Topic guidelines
How we pick what to explain.
Anyone can send in a topic. Not every topic becomes an explainer. This page says plainly how the choice gets made, so you are not guessing.
The three tests
A topic has to pass all three.
1. There is a lot of confident noise, and the truth is genuinely hard to pin down. If a clear, honest answer already exists in one search, you do not need us. We go where the loud answers disagree with each other.
2. It touches something real for you. Your money, your health, your vote, your time, or what your kids inherit. Interesting is not enough. It has to land somewhere in your actual life.
3. There is an official record we can check it against. A roll call, a filing, a study, a transcript, a budget line. This is the one that kills the most requests. If the honest answer is "nobody can know yet," we would rather say that in one sentence than stretch it into an article and pretend.
Send these
What makes a good request.
- A claim you keep seeing and cannot tell whether it is true.
- A word everyone uses and nobody defines.
- A decision in front of you where the advice contradicts itself.
- A number that gets repeated everywhere with no source attached.
- Something you were told to just accept, and you want to see the evidence yourself.
The more specific, the better. "Explain inflation" is a library. "Why does my electric bill keep going up when they say inflation is down" is an explainer.
Do these yourself
Three things the free tools answer faster than we can.
These are not lesser questions. They are just already solved, and you will have your answer in about a minute instead of waiting on us.
- "What does this dense text actually say?" Paste it into Dumb It Down.
- "What was said in this video?" Run it through the web transcriber.
- "What is in this file?" Use the File Explainer.
And if you want to check a claim rather than understand a topic, the fact-checker builds you a prompt you can take to whichever AI you already use.
Straight with you
What we will not do.
Advice about your own situation. We explain how a thing works. We cannot tell you what to do about your diagnosis, your lawsuit, or your portfolio, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Pure prediction. If answering means guessing what happens next, there is nothing to check the work against, and an explainer with nothing behind it is worse than no explainer.
Settling an argument for you. We will show you what the record says and where it runs out. Where the evidence genuinely does not decide the question, we say so instead of picking a side and dressing it up.
How the list moves
The order changes, and that is on purpose.
There is a queue, and it is public — the explainers page shows what is next and what is behind it. That order shifts when a topic suddenly matters more, when a lot of people ask for the same thing, or when a piece turns out to need far more digging than expected. Some topics on that list will get built. Some will quietly drop off. We would rather tell you that than publish a schedule we cannot keep.
One difference worth knowing: subscriber requests skip the review and go to the front of the line. Free requests still get read by a person, and good ones still get built — they just wait their turn behind the queue above.
Your turn
Send the topic.
If it passes the three tests, we want it. If you are not sure whether it does, send it anyway and let us make that call.