About

A woman smiles.

Photo by Chia Messina

Hello! I live in Athens, Ohio, and write about culture, history, and ideas for magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. I’m currently a senior editor for Slate.com.

I’d love to see your pitches for Slate. Find details here.

I’ve also written for Aeon Magazine, The New Republic, the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic‘s website, the Washington Post’s Book World, Topic Magazine, the Austin-American Statesman, PBS’ American Experience website, and others. You can see my favorite clips here.

My Slate pieces have been included in The Best American Food Writing (this one) and chosen as a finalist for Washington Monthly’s Kukula Award for book reviewing (this one).

My book, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Here’s the Amazon link. (Read much more about this project here.)

I love to listen to, appear on, and occasionally write about podcasts (especially the chat variety). Here is a Spotify playlist with some of my favorite podcast appearances.

As of fall 2023 I have a home cooking column for the Athens Independent. It is called…Home, Cooking.

I hold a Ph.D and an MA in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in American Studies from Yale University. Publications, CV, and other academic materials are available here.

You can contact me at rebecca.onion(at)slate(dot)com, or @rebeccaonion on Twitter.

The image on this site’s front page is from the Belcher Mosaic Glass Company’s 1886 catalog. I wrote about it on The Vault in 2015.