Pitches wanted (culture, politics, criticism) (worldwide) | $200-$300 per article

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: CURRENT AFFAIRS

Current Affairs is looking for freelance submissions for non-fiction writing. Pay is $200 for online, $300 for print.

Pitches for articles, amusements, and illustrator portfolios may be submitted here. Emailed pitches will be ignored. Please consider reviewing our Writers Guide in advance.

CONTENT GUIDELINES

Form

• We have two publication formats: our print edition and our online edition. Main articles for the print edition are usually around 3000-4500 words, while online articles are usually 1200-2400 words. (The print edition also contains lots of boxes, sidebars, etc. with short interstitial pieces, which can run anywhere from 100-500 words. Please check out the magazine to get a sense for what these are usually like! We love to receive ideas for games, puzzles, satirical advertisements, and other bits and pieces.)
• We aim to make Current Affairs accessible and enjoyable to our many millions of readers. If you are writing on a specialist subject, please write as if you were addressing a reader who is only passingly familiar with your topic. Articles should be able to be read and enjoyed by any literate person with a high school education. We don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t write about complex ideas and arguments. This isn’t Newsweek, after all: we’re not writing for children. But please try to express your thoughts in clear, understandable language with lots of examples.

Substance

• Current Affairs greatly values sincerity, compassion, and conviction. Please write about issues you genuinely care about. We are not overly fond of “hot takes” or contrarianism. (The difference between contrarianism and genuine criticism is that the contrarian opposes things because they enjoy opposing things, rather than out of true conviction. We publish lots of critique, but it should serve a purpose.)
• We are much more likely to accept pieces that contain original research and reporting.
• Submissions need not be humorous, though humor is certainly encouraged. Be warned, however, that if your jokes are not funny, we will remove them and replace them with our own jokes. We will also occasionally insert jokes where once there were none.
• General themes that tend to produce good Current Affairs articles are:Critiques of bad premises and arguments that are infecting current debates.
  Strategies and suggestions for solving contemporary problems.
  Discussions of types of human suffering that people ought to care more about than they presently do.
  Merciless verbal thrashings of bad writers, thinkers, commentators, and other such entities.
  
• If the general thrust of your article is “Guess What? This Thing That Everyone Likes Is Actually Terrible,” please devote 50 percent of your wordcount to practical proposals on how to improve the thing, or discussion of an existing alternative that you believe is superior.
• We also like book reviews! But it’s probably best not to pick a book on a niche discipline or debate, unless you’re confident that you can contextualize the subject matter in a relevant and engaging way for the uninitiated. Book reviews are among the trickiest pieces to write, because they require you to make readers interested in a book they might have no intention of reading. Best strategy: do not make it about the book, make it about the thing that the book is about, and use the book solely as a jumping-off point for an independently good essay about the
• thing. Above all else, whether writing about a book, a movie, or a TV show, it should be compelling and understandable to people who have never read the book or watched the media in question.
• We rarely print fiction, but are happy to do so when the right piece comes along. Satirical or speculative fiction is a general plus..
• Poetry is a tough sell (the editor-in-chief is a philistine), but it may still be considered as long as it’s an appropriate match for our tone and content.
• Twitter-based controversies are not suitable subjects for articles under any circumstances.

Open to international writers? Yes!

Read the full writers' guide here: https://images.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/Writers-Guide.pdf

CONTACT INFORMATION:

• Submissions: Via the webform
• Website: https://www.currentaffairs.org/

TO HELP YOU CRAFT YOUR PITCH:

• Learn more about the publication: Current Affairs is a magazine of culture, politics, and the absurd. It is a refreshing antidote to political media, bringing a sharp critical eye to the absurdities of modern American life, while providing a fresh set of voices amid the desiccated wasteland of contemporary media. More information here.
• Read through its selection of recent articles/stories, categorized into: Interviews, Frivolity, Economics, Immigration, Moral Harangue, Media
• Review the submission guidelines here.
• Check out our collection of pitch excerpts on this page and find more sample pitches at The Open Notebook Database.
• Do not forget to end your pitch with (1) a short introduction about yourself; (2) a few lines highlighting your writing experience, relevant credentials and publication credits; and (3) links to your strongest work or portfolio, and online profile.

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