Editing

Here are some types of pitches for our Life, 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. (This page was last updated in May 2023.) 

Intellectual genealogies of ideas that are driving The Discourse.

• Daegan Miller, “One Of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn,” 11/5/22
• Tyler Austin Harper, “There Are No Heroes in a Nuclear War,” 3/17/22
• Adam Kotsko, “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?,” 2/20/22

Fresh, strongly-argued coverage of what’s going on in American higher ed. 

• Jon Boeckenstedt, “The Sooner We Start Thinking of the College Board as a Business, the Better,” 2/14/23
• 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 look at how 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

Arguments about how history is being used in present-day political debates.

• Matt Christman, “Why Does the Right-Wing Scion of a Failed European Dynasty Want to Tell Us How to Live?,” 4/21/23 (review of The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times, by Eduard Habsburg)
• 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).

• Daniel Kraft, “The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of World War II,” 11/22/22 (review of Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge, by Dina Porat)
• 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) 
• 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 tell good historical stories with a side dish of analysis.

• Flora Cassen, “My Great-Uncle, the Kapo,” 11/29/22
• 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 

Smart pieces about politics and culture online. 

• Phil Christman, “For Years, the Left Has Laughed at Rod Dreher. Is That Over Now?,” 4/16/23
• Luke Winkie, “MAGA Twitter Has Fully Lost It,” 2/16/23
• Ben Mathis-Lilley, “Why Every Photo of Jair Bolsonaro Has the Internet Peeing Its Pants,” 1/6/23

Personal essays that use an experience as a “way in” to talk about something bigger.

• Emily DeMaio Newton, “I Was Raised in the Only ‘Unproblematic’ Religion. Here’s How That Went,” 2/21/23
• 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
• Lucas Mann, “I Think I Know Why Men Don’t Talk About Parental Leave,” 1/26/22

Pieces about parenting that combine personal narratives with reporting, science, and history.

• Ian Bardenstein, “We Couldn’t Decide On Our Baby’s Last Name. Then I Had A Crazy Idea,” 1/15/23
• Lucy Morris, “My Exhausted Year in Instagram’s Anti-Sleep-Training Rabbit Hole,” 11/14/22
• Nancy Reddy, “I Was Promised That the ‘Golden Hour’ Would Make Me a Mom,” 4/7/22

And…  here are the nuts and bolts: 

• It’s rebecca dot onion at slate dot com.
• 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.