The best way to contact me, Alex Wellerstein, is by e-mail: wellerstein@gmail.com or awellers@stevens.edu (they are both actively checked). In the event of a long delay in a reply, please feel encouraged to send a polite “nudge.” The volume of e-mail that I get can be difficult to deal with on top of my full time responsibilities and life goals, and I am, frankly, just not very good at e-mail anyways (I hate it).
Please do not try to call by telephone (I generally don’t answer the phone at all, especially my official university phone) or try to contact me by getting in touch with the staff at my university (they find getting me to write back just as difficult as you do, I assure you, and I find it unsettling when people try to use them to get messages to me).
You may also find it useful to follow me on Bluesky: @wellerstein.bsky.social, or my blogs: Restricted Data (infrequently updated, general nuclear history) and Doomsday Machines (very frequently updated, on the end of the world).
You may direct all postal correspondence to the following address:
Alex Wellerstein
Stevens Institute of Technology
1 Castle Point Terrace
College of Arts and Letters
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5991
But you should know that for at least 2025-2026, I am living full-time in Paris, France, with only limited visits to the USA, and so any physical mail may not be seen by me for many months or longer at a time.
If you are a high school student trying to contact me about History Day or other such things, be aware that the odds are very low that I will have time to respond unless it is something that can be answered in a single e-mail. In an ideal world I would love to be of help for you, but I live in a perpetual state of being behind on deadlines, and the volume of such requests is just overwhelming.
If all of the above looks discouraging, please interpret this as an artifact of my own psychology, and/or an artifact of my being burned out of several decades of the “always on” nature of modern communication.