We accept unsolicited commentary. Most of it we cannot run. What follows is everything we will ask of you, in order, so that you can decide before you write rather than after.

Exclusivity. Tell us plainly that the piece is not with anyone else. If it is, tell us that instead and we will still read it, but say so first. Nearly every outlet asks this and the reason is not vanity. Two papers running the same argument in the same week is worse for you than for either of them.

Sourcing. Every factual claim needs something a reader can click. Not a note to us — a link in the text. We will confirm what we can and we will not run what we cannot confirm. A submission with no sourcing is not a submission we can evaluate, and this is the single most common reason a good piece does not run.

We will tell you now what this process does, because people find out the hard way. If you source your own piece line by line, you will find errors in it. Yours. Everyone does. The writers we trust most are the ones who write to us about the error before we get to it.

Generative AI. State how you used it. We are not asking you to swear you did not. We are asking for an accurate account, and we will hold you to the same account next time. Our own position is on the Policies page and we do not require yours to match it.

Revisions. If we send you edits, send us back the piece. Not comments on the piece, not answers to our comments — the piece, with the changes in it. We have lost weeks to this. So has every editor we know.

Length and timing. Eight hundred words is a real limit and not an opening position. If your argument is pegged to a date, tell us the date in the first line of your email.

What we can do. We publish monthly. That is twelve issues and a small number of slots in each. Every outlet in this city is in the same position — there are not many of us and there are not many slots, and the constraint is arithmetic before it is judgment. We will decline pieces that are correct, well sourced and better than things we have run. That is not a failure of the process. It is the process.

What we check. Facts, sources, arithmetic, quotations, attribution, the spelling of names, whether the thing you say happened happened, and whether the number you cite is the number in the document you cite it from.

We are good at this. We will catch errors in your piece and we would rather do it before print than after, and the whole apparatus above exists for that purpose and it works.

What we do not check.

Whether the piece asked the right question.

There is no stage for it. It is not in the readback and it is not in the sourcing pass, because a question that is not in a piece produces no claim, and a claim is the unit the entire process operates on. We can verify every sentence you wrote. We have no procedure that looks at the sentence you did not.

We are not announcing a fix. We have thought about it and we do not have one, and a publication that claimed to have one would be describing an editor's instinct and calling it a stage.

We are stating it here because it is the largest thing we know about our own work, and because it seems worse to know it and keep it on the masthead side of the page.

Send it anyway. Address is on the Circulation page.

These guidelines apply to Issue I and will be revised without notice.