Blog Jamboree 2026: The Winners

photo cred: my dadThis is the third annual Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree, where people send me their best new blog posts and I reward my favorites with praise and cash.This year, I got 68 submissions from folks all over the world, including visual artists, consultants, high schoolers, economists, engineers, lawyers, and all sorts of pseudonymous internet weirdos.For the first time, I ran all potential winners through Pangram, which is an AI-writing detector.1 So according to the machine (and to my ear), all of the winners are 100% human-written. And here they are:FIRST PLACE ($500): How to Survive Boiling Water by In the blogging biz, when someone dares to actually work on a piece of writing before they publish it—when they bother to cite their sources, check their facts, find a good story to frame their argument, etc.—we call that an “effort post”.“How to Survive Boiling Water” is a quintessential effort post. Cook accidentally drinks some…