthal writes this really nice discussion of, like, why he thinks Truman is a good guy, even though, you know, is he perfect? Of course not. And I thought, Oh, that's a good way to end a book. Great. We can have a little bit of discussion of, like, Truman's legacy and use this very evocative thing from the time as a springboard to talk about certain things without me either 100% endorsing Lilienthal's view of things, and definitely not doing that thing that biographers do, where they like, say, like, if only Harry Truman was alive today, which is, like, not the right answer, right? That's incorrect. He's not a hero of the book. He's just a guy in the book. But that was the biggest challenge, was figuring out the ending.
Kate Carpenter 47:36
I want to ask a little bit about your other non book projects and how they interact. So you, I mean, I think you say in places that you're maybe best known for one of your digital projects, nuke map, you're also you work on other digital projects that I've been following. And it really always strikes me that programming, working on that sort of development, is a form of writing, too. How do you think about the relationship between those projects and your writing?
Alex Wellerstein 48:03
Yeah, so I've been a programmer longer than I've been a historian. I've been programming. I've been programming for like, 30 years, which is horrifying to say. I started as a child for fun, self taught, never took classes, never did a degree in it. It was like the product of the late 80s, early 90s. Having a computer room in your house, that was a thing. And like, learning that there was like basic installed on all these computers, and you can write programs. And there was a book in my elementary school where it was like basic programs you could copy out of the book by typing into the computer. This is like the deep lore Gandalf, right? This is old time. This was a 486, and I've just been doing that as like something I do for a very long time, well before I got into history of science or history, or anything like this. I don't necessarily think of it as a form of writing. I think of it and maybe this ties back to the logic stuff. For me, programming is about logical flow. I sometimes differentiate, you know, a lot of people don't program. Think it's about math, and I tell people, and it's true, I'm terrible at math. I can't calculate a tip in my head, long division, just if I don't have a machine, it's not going to happen, right? Like, it's not intuitive to me. It's kind of like dyslexia with numbers. It's not good. But programming isn't that at all. Programming is logic, and it's visualizing a chain of logic that will get you to some end that I enjoy a lot. I'm very good with logic, terrible with math, good with logic, and so I like the chain of arguments. And similar to the writing of the book, with the chain of arguments, for me a program, it's like building this giant like, almost pinball machine or mouse trap or something, and then you, like, throw the ball in. And of course, the first 50 times you throw the ball in, it just like, explodes. You didn't do it right, error. But then you get it working, and the ball goes through, and you're like, wow, I actually figured something out. I made a thing. I took logic and I typed it into a keyboard, and now I have a thing. Thing I can show people that's magical to me, even though I know it's not magic, and I find that very fun on a day to day basis. It's like a dopamine button. It's that I like as a confession time. I really like to feel clever. Like I like that more than almost anything in the world, and it's a very short high, like, the minute I'm clever, it doesn't last long, because then it fades, and you're like, Well, how clever Are you? Right? Like, if you were so clever, but it never lasts that long. But programming is like feeling clever on a regular basis, because I have a problem and I have to solve it, and sometimes it comes pretty easy, and I feel clever for that because I have a lot of experience. And sometimes it like, doesn't come easy, and I have to sit there long. Logic it out, and when it works, especially if I do something that feels really clever, I come up with an algorithm that, like I've been doing some projects lately, modeling nuclear fallout as one does, the actual modeling is not that hard, getting a thing, an algorithm that can do the work needed in a fast enough time to run in a web browser. That's hard, that requires a that's that's a different type of optimization, and one that requires knowing what kinds of things are slow for a web browser, what kinds of things are fast for a web browser. And I had an algorithm that I had worked at in my head. I thought it was pretty clever, and it seemed like it worked. And then I was finding problems in which it wasn't working. And then at some point, I had this realization that it would never work, that the logic was wrong, that there were all these cases where it was going to think that it had reached the end, but it had not reached the end, and so it was going to be like partially rendering things. And I just thought this is incorrect way to do it. And I had to go for a long walk. I go for long walks for my ideas and my brain, the unconscious part, figured out a better way to do it, and it turned out that was the correct way to and then, of course, after the fact, this is the problem being self taught, I looked up and turns out like, Oh, this is a well solved problem. And like other people, a real computer scientist would have already known about how to do this kind of like search, basically, but I figured it out from first principles, and that felt pretty good. So that's that thing for me. Now, what does that dovetail into the writing? I think there is something about the logical i really love a good analytical argument, and I love a good figuring out how things fit together. But I will also say it's really different. Writing on a computer does require creativity, but it's not essentially creative in the same way it's a logical creativity, not like an artistic creativity, or something like that. There can be artistic creativity. You have to lay out the user interface, and you want to get certain types of behaviors and not others. And if you're working on something that involves creative content, you have to make that but for me, those are sort of a different that there's sort of a right answer for the programming. There might be 10 right answers, but there's usually a right answer that you have to find, and be clever enough to find. And I enjoy that a lot. There is a relation between that and like nonfiction argumentation, for sure, I do think that the programming has made me pretty my brain is pretty well trained to how to follow through a logical sequence and how to think about it in very abstract terms. I can write a whole sequence for the program essentially in my head without a computer, and be reasonably assured that it might be slightly right. It could be totally wrong, but it'll be interesting why it's wrong. That's a skill just based on experience, right? That's because I program every day.
Kate Carpenter 53:27
I love this. I also love that you don't think about it as related to writing, because, to me, you just gave like, an extended writing metaphor. That's fantastic. What is the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
Kate Carpenter 53:36
I think, in general. And I don't know if I can formulate this as just advice, but reading more makes you a better writer, which is kind of obvious, but I find my students don't do a lot of reading, and I'll confess I didn't do as much reading I did. I did not make reading in every day part of my experience until basically graduate school. And I credit my wife for a lot of this. She's a big reader. She still reads 10 times more than I can read. She can read inhale a whole book on a weekend if she's in the mood for it. And I'm not. That's not the kind of reader I am. But the more I've read, the more attentive I am to language, the more attentive I am to certain ideas. Again, I was always used to I spent a long time where I could get away with just being clever. And so if you're clever, you can kind of half read something and basically understand it and where it's going and where it went, and it's great, but that's not the same thing as actually reading it. And so whenever I talk to people who want to be better writers, I say you have to start by being a better reader, and that means being a frequent reader. So if you are not, you are not reading every single day as if it is just a thing that is part of your life, like breathing and eating, you're not going to improve as fast you have to read every day. It doesn't have to be high literature. I don't read Proust, right? Right now I'm re-reading a James Elroy book for like, the third time. This is not that kind of reading, but any reading is focusing, and it's the and it's the repetition, it's the practice of every single day is getting the brain a little bit better at doing things. So I think that's probably the best The other advice I would give, which I'm not sure if anybody ever gave me this advice, but if you want to be a better writer, you have writer, you have to write more. You just have to write all the time. Also, it's like any other muscle or or skill like it. I've known some people who really believe that, like writing is this inborn trait, and like you either got it or you don't, you're born a writer. And maybe that's true. Maybe there are some people who are so far beyond us that name, my standards are really low, and they probably are, I know, compared to other people, some of my standards are low, and that's fine, but you can get by pretty well. It can be taught. And for me, writing all the time, not just, you know, I spent too much time on Reddit, for example. And part of the reason there is I like to write about history, and that's a very nice little, essentially safe forum for me to do that, and I can try different ways of writing. I'll answer the same question 10 times over years, right? And it's like, okay, well, we'll try it this way, this time. What if we started off this way? That's all just practice, right? And my blogs and things like, all of that gets a little better. I think when I was younger, I sort of assumed that people were just good at things or not good at things, or you learned the right way to do it and you didn't. And at some point, I understood this thing that's really obvious, I think, in retrospect, but what you people are good at is what they're doing every day and what they practice. And if you want to learn a musical instrument, you got to practice it every day. You can't just every once a week, hook it up and try to fake your way through. You gotta do it every day. I'm living in France now. I gotta learn French every day, and it's really slow day to day. It does not feel like I make any progress at all. But I look back on where I was a month or two ago, and I'm like, Oh no. Actually, before getting on this podcast, I was on a talk where they were speaking entirely in French. The entire time as a roundtable, I was not speaking French. My French is not spoken. French is not good enough, but I could understand about 80% of what was being said. That is 100% better. That's 1,000,000% better than where I was even three weeks ago. Would not have been able to sit in an academic forum and listen to people talk, and it's just because I do it every day, that's that's the secret. And so that's my both of those are basically the same answer, but the tying the reading to the writing, and also, you got to write something all the time if you want to see it's got to be like invisible improvements. But then years down the line, it turns out you have all these things you've learned.
Kate Carpenter 57:39
Are there any particular people you read for inspiration?
Alex Wellerstein 57:42
I like it when I if I read something and I go, wow, that's having an effect on me. It doesn't sometimes it's the argument, but often it's like, how is this written? And there are a few people I've read where I go just, geez, I mentioned John McPhee, and he's one where I don't want to write like John McPhee. That's its own voice, but like he conjures up a whole almost emotional state in his writing. How do you do that? That's fascinating, and it's not that hard to figure out. I mean, you look at how he writes, and you say, oh, there's a very distinct thing going on here. It's decipherable. It's very technical in a way you could imagine. I would not be surprised if AI could write like John McPhee. There's a very specific cadence to a John McPhee sentence, and that's fascinating. I read a piece not too long ago, Martin, I don't even know how pronounce his name, Amis, Amis. Martin Amis. I guess it's Martin Amis. Yeah, British. Martin Amis, the French would do and like, the argument is okay, in the piece, it's about nuclear weapons. It's called thinkability. But the writing is like, wow, every paragraph feels like it hits you right in the gut. It almost is too much. It's almost, it's like, too many kickers, too many of those good lines that are at the end. It's just like all kickers, right? And like, I think an editor would be like, you can't have every paragraph end with a kick in the gut. It doesn't work. But still, it's amazing, right, to be able to kick in the gut like that and look at something. And again, I don't agree with everything he says. That's not the point. The point is like, Wow, what a way to say it. So he's, he's definitely someone I would include in that. I will say, and I don't mean this as any shade against I I'm not naming any historians here, and that's not because they don't write well, but I will say fiction is where I find stuff that where the writing jumps out at me often, away it goes, oh my gosh, that's great. There are, there's some non fiction that does that, but it's sometimes fewer and far between. I will say I like the style of some of the older historians, sometimes more than some of the newer ones, like some of those. Richard Hofstadter, another amazing writer, and is his history up to date? No, do I think we should all do things like Richard Hofstadter is not what I'm saying. That he is somebody who is like, really in control of the craft, and that I am impressed by. I'm impressed by people who are really. Really in control of the craft. There are some academics, I will say, who also let me throw out one who's an academic, Donna Haraway, who, I will say, academics have a real love hate relationship with Donna Haraway. And a lot of them don't like her writing at all, or think it's and I think it's, it's kind of amazing. I don't want to write like Donna Haraway, I would not be able to pull that off. And I think maybe some of the problem with how people feel about her writing is because it spawns imitators, and not everybody can do that. But like, I don't know her cyberg manifesto, I reread it recently, and I was like, this is really interesting. This is just like bursting at the seams with ideas and references and clever turns of phrase. And I don't know if I understand it 100% but my God, it's actually really like pyrotechnic, and that's impressive to me. But again, that doesn't mean it's a model. I wouldn't want to try to do that. I would not pull that off.
Kate Carpenter 1:00:59
Fair enough. Before I let you go, you seem to me to be a person who always has a lot of projects ongoing and simmering at various stages. But is there anything you're working on that you want listeners to know about right now?
Alex Wellerstein 1:01:11
Other than my book, the most awful responsibility on sale from Harper Collins, everybody should buy at least 10.
Kate Carpenter 1:01:17
Perfect Christmas present.
Alex Wellerstein 1:01:18
For basically everybody. I mean, you could be done with your Christmas shopping tomorrow is all I'm saying. So of the I have always too many projects. I'm kind of a compulsive project person. Again, I like feeling clever, and starting a project feels more clever than finishing a project. Finishing is the horrible, difficult task. Starting is really fun, infinite potential. I think the one that is the most fun to talk about is I've been working on a video game, and this is with students at the Siemens Institute technology for the past or five years, five years I think, I think we probably started during the pandemic as a remote project. That's really fun, because that is not something I've ever done before, either building a game. But also it's sort of a it's set in 1983 after the nuclear war that didn't happen. It's sort of a mixture of Oregon Trail and choose your own adventure books. And so it's got sort of that kind of both feel and vibe to it. It sort of started initially as more of almost like a simulation project, and it's become much more of a narrative project about people you meet and people who join you, and how do you make a narrative arc, especially one where it's essentially kind of an open world and and that's been really fun on every level, technical level, artistic level, but the writing has been really fun. I've never written fiction before, so this is totally new ground for me. I've written lots of non fiction, and it's really different than right? You know, I always was amazed. How do you come up with new ideas? With history? I just sort of try to find the ideas that are out there and boil them up into something interesting. I don't need to, like invent, because it's a sifting. It's creative, but it's still like you're working with the material that's sort of out there in some way. And fiction is not that, but I've learned a lot, including, like, well, actually, fiction is that too. You need to make a character think about the kind of character it reminds you of. Is there a character from a book? Is there a relative? Is there a person you've met? I've resurrected some people I've since passed away, who I knew as a student in the game and made their whole complicated backstories and narrative arcs, even solving narrative problems and fiction. I'd never done that before, where it's like, I need to motivate them to think this. How do I do that? I've like, worked into a core what's the proper structure for the motivating plot of the game? And talking with friends, talking with my wife, people who are also and they'll have ideas, and I'll say, No, that isn't quite right, but it gives me this other idea, and then you get this, like, clever solution that's not so different from what you were starting with, but it turns out it solves all your narrative problems, like, it actually solves problems you didn't know you had. And I'm like, Oh, that feels really good. I told one of my friends, who's a creative writing instructor and writer this, and he's like, that's what creative writing is. That's what it's about. I was like, about. I was like, Oh, that's fun. That's really neat. So that I've enjoyed this project from a lot of levels, including historical research that goes into it and may turn into other projects and things, but I've really enjoyed it as it's really expanded my repertoire for thinking about narrative into directions. I honestly didn't think I would go in with this career choice and that. So that's been really fun, awesome.
Kate Carpenter 1:04:22
Well, Dr. Alex Wellerstein, it has been a real joy for me to get to talk with you about writing. Thanks so much for coming on.
Alex Wellerstein 1:04:28
I'm really pleased to be here. I think you should get every historian to talk about writing. I will just say it again. I think there's too little deep dive into the craft. I find that fascinating. I know that we all work differently about this, but it also helps, I think, especially for non historians, peel back the curtain a little bit and see that it certainly dispels the idea that all we're doing is sort of chronicling, and it's not. It's a much, it's a humanistic activity at its core, I think this is a really fun podcast that I'm really grateful to be on. Thank you.
Kate Carpenter 1:05:00
Thanks to Dr. Alex Wellerstein for those kind words and for underscoring why we're all here, and thanks to you for being here with us. For show notes, go to draftingthepast.com where you'll find links to the books we talked about, a complete transcript and more, and don't forget to leave me a voicemail with your favorite history book of the year. After all, friends don't let friends write or read boring history.
