The Dans

February 27, 2026.Reading time 27 minutes.

By Molly Reid
Featured Art: “Frederick” by Denise Loveless

We arrived at Alex’s with our phones tucked discreetly away, each of us carrying something: dip, wine, flowers. I brought my famous seven-layer Jell-O salad. It took all day to make; each of the seven layers had to set before adding another: lime / banana / cherry / grape / strawberry / blueberry / raspberry. But the labor was worth it—translucent rainbow squares that were neither too pretentious nor too generic. Retro. Low in calories.

Alex had laid out games and cocktails. There were candles burning, a record playing—she knew just how to woo us.

We sat around sipping our first drink—something Alex mixed especially for the occasion, a bright green concoction that tasted like candied Christmas trees—catching up on what we’d missed in each other’s lives over the last few months. The lost and gained jobs, the shows and movies we’d binged, the microdosing of mushrooms—or cannabis or K or LSD—the Pilates routines and intermittent fasting. Melissa bought a house—the first of us to own property. A twitch of jealousy moved through us all, though we were enthusiastic in our congratulations. It had a pool.

June 1, 2025.Reading time 25 minutes.

5 things getting attacked by a dog taught me about mid-level B2B sales management

By JB Andre

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, A List of the Reasons of Why I am Getting Into Computers, 2025. Oil pastel, pen and marker on paper, 14″ x 11″.

First I want to start off by saying that I am OK. An ambulance ride, eight stitches, and a lot of painkillers later, I am safely at home with my beautiful, loving family. Shoutout my amazing wife @CamillaSpringer for taking such good care of me after my hospital stay. I also want to take this time to share my gratitude with friends and family who have reached out to wish me a safe recovery—and to those who haven’t: it’s not too late! I have decided to post about this following the success of my more personal article: “What I learned about leadership when my Grandmother died.” To all of my readers, again I thank you for your well-wishes. Please don’t forget to like, share, re-post, and comment. Follow me if you don’t already for more great business content!

Yesterday morning, I was walking my labradoodle puppy (say hi Max!), or, I suppose, we were coming back from a trip to the park, and crossing the parking lot to our apartment (for those of you shocked that we still live in an apartment, check out my article “The risks of homeownership for early-career entrepreneurs”). About halfway across the parking lot, I saw a nasty-looking dog. About 70, 80 pounds, brown, a mutt with a broad, square face like something between a pit and a shepherd, but low to the ground and stocky. I recognized this dog and knew it was trouble (check out my post “Max got attacked by a dog but he’s OK: Resources on pet care and picking an affordable veterinarian”). It was walking up to us slowly, but I have to admit—I ran! Which brings me to my first of five tips.

Down in the Valley

November 22, 2023.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Mary Birnbaum

The Featured Art is “Sea Library” by Greta Delapp

I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.

There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.

Doppel

March 22, 2022.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Max Bell

Selected as winner of the 2021 Fiction Contest by Anthony Marra

Featured Art: King Lake, California by Albert Bierstadt

I hear every word. I know exactly where I am. Dr. Shelley, sitting across from me in her white lab coat in her air-conditioned Westwood office, has told me that I have cancer. The pain in my chest does not signal the cancer’s home but its most recent lodging. Each scan and test reveals that it is too late for any combination of surgery and chemotherapy. I should not have ignored the signs. I delayed it all for too long.

Dr. Shelley pauses after delivering the news, searching my face to deduce how soon she can relay more information, how quickly she should speak, how she should modulate her voice. No speed or timbre seems apt. I do not worry about how she will sound after the silence. Taking offense at anything in this moment, or in any other, suddenly seems a waste of valuable time.

Why have the movies lied when depicting the cancer revelation scene? The world does not dissolve into a warm haze. Everything is clear, sharper than before. It’s as though I am someone with astigmatism who’s found the perfect corrective lenses. The sun strikes through the glass of the office’s wall-to-wall window, accentuating the details of each object in the room. The ridges of the lone paper clip on Dr. Shelley’s desk are as clear as the dotted brushstrokes of the purple-red sunset that casts a shadow over the sand in the reproduction of Lemmen’s Beach at Heist, which hangs in a dark brown frame next to her college degrees. I can read the spines of the books on Dr. Shelley’s shelves, the letters on each embossed in muted gold on leather that looks like tanned human skin.

Essay: Olympia Traveller de Luxe

May 19, 2020.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Robert Long Foreman

The Olympia Traveller de Luxe is not the same thing as the Olympia de Luxe.

They’re similar, sure. They’re both manual typewriters. They look like each other. But if someone said they were the same they’d be lying through their teeth. They’d be capable of anything.

The Olympia Traveller de Luxe does all the things the Olympia de Luxe does, but it’s far more compact. It doesn’t rise high off the table but keeps its head down; it’s three and a quarter inches tall, where the Olympia de Luxe is five and a half.

It can’t have been easy for Olympia’s engineers to take all the functions of the de Luxe and reproduce them in an even smaller model. But they did. And I’ve tried other typewriters of about the same size, like the Smith-Corona Skyriter and the Hermes Rocket. They’re nice, but they’re flawed. The page you’re typing on will slide out of place as you type. The hammers won’t strike hard unless you press hard.

Not so with the Olympia Traveller de Luxe. It’s small, but the letters it makes are bold—which helps convince its user that what they’re writing matters, that someone in the world will care about what’s on that page.

The words you make on it aren’t pixels on a screen but ink on paper. You can see them when the power goes out.

Recovery

October 2, 2019.Reading time 44 minutes.

by Max Bell

Story originally published in New Ohio Review Issue 25

Featured Art: Recharge by Corran Brownlee

Two Weeks

Lisa left when the droid arrived. There was no period of transition, no time for Richard to adjust. After she signed for it, she carried it into the living room, set it down in front of him on the worn shag, and began saying her goodbye. Like the stitches in his hip, she was disappearing, dissolving in front of him. He did not, however, rejoice in the knowledge of her impending absence. Read More