Editing
Here are some types of pitches for our Human Interest, Culture, and History sections that I’d love to receive for Slate.
I’m looking to commission pieces that make connections across culture, life, history, and politics, and that feel urgent, necessary, and sometimes fun. Here are some examples of pieces I’ve edited that fit this bill.
- Intellectual genealogies of ideas that are driving The Discourse.
- Personal essays that use an experience as a “way in” to talk about something bigger in culture, history, or politics.
- Travis Nichols, “My Epic Struggle to Get My Son to Swing At One Single Youth-Baseball Pitch”, 10/8/22
- Jesse S. Summers, “What I’ve Learned From Having Cancer Is Nothing,” 8/29/22
- Jenn Lyons, “My Mother’s Abortion Saved My Life,” 6/6/22
- Nancy Reddy, “I Was Promised That the ‘Golden Hour’ Would Make Me a Mom,” 4/7/22
- Lucas Mann, “I Think I Know Why Men Don’t Talk About Parental Leave,” 1/26/22
- Fresh, strongly-argued coverage of what’s going on in American higher ed.
- Pieces that tell good historical stories with a side dish of analysis.
- Pieces about new culture (movies, TV, books) that’s derived from historical source material.
- Arguments about how history is being used in present-day political debates.
- Critically-minded, argumentative reviews of new works of history (books, exhibits, documentaries, etc).
- Paul M. Renfro, “The Historians Take a First Crack at Donald J. Trump,” 4/12/22 (review of The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer)
- Joseph Adelman, “It’s Finally Ben Franklin’s Time in the Sun,” 4/4/22 (review of Ken Burns’ documentary,
“Benjamin Franklin,” and Michael Meyer’s book, Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet)
- Richard Kreitner, “Imagining a ‘Second Civil War’ is a Lost Cause,” 1/17/22 (review of Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future)
- Pieces that look at how history and the humanities are taught, using a narrowed-down lens to make a specific point.
If you have a book coming out and are trying to figure out how to pitch parts of it to me, the following is for you.
- Try pitching one specific story from your research.
- If you’ve made an archival discovery in the course of your research, try pitching a piece that’s just about that document, or set of documents—even better if the documents are visually intriguing and can be reproduced on our pages.
- We do run excerpts sometimes (at 1,000 – max 3,000 words). We’ve had good luck with excerpts that tell a single story, or have a strong narrative to them.
And…here are some things I can do without:
- Pieces built around the argument that it’s important to learn and study history. Slate readers are generally already on board; you can assume this is a given.
- Pieces that reflect on a bit of history that seems similar to something in the news, but doesn’t have a direct connection to it. If you have expertise about a bit of history that relates to a story in the news, please do go ahead and pitch that, but the connection has to be something clearly relevant. The Trump and COVID eras have left us pretty sensitive to strained historical analogies! I always try to think about roots, rather than echoes.
- Pieces that rest on the revelation of a “hidden history” or “discovered history” that’s not actually new. If an archivist had seen and cataloged a document, it wasn’t “unearthed”….if a non-white group is very familiar with a story, it wasn’t “unknown.”
- Anniversary-pegged pitches, with some exceptions. Readers don’t really seem to care, unless the anniversary is huge and getting some discussion beyond your pitch.
Nuts and bolts:
- It’s rebecca dot onion at slate dot com.
- Send only a pitch, not the full piece, so that I can have a sense of what your argument is, and help you shape the piece as you write it.
- Slate has a good Pitch Guide with more details about the format (plus a list of other editors and their areas of interest).
- If something is time-sensitive (i.e., pegged to news that you imagine will drop out of the cycle quickly), do put that in the subject line of your email.
- We usually run pieces between 1000-2000 words.
- We can pay $200, or more, depending on the piece’s level of difficulty.
- If you don’t hear back from me in 10 days’ time, please assume I’ve passed on the pitch.
(This page was last updated in October 2022.)