You should write for Palladium. Our editorial process will polish your work to be the best it can be, and deliver it to the most discerning audiences in the Western world. It will also make you a stronger writer and thinker. Many thinkers, writers, and journalists have launched their careers and found their public voice through Palladium. If you’re interested, get in touch with an editor to discuss your ideas.

Before working with us, you should read this document to understand our requirements, how we edit, and why we do what we do. You should also be familiar with Palladium’s past work and general interest areas.

Our Editorial Process and Standards

For commissioned articles, our editorial process starts with a discussion to establish an article idea that we are both interested in pursuing. We will ideally decide on a clear research direction or journalistic mission, key questions to answer, a provisional sketch of what we think those answers are, and possibly a rough outline. After initial research, thinking, experimental writing, and any interviews or on-the-ground work, we will take aim at a full draft. 

For those who haven’t previously written for Palladium, we recommend either submitting a detailed pitch or a full first draft. We’ll take a look at your submission and decide whether or not your article would be a good fit for Palladium publication.

As you send in rough drafts, we may do multiple rounds of feedback and writing to get a draft up to specification before we do final editing. There is a straightforward recipe for a good Palladium article:

• Format:
  • Email your draft to editors@palladiummag.com in plain text or Google/Microsoft Docs format.
  • Stay within 4,000 words maximum.
  • Double-check sentence completeness, grammar, and formatting.
  • When submitting a draft, make sure you would be proud to publish the essay as is.
  • Work any footnotes into the body text of the article, and cite sources via hyperlink.

• Thesis:
  • Argue for a thesis relevant to the Governance Futurism project.
  • Start with a hook that draws the reader in and gives them a sense of your thesis.
  • Either convince us of something we didn’t know or explain it better.
  • Avoid any topic or example that won’t be relevant in a decade.
  • Argue for views or plans that you, we, and our audience should act on.
  • Avoid assuming the general public as an actor or political agent.

• Argument:
  • Assume your reader is smarter than you and can’t be deceived.
  • Use real examples, not just arguments, to make your points.
  • Tell stories with concrete characters, scenes, material mechanisms, and events.
  • Avoid abstractions like “neoliberalism,” “democracy,” or “wokeism.”
  • Show, don’t tell. We should see the point you’re making ourselves.
  • Omit obvious arguments. Focus argumentation on your boldest claims.
  • Do your research, but omit most of it.
  • Directly state your view. Avoid hedging, suggestion, and over-argumentation.

• Language:
  • Avoid polemics, snark, political signposting, and moralizing language.
  • Write in a straightforward, composed, authoritative manner.
  • Avoid jargon and specialized knowledge.
  • Write in good non-academic English.
  • Write to be understood by smart teenagers, subject matter experts, and an educated general audience.

• Artificial Intelligence:
  • We do not accept submissions that have used generative AI in the drafting or copyediting process.
  • Every word of your submission should be written directly by you or by a quoted source.
  • The use of AI for research, brainstorming, red-teaming, or general feedback is acceptable.

We can’t edit your article to our standard of quality if it doesn’t meet the above requirements. We will have to send your draft back for rework, often multiple times, if it doesn’t conform to our standards. If we determine that your draft has been composed with AI, we will ask for it to be rewritten.

Our final editing process could include anything from rewriting and deleting whole paragraphs to lighter copy editing. Our objective is to craft the best possible article with you; many writers find that their own thinking and writing skills are sharpened by going through the editorial process.

We pay for all published articles. Specific rates vary depending on research difficulty and writer prominence. We only fund research and travel for proven writers we have worked with before.

Why We Write

Palladium’s purpose is to help navigate the serious political and governance challenges of the twenty-first century, especially in the United States and its immediate sphere of influence.

We recognize an ongoing multi-scale crisis in U.S. political institutions and elite formation. We expect large-scale paradigm changes in our institutions of power and elite worldview within the next few decades. Our job is to equip an ambitious, public-spirited audience with the intellectual tools to navigate that crisis and build a functional and thriving society. That means both big-picture holistic understanding and local functionality-creation are vastly more valuable than engagement with the political swamp or with popular ideology.

Palladium is at the cutting edge. We are not working within any established ideological paradigm or faction. In fact, we actively reject them and consider ideology to be part of the problem. We instead aim to synthesize and advance the best available understanding of reality, wherever it exists or is being developed. This means we strive for an unusual combination of tolerance for many different perspectives, and a discipline that requires useful material insight above all else.

We have our own perspective about what counts as useful and important. We believe that the key challenge of the early twenty-first century is to understand and then build the institutions and human networks of a thriving society directly, without dependence on existing power structures, ideologies, or public spectacle. We wish to inspire our audience to take this path, and give them the tools necessary to do so.

This means we are most interested in practical insight into elite politics and functional institutions, our material problems and opportunities, and the moral formation necessary to act on these. All articles should contribute to this purpose.

In service of this goal, we strive to publish long-form thoughtful articles that are some mixture of the following archetypes:

• Navigation-grade journalism. We send our correspondents all over the world and delight in in-depth research to really understand the areas we cover. Our purpose in this is to provide the reader with information they would need to practically interact with the world.
• Orienting theory. We put a great deal of thought as editors and with our correspondents into the generalized principles we draw from our work. We want to orient ourselves and our readers to be able to contextualize information and act effectively in the world.
• Inspirational visions. We are very interested in visionary plans and goals that we and our audience can act on. We aim to inspire our audience to create the kind of worlds and lives they actually want to live in.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and publishing your contributions.