We often come up with ideas which we don’t have the time to write about in-house. If you’re keen to write for SpeakFreely, 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:
Europe Finally Freed Gene-Edited Crops. Did It Go Far Enough?
The EU adopted new rules for plants produced through targeted gene-editing techniques in June 2026, partially separating them from the older GMO regime. We are looking for pitches that evaluate this rare move toward biotechnology liberalisation. Which innovations will now become commercially viable, what restrictions remain, and should the same principle—regulate the product according to its actual risk rather than the technique used to produce it—be extended to animals and other forms of biotechnology?
Right to try: let the dying try
A patient with a terminal diagnosis and nothing to lose is often forbidden from taking an experimental drug that has already cleared early safety trials, on the grounds that it has not yet been proven to work. For someone out of proven options, a demand for certainty is not caution but cruelty, and the same logic that grants a right to refuse treatment should grant a right to attempt it. We’re looking for pitches that make the autonomy case for expanded access to experimental medicine in Europe.
Europe’s War on Poker
Across Europe, poker players face state monopolies, casino-only rules, punitive taxes, restrictions on private tournaments and online markets divided by national borders. Poland may be one of the clearest examples, but it is not alone: Norway largely prohibits organised poker, Finland is only now dismantling part of its gambling monopoly, and Germany taxes online poker on every stake placed.
We are looking for pitches examining why European governments continue to treat poker as though it were indistinguishable from slot machines or roulette. Is poker primarily gambling, a game of skill, or simply a peaceful activity between consenting adults? Do restrictive laws protect vulnerable players, or merely preserve state monopolies and push ordinary players towards unlicensed markets?
Writers may take a comparative European approach or concentrate on the laws and poker culture of a particular country. We are especially interested in accounts of underground poker clubs, restrictions on small tournaments, online-poker regulation, national player-pool barriers, and countries that offer more liberal alternatives.
Surrogacy, the forgotten reproductive freedom in Europe
Europe’s fertility laws are a patchwork. Surrogacy is banned or tightly constrained in many countries, while embryo-related rules are often shaped by precaution, moral panic, and heavy-handed paternalism. We are looking for pitches that make the bold case for liberalisation.
Tintin: The Anti-Communist Hero Europe Forgot
Long before anti-communism became fashionable in Western Europe, Tintin was exposing Soviet propaganda, political repression, manufactured elections, and the misery hidden behind official claims of prosperity. Across his later adventures, he repeatedly confronts dictators, secret police, militarists, corrupt officials, slave traders, and revolutionary strongmen, while remaining stubbornly independent of governments and ideologies.
Politics and sex
Sexual culture and political culture are not as separate as polite society likes to pretend. Aella recently published an extensive survey of roughly 19,000 respondents, containing around 400 questions on demographics, childhood experiences, personality, sexual attitudes, political identity, and sexual preferences.
It is a goldmine of intriguing patterns about the relationship between politics and sex, including some particularly interesting findings on libertarians. We are looking for pitches that delve into the survey and explore what this data might reveal about ideology, personality, and sexual culture. This could be an especially fitting piece to publish around next Valentine’s Day.
Portugal’s drug decriminalization: what remains of the success story?
Portugal’s decriminalization model is still widely invoked as proof that a less punitive drug policy can work. But the early success has often been flattened into a slogan, while the longer term picture is more complicated. We’re looking for pitches that revisit Portugal with fresh eyes: what actually improved, what stalled, what got overstated, and what lessons the rest of Europe should and should not draw from the Portuguese case.
Why is Europe missing the driverless-car revolution?
While Waymo expands fully driverless ride-hailing across one North American city after another, Europe remains largely stuck with small pilots, safety operators, and distant promises of commercial deployment. Human error causes the overwhelming majority of serious road accidents, and autonomous vehicles could prevent countless deaths and life-changing injuries.
We are looking for pitches that examine why a continent with world-class carmakers is falling behind in one of transport’s most consequential technological shifts. What regulations are obstructing deployment, what can Europe learn from cities where autonomous vehicles already operate in everyday traffic, and how many lives might be lost in the meantime?
The Persecution of Metal in Eastern Europe
Whether in authoritarian states, Balkan kleptocracies such as Serbia, or socially conservative EU countries such as Poland, metal music is still routinely vilified by public authorities as dangerous, extremist, blasphemous, or morally corrupting; with censorship, intimidation, and legal repression often following. One recent example is the controversy surrounding Patriarkh in Poland, where a group of city councillors sought to prevent the band from appearing at a metal festival. In Serbia, a planned Batushka concert in Belgrade was cancelled after pressure from Orthodox activists. Meanwhile, Russian fans of metal and goth music now face prosecution after the country’s Supreme Court outlawed a vaguely defined “Satanist movement,” potentially criminalising symbols and aesthetics long associated with these subcultures.
We are looking for pitches that trace this frequently overlooked persecution of metal, examine how religious coercion and state power reinforce one another, and ask why such theocratic repression is so rarely recognised as a serious civil-liberties issue.
How should countries at risk of war rebuild their cities?
Ukraine’s reconstruction will not simply be a matter of replacing what has been destroyed. It offers a chance to rethink architecture and urban planning for an age in which missile attacks, drones, blackouts, and mass displacement may remain permanent security risks. We are looking for pitches that explore how homes, schools, hospitals, transport networks, and public spaces can be designed to save lives without turning entire societies into concrete fortresses. Should shelters be integrated into every new building? Should energy, water, and communications systems be more decentralised? Can underground spaces serve useful civilian purposes in peacetime while remaining ready for emergencies? And how can reconstruction remain affordable, attractive, and responsive to local needs rather than becoming a centrally planned exercise in militarised architecture?
Are cities struggling because they subsidise the rest of the country?
Major cities generate a disproportionate share of economic activity and tax revenue, yet often face crumbling infrastructure, unaffordable housing, overcrowded transport, and strained public services. One possible explanation is fiscal: urban economies may be transferring more to national governments and less productive regions than they receive in return, while cities themselves are left without the money or autonomy needed to solve their most visible problems. We are looking for pitches that examine whether this argument holds up. How large are the transfers from prosperous cities to the rest of the country? Which urban problems are genuinely caused by fiscal extraction, and which stem instead from local mismanagement, restrictive planning, or poor governance? And would giving cities greater control over taxation and spending produce more responsive, accountable, and prosperous urban government?
How populists hijack libertarian language
Populist movements increasingly present themselves as defenders of freedom, free speech, sovereignty, and resistance to elite control. Yet the policies that follow often involve stronger executives, attacks on independent institutions, protectionism, selective censorship, and expanded state power over disfavoured groups. We are looking for pitches that examine how libertarian language is repurposed to serve illiberal ends: how “freedom” becomes freedom for one’s own side, how opposition to bureaucracy turns into hostility toward legal constraints, and how distrust of elites is converted into loyalty to a political strongman. What makes this rhetoric persuasive, where have libertarians themselves helped legitimise it, and how can the language of liberty be reclaimed from movements that use it to justify coercion?
Can Technology Solve the Fertility Crisis?
Governments have spent years trying to raise birth rates through cash bonuses, tax breaks, parental leave, and appeals to traditional family life, usually with disappointing results. But the most promising solutions may come not from social engineering, but from technology: cheaper IVF, egg freezing, surrogacy, treatments that extend fertility, and eventually more radical innovations that give people greater control over when and how they have children.
The Case for the Enhanced Games
Elite sport already rewards every permissible advantage money, technology, genetics, nutrition, and medical science can provide, while pretending that one arbitrarily drawn category of enhancement is uniquely illegitimate. Write for us the case for the Enhanced Games!
Free Europe’s airports from nighttime curfews
Many European airports still prohibit or sharply restrict flights overnight, leaving enormously expensive infrastructure underused, compressing traffic into congested daytime windows, and weakening Europe’s position in global passenger and cargo networks. We are looking for pitches that make the case for Europe to follow the example of major 24-hour airports elsewhere.
A rebuttal to: The Case for an EU Progress Studies Law Movement
The Case for Legalising Euthanasia across Europe
Europeans enjoy increasing control over how they live, yet in much of the continent they are still denied control over the manner and timing of an unbearable death. The result is a cruel geographical lottery: while countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain permit euthanasia under regulated conditions, elsewhere patients experiencing incurable and intolerable suffering must continue against their wishes, travel abroad, or attempt to end their lives without medical assistance. We are looking for pitches that make the liberal case for assisted dying as an extension of bodily autonomy, personal dignity, and freedom of conscience.
The Case for Paying Organ Donors
Thousands of Europeans die each year waiting for a kidney, while the one country with a legal, regulated market for living donors, Iran, has effectively no waiting list. Almost everywhere else, offering a donor anything beyond thanks is a crime, a prohibition defended on dignity grounds that quietly consigns patients to dialysis and death. We’re looking for pitches that make the bodily-autonomy and lives-saved case for compensated donation: how a regulated, safeguarded market could work, why the usual objections about coercion and commodification are wrong, and where the ethical limits genuinely lie.
Let Europe build a Charter City
Honduras let a private group build Próspera, a semi-autonomous zone with its own light-touch rules, and it has become both a magnet for investment and a target for litigation. Europe, with its dense thicket of harmonised regulation, has nothing comparable, even as its own founders leave for freer jurisdictions to start their companies. We’re looking for pitches that make the case for real regulatory experimentation on European soil: how special zones, sandboxes, and charter-city ideas could bring about a new era of deregulation and innovation.
End the War on Landlords
Rent control, eviction bans, and licensing schemes are sold as tenant protection, yet they reliably shrink the rental stock, degrade the housing that remains, and lock the priced-out out for good. Berlin’s rent cap was struck down after landlords simply stopped offering flats, and the pattern repeats wherever politicians treat the symptom of scarcity by punishing the people who supply housing. We’re looking for pitches that defend the much-maligned landlord as a supplier of a service people need.
Scrap the Parking Requirements
Across much of Europe, planning rules still force developers to construct parking according to bureaucratic formulas rather than demonstrated demand. We are looking for pitches that investigate how these mandates affect housing costs, density, small businesses, and car-free households—and what Europe can learn from cities that have abolished or sharply reduced them. How should cities replace compulsory private parking with market pricing and sensible management of public street space?
Europe’s Fertility Donor Shortage Is Man-Made
European policy often limits compensation for sperm and egg donors, imposes nationality or residency restrictions, and struggles to reconcile donor anonymity with children’s access to genetic information. We are looking for pitches that examine how well-intentioned ethical restrictions create shortages, long waiting lists, reproductive tourism, and dependence on foreign clinics.
Why Europe Needs Delivery Drones
Delivery drones could bring medicines and essential goods to remote communities, reduce road traffic, and make last-mile delivery faster and cheaper. Yet visual-line-of-sight rules, complex approvals, and municipal restrictions keep most services trapped in pilot programmes. We are looking for pitches that examine how Europe can address legitimate concerns about safety, noise, and privacy without regulating useful drone delivery out of existence.
Let Europeans Resell the Tickets They Own
Across Europe, anti-scalping laws and official resale platforms often restrict how, where, and at what price people may resell event tickets. Intended to protect fans from fraud and inflated prices, these rules can instead lock buyers into monopolistic exchanges, impose high fees, prevent legitimate transfers, and leave valuable tickets unused when plans change.
The Case for Political Prediction Markets in Europe
We are looking for pitches that make the case for legalising and expanding political betting markets as tools for public understanding.
The Politics of Anti-Tourism
Complaints about overcrowded streets, rising rents, noise, and pressure on public services are often legitimate. But anti-tourism movements can quickly turn these concerns into hostility toward visitors themselves and into demands that residents be prevented from renting out their homes, businesses be restricted from serving tourists, or property owners be forced to use buildings in politically approved ways. It is time to counter the anti-tourism NIMBYs!
Bring back the night: Europe’s disappearing nightlife
More and more venues are closing under noise complaints, licensing crackdowns, and a regulatory drift toward earlier, quieter, safer, and duller. Nightlife is easy to dismiss as frivolous, but it is culture, commerce, and one of the few spaces where the young are left genuinely unsupervised. We’re looking for pitches that defend the night as a civil-liberties and urban-freedom issue: how curfews, licensing regimes, and noise law throttle a legitimate economy.
