Earlier this year, we asked for your questions for editors of public philosophy venues. We previously shared their answers to your questions on pitching and on working with editors. Today, in the third and last part of series, they talk about minority representation, cultivating an audience, and other matters.
The editors who participated are (in alphabetical order):
Anastasia Berg, The Point
Peter Catapano, The Stone, The New York Times
Sam Haselby, Aeon
Matt Lord, Boston Review
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA
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What are you doing to ensure minority representation in your publications? — Manuela Gomez
Anastasia Berg, The Point:
We place a strong emphasis on bringing a wide range of perspectives to our audience. We invest a lot of time and energy in making sure that the magazine encompasses many different kinds of personal experiences, political stances, and intellectual positions. For us this is never a matter of checking boxes: We’ve come to cultivate the kind of audience that expects us to help them see the world, and those things in it they care about most, through the eyes of all those they must share it with. This feature of the magazine on best display in our symposium section, where several writers respond to a question of the form “What is X for?” In recent issues we’ve asked: “What is America for?” “What is the earth for?” “What are children for?”
On a more practical level, first, we make an effort to actively commission pieces from writers of color whose work catches our attention online, on academic blogs (like the African American Intellectual History Society’s) and in other small magazines.
Second, one of the most effective ways we’ve brought more diverse voices into the magazine is by hiring a diverse editorial staff with a diverse set of interests who can draw on their professional expertise, relationships, and networks to identify new voices from a range of backgrounds, communities, specializations, and ideological persuasions. And finally, we hold college events and run college internship programs in order to reach students of a variety of backgrounds with an interest in public writing and literary magazines: Some of our most promising young writers—Aaron Robertson, John Michael Colón, Rosemarie Ho—have come to us through such efforts.
Peter Catapano, The New York Times:
Throughout our department we actively seek out underrepresented voices and viewpoints. In The Stone, we have published dozens of essays on race, gender, immigration, and other issues at the heart of this underrepresentation. We are in the midst of publishing a series of interviews conducted by George Yancy with scholars and practitioners from the world’s major religions. To me, that’s a wonderful and unexpected take on diversity. But we have to be more proactive than we have in the past. There are systemic realities that can make this mission challenging. Women and people of color are underrepresented in professional philosophy and so the submissions we receive from those precincts reflect that; they are overwhelmingly from white men. Still, it’s part of my job as an editor to make sure work in The Stone reflects the desired balance.
Sam Haselby, Aeon:
I can only speak for myself but I am more concerned about publishing writers from around the world and from outside the two dozen or so institutions that provide a disproportionate representation in public intellectual life.
Matt Lord, Boston Review:
Listening to our readers, building long-term relationships with authors and contributing editors from underrepresented groups, covering a wide range of books and ideas, welcoming unsolicited submissions, and seeking out new voices—not just writers and academics who are already well-established.
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA:
We actively recruit authors from diverse backgrounds, in identity, philosophical topic, and method. This concern is very much on the forefront of our thinking when we recruit authors. We are regularly asking people for ideas for people from underrepresented groups who might be a good fit. We look through conference programs for people from underrepresented groups. When someone from an underrepresented group cannot write for us, we ask for recommendations. We know we can do more, and we would take any constructive feedback for how to improve.
As an autistic philosophy grad student, one consistent piece of advice I keep getting is “Find, choose, and know your audience.” How exactly does finding, choosing, or knowing your audience work? What goes on within that process, especially as it pertains to public philosophy?
Anastasia Berg, The Point:
For any small magazine, “knowing your audience” involves cultivating it—there’s no prefabricated audience. (Unlike academic journals, which tend to appeal to a very targeted group of specialists.) When we first started the magazine, many of our readers were our friends and colleagues, or people like them—graduate students and academics. But it was always our ambition to make the writing in our pages appeal to a much broader group of curious readers, united by a love of humanistic inquiry and great writing—from social workers to tech workers, from publishing types to scientists, from lawyers to welders—and as the magazine has established itself, our audience has begun to resemble this mix.
Peter Catapano, The New York Times:
I am not a proponent of advice like that, mainly because I disagree that in such a disparate, fractured information landscape that such a thing can really be known, and to the extent it can, it seems more limiting than liberating. True, simple distinctions like the one I made above — “remember public philosophy is for general interest readers not specialized academic readers” — are necessary. And I suppose that if you have insights that would be of use or particular interest to a definable group — philosophy basics for disaffected teenagers, people with anxiety or depression, public policymakers, etc. — it makes a lot of sense. It’s a form of specialization that can be immensely effective. But in the realm of mainstream commentary, which is where I work, it seems to me it’s more important for a writer to find and know themselves and their subject first, to find a voice and a frame of mind they can use confidently, then find a platform for their work, and let their audience find them.
Sam Haselby, Aeon:
That is a great question. It’s hard to give a pithy answer but one thing—the truism is wrong—always read the comments.
Matt Lord, Boston Review:
When I hear “know your audience,” I think “know what you can get away with.” You can’t write a technical paper on the semantics of indexicals for Boston Review, but then I doubt you thought you could anyway. To get a sense of what you can get away with—what a publication’s readers expect—you should always read a few pieces published by the venue you’re submitting to. That should give you a model to emulate: the length, the style, the tone, the approach all tell you something about the audience, what the readers and editors are looking for.
Adriel M. Trott, Blog of the APA:
To a certain extent, writing for the Women in Philosophy series means you have already chosen your audience: people who care about issues facing women in the world or in the field. If your audience is the field, the post would be different then if it were the wider world. The topic would help you decide to some extent. The Ask a Senior Woman Philosopher mini-series within our series, for example, is clearly pitched toward members of the field because the content is meant to serve those trying to navigate the field. Other posts might be pitched toward a subset of the wider world. The Title IX changes post that Ann J. Cahill wrote, for example, was pitched toward academics working to improve practices around Title IX after the Trump administration’s rule changes this past spring and so the post assumes some understanding of institutional practices. The most important aspect of this advice, from my perspective, is matching the topic to the audience, and considering how to write about the topic in light of who the audience will be.
So far I have published at public places through colleagues or friends who either gave me the names of editors or recommended me directly. If I want to contact editors myself, how do I find the right person to contact in large organizations like the New York Times, for example?
Peter Catapano, The New York Times: If you’ve gotten that far, you are already doing what you need to do, just more proactively. Research. Crowdsource. Pick brains. The editors you’ve worked with will surely know other editors they’d recommend. If a writer you know published somewhere you want to publish, write them and ask. Every publication and functioning editor has a Twitter account with their basic job duties listed, as well as stories they’ve worked on (My Twitter account is pretty poor, though). Find editors who you think might share your interests or like your work. It’s easier now than it ever was. Nothing is private. You just have to dig.
Aeon no longer accepts unsolicited submissions. How does Aeon choose writers to solicit articles from? — Daniel Moises Tippens
Sam Haselby, Aeon: Different editors have different methods. Some get an idea and look for people working on it while others respond more to what journals, conferences, abstracts, and books tell us people are working on. There’s no one right way.
Do factors other than your judgment of the quality of pitches affect your decision to accept, like prestige of individual/institution, acquaintance with the person pitching, news cycle, etc.? — Barry Lam
Peter Catapano, The New York Times:
That’s a very tough question to answer. At a daily news operation there are dozens of external variables each day/week (logistical, volume of work, overarching editorial needs, limits to bandwidth) that partly determine what we can and cannot accept. So not only does the piece have to be good, it has to arrive at time when all these things fall into place. I think that’s a long way of saying that, yes, news cycle matters.
Prestige, on the other hand, doesn’t matter. Of course, it’s always fun to get a good piece from well-known or highly respected writer. But I wouldn’t accept a subpar piece just because of the writer’s profile. Some of my favorite pieces in The Stone have been from philosophers I was not familiar with, as well as from several who are not professors, or who are not considered philosophers. I think it’s important to have this platform open in that sense, to challenge the idea that only certain select professional philosophers are qualified to engage in philosophical life and activity, and to surprise and delight readers with new voices. Everyone is welcome.
As for “acquaintance with the person pitching”: If I’m acquainted with them professionally, then yes, it is a factor. If I have worked with a writer before and know that writer to be reliable, consistently good and cooperative in the writing/editing process, and we have developed a good working relationship, I’m inclined to work with them again. But that kind of relationship is only established over time, usually years. I certainly don’t favor work from people I know personally and in fact I recuse myself from evaluating submissions from friends (though I almost never get them).
What are the challenges unique to the more theoretical rather than practical areas of philosophy when it comes to writing public philosophy? Clearly, political philosophers, ethicists and social epistemologists have plenty to say about current affairs, but how possible is it for metaphysicians or philosophers of mind, language, or logic to write successful public philosophy? — Alex Fisher
Sam Haselby, Aeon:
It happens all the time at Aeon. Unhooking pieces from a news peg open them up a larger audience too.
Matt Lord, Boston Review:
Public philosophy can mean many things: subjecting popular debates to a distinctive form of philosophical scrutiny; constructing careful arguments for claims of public interest; exploring philosophical problems in issues of the day; analyzing current affairs through the lens and language of the philosophical tradition; bringing philosophical ideas to a wider audience; reporting on the philosophical profession itself. There’s nothing keeping the metaphysicians from doing many of these things. Philosophers don’t have to write about problems in their professional field of expertise.
But even if they did, many could still find plenty to say that would interest a wide readership. Earlier this year we published Ken Taylor’s reflections on artificial intelligence—a subject that matters for all the areas you call more theoretical. Last year we published Tim Maudlin on the metaphysics of causation, a reflection on Judea Pearl’s Book of Why and what Big Data can do. One of our most-read pieces of all time is Ned Block’s analysis of the genes and IQ debate. There’s no shortage of issues in the news that can reward the attention of philosophers working outside ethics and politics.
Whatever you take public philosophy to be, it’s meant for a general audience, and I think that’s the principal challenge for all professional philosophers, no matter their area of expertise (though certainly public philosophy can also be written by people who aren’t professional philosophers). Academia trains us to write for a very small group of very well-trained specialists, often in very peculiar ways. Learning to write for a wider range of readers is hard, but the payoff can be huge. You might get three or four orders of magnitude more readers in a public venue than in an academic journal. If that kind of influence matters to you, it should be incentive enough to try stepping out of your comfort zone. And you don’t have to do it alone: We’re here to help.
Helen De Cruz
Helen De Cruz holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of religion. Recent publications include De Cruz, De Smedt & Schwitzgebel (Eds.) Philosophy through science fiction stories (Bloomsbury, 2021) and De Cruz (Ed. and illustrator). Philosophy illustrated. 42 thought experiments to broaden your mind (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
David V. Johnson
David V. Johnson is the public philosophy editor of the APA Blog and deputy editor of Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is a former philosophy professor turned journalist with more than a decade of experience as an editor and writer. Previously, he was senior opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, where he edited the op-ed section of the news channel’s website. Earlier in his career, he served as online editor at Boston Review and research editor at San Francisco magazine the year it won a National Magazine Award for general excellence. He has written for The New York Times, USA Today, The New Republic, Bookforum, Aeon, Dissent, and The Baffler, among other publications.
