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.
  • Tyler Austin Harper, “There Are No Heroes in a Nuclear War,” 3/17/22
  • Adam Kotsko, “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?,” 2/20/22
• 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. 
  • Jana Mathews, “How Female-Heavy Sex Ratios Are Changing the College Dating Scene,” 10/1/22
  • John Warner, “One Of Higher Ed’s Worst-Kept Secrets Is Out. It’s Even Grimmer Than We Thought,” 9/24/22
  • Lily Geismer, “How the ‘Chill Ivy’ Decided to Give Its Students Absolute Freedom,” 9/2/22
• Pieces that tell good historical stories with a side dish of analysis.
  • Stephen R. Kelly, “How a Long-Lost Soldier’s Survival Story Riveted—and Confounded—‘70s Japan,” 1/31/22
  • Joshua D. Rothman and Benjamin Skolnik, “The Brig Named Uncas,” 12/4/21
  • Lawrence B. Glickman, “How the American Right Claimed Thanksgiving for its Own,” 11/22/21 
• Pieces about new culture (movies, TV, books) that’s derived from historical source material. 
  • Jonathan M. Katz, “Did American Business Leaders Really Plot to Overthrow a President, Like In Amsterdam?,” 10/7/22
  • Sara McDougall and David Perry, “How Historically Accurate Is Matt Damon’s Hideous Mullet in The Last Duel?,” 10/19/21
  • Johanna Winant, “How The Chair Turns a Beloved Literary Classic Inside Out,” 8/25/21
• Arguments about how history is being used in present-day political debates.
  • William Hogeland, “The Cutthroat Historian Brawl Over the 1619 Project Is Only Getting Worse,” 10/30/21
  • Erin L. Thompson, “The Museum of the Bible Forgot That One Commandment,” 10/4/21
• 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.
  • Annie Abrams, “The AP Program Is Broken. You Can Tell, Because Ron DeSantis Loves It,” 9/28/22
  • Priya Satia, “One Tool of ‘Critical Thinking’ That’s Done More Harm Than Good,” 3/30/22
  • Mary Niall Mitchell and Kate Shuster, “What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s A Vivid Example,” 2/10/22
  • Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, “The Newbery Medal is 100. It’s Smuggled Some Real Duds Onto Our Library Shelves,” 1/21/22

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.
  • Julie Phillips, “This Novelist Abandoned Her Toddlers. I Wanted to Know Why,” 4/26/22 (from The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem)
  • Myke Cole, “The Badass Spartan War Story the Far Right Loves the Most Probably Isn’t Even Real,” 9/7/21 (from The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy) 
• 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. 
  • Rebecca Onion, “When Comic Books Were America’s Secret Superpower,” 8/27/21 (interview with Paul Hirsch about Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism)
• 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.
  • Isaac Butler, “Why Marlon Brando’s Streetcar Co-Stars Couldn’t Stand Him,” 2/1/22 (from The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act) 
  • Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Hatchet Nation,” 9/7/21 (from Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition) 

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.)