Maria Streshinsky is the deputy editor of Mother Jones, and former editor in chief of Pacific Standard, which she launched in 2012, and which won a National Magazine Award for a story she edited in 2014. Before launching Pacific Standard, Streshinsky was the managing editor at the Atlantic in Washington, D.C., where she managed a staff of more than 25 editors, writers, art directors, and interns. In 2009 she won the Atlantic Media Company 2009 Chairman’s Award for editing excellence. Before the Atlantic, Streshinsky spent two years at the U.S. Department of the Interior as a program analyst working on Indian Affairs issues. After graduating from the University of California-Santa Cruz, she began a career in magazine journalism with VIA, the AAA magazine in San Francisco. She has also worked as a freelance writer and editor for various magazines.

Pitch Guidelines

Mother Jones is interested in just about anything that will raise our readers' eyebrows, but for science, we focus especially on these areas: the social and behavioral science that say something about how we live together as humans. We also have a strong interesting in environmental issues.
A Mother Jones story needs to do one of the following things, but it is better if it does three or four:

-Say something about the way we live together

-Surprise a reader

-Be relevant to the state of our society today.

-Examine issues of power

-Include villains

Our readership is nationwide, so please, no local issues unless they have national interest or implications. At the same time, anything that has already been covered extensively in the major national media will probably not work for us, unless you have some new unique angle.

We are looking for short 800 to 1,200 word stories for the front of the book, and feature stories.

Narrative: we love characters (characters that you'd want to hang out with) and we want to run stories by people who have a deft sense of language and style--but who can also make a clear point.

Misconceptions: A lot of people still think Mother Jones is a far left leaning rag. ("Aren't you in the bag for Bernie?") But the truth is, we like to tell deeply reported stories that don't pick their facts out of convenience. We want to tell the truth, and specifically when it comes to science. We believe in smart, proven, thoughtful science--no matter the issue (vaccines, climate, GMOs, etc. )

The 1981 book Getting to Yes popularized the notion that negotiations can have “win-win” outcomes. In his own work, especially his 2014 book Good for You, Great for Me, Prof. Susskind takes those ideas further, arguing that while there is room for advantage within win-win situations, finding it requires studying the other party’s interests closely, to produce new ideas for expanding the value that can then be divvied up.

Susskind’s current research focuses on the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution, especially as applied to the land and sovereignty claims of indigenous peoples in Israel, Canada, the Philippines, the U.S., and Chile; building consensus on local, state, and national adaptive responses to climate change; strategies for promoting renewable energy use; and water diplomacy.

Susskind earned his masters and Ph.D. degrees in urban planning from MIT and joined the faculty in 1971. He teaches six courses on topics including negotiation and dispute resolution, international environmental negotiation, and water diplomacy. In his private practice he has mediated more than 50 disputes related to the siting of controversial facilities,public health and safety standards, development plans and projects, and conflicts among racial and ethnic groups.

He is the director of the Science Impact Collaborative, which seeks better ways to involve a wide range of stakeholders in environmental policy-making and natural resource management; vice chair of the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution; and founder and chief knowledge officer of the Consensus Building Institute, which trains organizations to negotiate and collaborate using a “Mutual Gains” framework developed by the program on negotiation.

Latanya Sweeney is a computer scientist who creates and uses technology to assess and solve societal, political and governance problems, and teaches others how to do the same. She is director of the Data Privacy Lab, which she founded at Carnegie Mellon University and which is now housed at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. She was formerly the Chief Technology Officer (also called the Chief Technologist) at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Her work on data privacy technology was recognized by the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation with the 2014 Louis D. Brandeis Privacy Award and has also won awards from the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Informatics Association and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Sweeney is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and author of more than 100 academic publications and patents. She holds a PhD in computer science from MIT. Twitter: @LatanyaSweeney

Meg Tirrell joined CNBC in April 2014 as a general assignment reporter focusing on biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. She appears on CNBC's Business Day programming, contributes to CNBC.com and is based at the network's global headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prior to joining CNBC, she led coverage of the biotechnology industry for Bloomberg News. She broke news on proxy fights, mergers and acquisitions, and drug development, and wrote features that illuminate how science and business meet. She also contributed to Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Businessweek. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a bachelor's degree in English and music from Wellesley College. Twitter: @megtirrell

M. Mitchell Waldrop was the editorial page editor at Nature magazine from 2008 to 2010, and is currently a features editor at Nature. He earned a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and a master’s in journalism at Wisconsin in 1977. From 1977 to 1980 he was a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News. From 1980 to 1991 he was a senior writer at Science magazine, where he covered physics, space, astronomy, computer science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, psychology, and neuroscience. He was a freelance writer from 1991 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2008; in between he worked in media affairs for the National Science Foundation from 2003 to 2006. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (Walker, 1987), a book about artificial intelligence; Complexity (Simon and Schuster, 1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity; and The Dream Machine (Viking, 2001), a book about the history of computing. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander.

Pitch Guidelines

Sections: News of the Week, and News Features

Nature would like to build relationships with journalists around the world who are interested in telling in-depth stories about science, scientists and the intersection between science and society. Nature’s new and features sections publish agenda-setting, thought-provoking, can’t-put-down reads with strong narratives, compelling characters and rich reporting. They cover every aspect of science except clinical medicine, and are written with our core audience of working research scientists in mind. But they also appeal to a far broader readership. Anyone reading them should feel that they get inside access to science and scientific research: how it works, its challenges and its controversies.