Submitting a piece — what we look for

We get more submissions than we publish. Here’s what makes a piece more likely to run. One: a specific moment, not a general argument. ‘Women are interrupted in meetings’ is everyone’s essay; ‘the time my supervisor explained my own research back to me at the all-hands’ is yours. Two: tension you don’t resolve too quickly. The reader doesn’t need a lesson; they need to see what you saw. Three: at least one detail that wasn’t in the headline. Four, for the Raw section: leave the rough edges. We don’t edit the Raw to a sheen. That’s the whole point of it. The submission form is at the bottom of the homepage.