How to write for Works in Progress

We are interested in a wide range of article types. Some of our best articles have been journalism about breakthroughs in science and technology, like Stephan Guyenet’s early piece on the effectiveness of GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide, and Hiawatha Bray’s on the many uses for silk.

One of our pieces is a ‘how to’ – Nan Ransohoff’s guide to creating an advance market commitment. Another is a diary: Keller Scholl’s account of his time in a human challenge trial for Zika. 

Some offer small ‘keyhole’ changes that might make significant improvements without a lot of political fuss. John Myers’s case for nuclear federalism is one such example. 

The bulk of our pieces are analytical case studies, which look at a particular phenomenon in great detail and draw out the important lessons of that. This category includes Nick Cowen’s account of how the norms that control crime are formed, using campaigns against drunk driving as a case study; Samuel Watling’s history of British housing shrinkflation in the 1960s and 1970s; Brian Potter’s story of the decline of cut and cover in tunnel building; and Eleanor West and Marko Garlick’s explanation of the massive half-success of upzoning in New Zealand. 

How to pitch us 

If you would like to write a piece for us, please send over 1-3 short paragraphs summarising what your article will claim, or report on, or argue, to wip-pitches@stripe.com.

Your paragraphs should clearly show what idea and/or argument your piece will demonstrate and what core facts you will rely on to support your claims. For example, if you were pitching The Housing Theory of Everything you might write:

Housing is much more important than anyone thinks – and therefore so are housing shortages. Not only does it affect our budgets, because less housing means higher prices and rents, but it has knock-on effects on a huge range of other things. 

It worsens productivity growth because people cannot move towards the best jobs. It lowers innovation because industries cannot cluster close together and enjoy serendipitous collaborations. It raises income and wealth inequality because homeowners enjoy wealth increases while renters do not. It raises regional equality because lower-skilled workers are deterred from migrating and get ‘left behind’. It raises obesity because sprawl means people drive rather than walk – and it worsens the climate for the same reason. It even contributes to falling fertility. 

If we accept this, then tackling housing shortages, by coming up with politically popular and durable mechanisms to deliver more housing, should become one of our top priorities.

Please include some of your best statistics and examples here too, to give us a sense of how rich your piece might be. 

If we think your argument is interesting, important, and possibly true, we will ask you for an article outline of 1-2 pages of bullet points. This should flesh out your argument in a little more detail. In particular it should draw out sources, anecdotes, examples, details, data, and statistics that support various planks of your argument. If we like your outline then we will agree on a deadline for a first draft, and plan to publish the finished piece once both you and we are happy with it.

If you’re interested in writing a piece but don’t think the argument would be suited for a full-length WIP article, still pitch it to us and we will consider running it on Notes on Progress. 

Pieces we would like to commission

We also come up with ideas for which we can’t think of the right author. If you’re keen to write for Works in Progress, but don’t have a clear idea of what your article will be about, here are pieces that we’re hoping someone will write for us:

Homage to Madrid: urbanism in Spain. In the twentieth century, almost all countries stopped building dense, transit-oriented urbanism at scale. Perhaps the most striking exception is Spain. Spanish cities have expanded enormously over the last century while much in common urbanistically with the cities of the nineteenth century. How did this happen? Why did it happen in Spain, in contrast to virtually everywhere else?

Why Ethiopia escaped colonization for so long. Only ten countries escaped European (including Turkish) colonization: Bhutan, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Japan, Liberia, Mongolia, Nepal, South Korea, Thailand, and Tonga. Of these, Thailand, Japan, and Ethiopia are of special interest. We have an article on Thailand coming, and we’d like to do one about Japan as well. But how did Ethiopia remain uncolonized until 1937?

Ending the environmental impact assessment. Environmental impact assessments have become a major barrier to action in most developed countries. It is far from clear that their benefits outweigh their costs, but even if they do, there may be a better way of achieving their intended aims. What can we do to get rid of EIAs, or significantly reduce their costs, and has anywhere successfully done it?

Bill Clinton’s civil service reform. Government efficiency, fewer managers, a smaller workforce and less red-tape were all a priority for the Clinton administration. Did it work? What did they do and how did they do it? Does it have any legacy today, or historical parallels? (Here is testimony from the someone who led part of it.)

Land reclamation. Historically, countries have drained swamps, built artificial islands, and dammed water to expand their territory. But it seems like this has all but stopped. Land reclamation involves complex feats of engineering, urban planning, and political maneuvering. We’re interested in publishing anything about this – from a granular look at a specific project of sufficient scale, to a piece about what political, economic, and scientific conditions allow such projects to happen, to a concrete proposal for making land reclamation projects viable in high-value places

Cookbook approach for special economic zones. A practical guide to establishing and optimizing special economic zones, from Freedom City to Próspera in Honduras. If you set out to build one, what should and shouldn’t you do? How do you get around the risk of expropriation? What conditions are needed for it to work?

Gigantic neo-trad Indian temples. India is going through a wave of monument–building, blending traditional styles with modern engineering. For examples of this abroad, see this. What’s driving this phenomenon? How are these massive structures being financed and built, and what does it tell us about the cost of traditional ornamented building?

Politically viable tax reforms. Changing what we tax can be as effective at driving economic growth as changing how much we tax, and in principle could be designed to have fewer political trade-offs than tax cuts have, since they are revenue-neutral or -positive. There are a number of cases where bad taxes exist that could be replaced by something that was paid by roughly the same people in similar amounts, but in ways that distorted behaviour much less – for example, shifting capital taxes to progressive consumption taxation, or shifting transaction taxes like Australia and Britain’s stamp duty land tax to an ongoing property tax. In other cases, removing exemptions – such as exemptions to VAT – would be very valuable.

We would welcome pieces on both how one of these could be done in a politically achievable way, and case studies of how difficult tax reforms have been done in the past.

Everyday progress. We are always interested in articles about how simple things in the background of our lives have made things better, like our articles about polyester, drip filter coffee, the materials we use to build roads, and the life of Matt Clancy.

Why exactly do particular religions have high fertility? Some groups like the Old Order Amish and Hasidic Jews have much higher fertility than the broader societies that host them. What exactly explains the persistent fertility differences across religious communities, even when they live amongst non-believers? Could we adopt any of these traits without sacrificing other important values we have?

Lessons from fracking. The expansion of fracking is one of the most important energy stories of this century so far. What technological and economic factors made this possible? What general lessons can we learn?

Using mechanism design to fix society’s problems. There is a field of economics called mechanism design, which Roger Myerson, Leonid Hurwicz, and Eric Maskin won the Nobel Prize in 2007 for inventing. It uses economic reasoning (including game theory) to design policy mechanisms that, for example, raise the largest possible sum from an auction. How could it be applied to a whole range of other societal problems?

How did they approve Waymo? Self-driving cars were approved in San Francisco, a city sometimes seen as being risk-averse and somewhat hostile to the tech sector. And they lack approvals in many other cities. How did Waymo succeed in getting permission in San Francisco, and what are the regulatory and economic barriers to self-driving cars being approved and deployed in other cities across America and the world?

Drones and the future of war. Weaponized drones mean everyday citizens have the ability to operate rudimentary guided missiles. How should we think about the risks? What should states do to prepare?

We’d also like to run pieces about battlefield deployments of military drones and what they mean for the future of military strategy, and in particular cases of countries that have built successful military drone industries.

New Zealand’s curious approach to insurance. There is no requirement to buy car insurance or many other forms of insurance in New Zealand, because it has a mandatory, publicly-run no-fault accidental injury compensation scheme (the Accident Compensation Corporation). This is a very weird setup. How does it work? Why does only New Zealand do it? Why don’t moral hazard problems destroy the system?

A history of expanding Manhattan. In particular we are interested in expanding Manhattan, as Mayor Eric Adams reportedly would like to do. What can we learn from historical failures to expand Manhattan’s boundaries? Why have past and present efforts to grow New York City’s landmass fallen short? We’re interested in the engineering, political, and economic barriers that prevented these expansion projects from succeeding, as well as the reasons – if they exist – for why now might be different.

Japanese fertility. Japan is, perhaps, the most mainstream example of a low-fertility country. But, while they were one of the first countries to have a substantially below replacement birth rate, the rest of East Asia has rapidly ‘caught up’, leaving Japan as the most fecund country in the region. How did this happen and what can we learn from them?

Plant breeding. Most of the plants we eat today are completely unrecognizable from their distant relatives before human cultivation. We’d like to read the multi-millenia story of a plant from when humans first started eating it to its modern form.

How much fracking is really viable in Europe? Projections of how much natural gas could be fracked in Europe range from ‘almost nothing’ to ‘essentially unlimited amounts’, depending on who you listen to. We would appreciate a hard-headed assessment of the different estimates and a guide to thinking about what Europe could do, if anything, to emulate America’s fracking success.

Horse breeding. There is a lot of money in breeding elite racing horses. We presume, therefore, that there is a wealth of interesting information about horse genetics and how we created the elite racing horses of today. We’d like to read a story on how horses have gotten better (or worse) over time.

Transmission towers. Some scenarios for a mass shift to renewable energy involve building huge solar arrays in sunny parts of the world and transporting the electricity across great distances to darker places, over land and under the sea. How viable is this? What progress are we making in the technology and cost of electricity transmission?

Going big on geothermal energy. Geothermal energy is an exciting prospect because it has none of the intermittency that wind and solar power both have, and is not as poorly regulated as nuclear is. We have already written about geothermal twice – one on the field overall, and another time on building local heat networks for home heating. We would like other pitches here, especially a piece on what it would be like for a country that is somewhat well-placed to do geothermal – but not Iceland-level lucky – to ‘go big’ on it in the near future.

Around the world in 80 days? Is it possible to go around the world in 80 days using the path in the novel and means of transportation? What would be the barriers? We are open to creative and atypical approaches to tackling this article.

France’s fertility. France was the first country to experience falling birth rates but now has the highest birth rate in Europe, after a turnaround in the 1980s and 1990s. This does not appear to just be down to France’s Muslim population, as is often assumed. What is France getting right?

Successful childcare reforms. Childcare may be one of the most difficult areas to deliver supply-increasing reforms, because people are understandably risk averse about what happens to their kids. Has anywhere managed to do it, and, if so, how?

Chiral Life. Chirality is a chemical property. Some molecules can be made up of the same atoms and the same structure but exhibit different chemical properties because they are mirror images of each other (the same way your hands have the same number of fingers, in the same places, but are not totally substitutable). All life is built on one chiral system. What would it look like if we could build chiral life? We’re interested in pieces on chirality, both general and specific, talking about the upsides and downsides.

Marriage and dating customs unlike our own. People have courted and settled down in a number of different ways across time, place, and social class. What are the right models to understand upstream causes and downstream consequences? How have these customs impacted and reflected the cultures they were a part of? We’re interested in general arguments and specific cases.

Autonomous weapons. It seems likely that autonomous weapons will soon be ubiquitous. We’d like to commission a piece with a strong framework, argument or historical case that will help us make sense of these changes. What analogies are relevant? How should states prepare for this reality? What should we expect?

What caused Europe’s growth miracle and why did it break? Europe experienced its fastest economic growth in the three decades following World War II. What combination of factors best explains this transformation? More importantly, what is our strongest theory for why it eventually slowed down?

Upzoning in Paris. France has a successful and powerful YIMBY movement. Many communes of the Paris region are adding density rapidly, and the French Government is promoting densification nationally. But there is almost no awareness of this movement internationally, and Anglo-American debates around density usually proceed in complete ignorance of it. We want to commission a piece telling the story of this movement for an international audience, covering its methods, its successes, and its future.

How the Meiji Restoration bought in elites. Japanese samurai did not just accede to the total destruction of their way of life and status in society, but actively fought for it. How did the architects of the Meiji Restoration convince samurai to accept change?