Everywhere and we have for also open to the public at 11 with limited capacity to swing by because weekends are busy for us. Just remember that your purchase of books are supporting bookstore and their staff and if you order a copy of the book today you will be entered to win a pretty cool was in the schools letter. Just to give everyone a quick walkthrough of our platforms and events, our guests will be joining us on the screen. They will be taking some questions so please make sure to submit them in the q a all below. Looking at your resume screen and the part below, all the way to the rightyoull see two little bubbles. Please use them there instead of the chat. , just a quick note. We will be recording accidents will be aired on the fan at a later date which so just a heads up. Now on you introducing our guests for the night. And heller, peterson is a Senior Writer for a former academic procedure phd at the university of texas at austin where she focused on the history of celebrities. Her previous books too fast, bloodied loud and scandals of classic hollywood featured in npr, l and the atlantic. She currently lives in merced. Kate is an labased freelance film culture credit trinidad and tobago writing focuses on the intersection of race, gender and sexuality and has appeared in jezebel, npr music, nylon, state media, letter, cosmopolitan paper magazine. Kate has a ba in journalism from boston university, a masters in mastication from the university of letter and reference specialized journalism in the arts and the university of california. In 2015, she served as popculture criticism fellow for its medium and in 2019 she was awarded the fellowship in Digital Innovation film criticism. At each a National Magazine awardwinning ses and journalists based in northern california. She is a growth editor of wheat and also writes in a daily media newsletter, he links and has published work in the cold gq area next we have the negative executive editor before she was a staff features writer and culture rates, she also posted and coproduced a 2019 documentary series titled out there that reported on fashion, culture around the world. Season one a news womens frontpage award. Emmas articles, id like to help you welcome our guest for thenight. And being here. A real refuge for me and every time i come back, it remains as much and im so grateful for the work they do in the community and the place they preserve in the community for books and reading, very happy to be here and i want to go around and im going to have each of the panelists say one thing about themselves, place where they can find a piece of work that theyve done that there really proud of because i think one of the tasks of these panels is introducing you to new thinkers and also to say thank you for donating 250 to an organization of each of their choice so everyone can just say a little bit about their organization, and get on your radar as people who are watching and if you have 2, 5 to throw these organizations, a little bit cannot up to a lot, lets start with connie because shes to the left of me on my zoom. Hello im connie executive editor at refinery 29 and im very proud, i think more recent piece of work that ive done was an essay i wrote called the grateful generation has some apologizing to do and many of the same structures but weve seen millennial burnout, it focuses on the personal reckoning that i underwent in refinery 29 went through workplace reckoning where i along with refined 29, they worked to address the people in the structures that were responsible for the antiblackness to make sure that things changed and those were implemented in sustainable in a meaningful way and when people ask why were these changes, inhabited 2020 when we were working from home, we decentralized and a lot of people said it was because what was happening in the world but i have to give credit to the people who made it happen and what i noticed there was some switch that happened that was based off of an older generation and millennial like myself versus younger millennials entering the workforce and the difference in the way that we saw what was possible and what we were capable of in the possibilities of collective action so i wrote about how my generation blocks the vision and what we learn from other people and all of the various reckoning that have been happening this year. What is your organization. I forgot about this, they keep reminding me, i dont have an organization, i just had a baby two weeks ago so my brain is a little bit fried, i will mellow on this idea by the end of this organization to drop into the chat. Kate. I think you are muted. Sorry about that, i am kate, the piece that im really proud of is an essay that i wrote revealing called beyond victim makes a pack present which i talked about homecoming as a project, i thought of it because it does a good job in calculating the kind of writing that i most enjoy doing specifically around how thats been our record to the media and for my organization i would like to pay more attention through action network, it has always been crucial but now especially it is more crucial than ever to make sure were splitting people on the ground. Absolutely. Hello, i urge you got introduced so we can skip that, my piece that is most relevant to the conversation into my later body of work is called good grief, it appears in the six issue of [bleep] and its online and looking at grief that ties into your one day off and then you need to come back and you need to be over it and this came out before covid but now its more than ever because everyone is experiencing loss or close to lawson not able and not able to process it, you have to get fixed, therapy, and a brief counselor said grief just sucks and thats how it is, it was an amazing teacher to work on and it was great to be supported by one of the few black editors that i get to work with. My charity is a Childrens Fund, i live in one of the lowest income counties in california with really significant class disparities like which is buying houses and people buying into and sleeping on the street in the Childrens Fund provides a ton of services and support and they punched above their weight and right now we have the fire refugees and covid issues that are really testing their abilities, i would love to see them get more supportive. Also shot out our current fundraising to the yearly capital campaign, they are a nonprofit that truly has great work, if you go to google bitch magazine you will find a link to donate to that is an important project that i donate to every year. Hi im julia, i guess the newsletter edition that i would love to read is the q a i did with planet money tiktok in tu turn, i dont know about you guys but i spent the entire pandemic deep into tiktok and deep into being astounded by how creative everyone is and especially the young people and one of the accounts ive been totally blown away with is the planet money tiktok, i was able to get in touch with the guy who runs the whole thing and got to pick his brain, if you look it up on tiktok, it is weird its a weird account but explain basic economics i got to ask his background so if you just googled these leaks planet money tiktok or link in the chat i highly recommend, his name is jack corbett by the way, i highly recommend that in the organization tonight is the city which is a nonprofit that covers new york city after the grassroots level, i have been checking the coronavirus tracker every single day and ive also been really impressed by the projects that they have, one is there building a searchable memorial for mediocres who have died from coping which is a huge indicate undertaking and we have an ongoing project with another news outlet in order to keep the nypd accountable especially black and brown communities, i think theres still crowdsourcing for that is they want people to talk about their experiences and within the nypd and i think theres never a bad time to support local journalism but is more apparent how important it is, especially right now. Thank you so much, yesterdays panel we were talking about the labor and the exhaustion of social media participation and everybody is talking about the only platform that does not make you feel like crab is tiktok because first of all even as millennials, even the youngest because i know some of you guys are young millennials, you dont feel the compulsion that you have to go out there and make it tiktok, there are college kids who can go do that so i just assume it and refine the algorithm, the first question that were going to do is a little bit more personal and talk about the time in her life when we felt that we have fulfilled the most in the broad theme of this panel is a culture feeling like you have to be working and whether that is a salaried job or putting together a bunch of different gigs and really that compulsion and which existed for millennials but has become much more prevalent as millennials have entered the workforce in the 2008 recession has become a different feature of the relationship, for me it was feeling like i had always put together other unpaid jobs in order to find a job that would pay me very little but im curious to hear everyone else, julia d went to go first. For me it was definitely college and you have this amazing chapter in your book about the college emissions process and when i was doing it reminded me of this nightmare of college, it is supposed to be the most fun years of your life and the best time ever and i went to missouri and i went to the Journalism School and it was sort of on top of normal pressure to be having the time of your life every day but also be preparing for your entire life, there was a pressure coming from our professors, the administration and our peers in terms you have to get on your internship and you have to never stop letting up because thats how youre going to break into media, thats how youre going to get out of missouri in the midwest and there was a real sense of only a few will ever make it out of here and it was so competitive and even if you took a weekend off being a college kid, you had a set that you are falling behind, that was definitely the most stressful and burnout time. From my time as a professor, how do you make those connections to get those internships, sometimes there are routes through the university or college but sometimes your professors are like trying to reach out to some people in the business and you dont know how to do that, at least i never have the connections through my parents or anything like that that would make that possible it felt like such a huge boulder to keep rolling up the hill. Absolutely. I was a fulltime freelancer for 15 years, basically all of those years, probably the most stressful point was my father had a heart attack in 2012 and needed a quadruple bypass, we dont mess around when it comes to health problems, we go full out and i suddenly had a realization that he was a faculty member, he had no saving and could not work for a month and actually ended up leaving the workforce altogether which in a normal world where people can retire at 60 is fine and is not for me, i was going to be keeping two households on one income in a county that weirdly is. Poor and i think very high cost of living, that is where i started scrambling for the bottom of the barrel basement juggling any 50, i will take it, every cent counts and i think this is really familiar to a lot of freelancers and it comes with the dark side because it comes back to bite you in the later when someone pulls up thatshould depersonalize the re for 50 in 2013 or whatever which is something we dont talk about as much as we should, and the pressure to do it all and do all the things, sometimes you are trapped with the future you will say really you needed to depict the assignment, you really did, okay. Thank you. I have those dotted all over the internet if anybody wants to find them and a lot of did not get paid anything, something that connie talked about, i was grateful to be published on the internet and not drive down what other people expected to be paid and what i expected to be paid, if i worked for free, why would they pay someone else. Kate, go ahead. For me things are slightly different because im an immigrant and when i graduated from college i went back home to trinidad and it was an experience for me because i had the opportunity to move home because culturally we just dont have that expectation that you leave, 18, that was never really the pressure but i was under pressure to find work that held prestige in the way that you talk about in the book so for a number of years that was what was crippling of my life, i was as a freelancer on the internet for website people, they figure made up and having to continually justify the work that i was doing meant something and i was also behind it away because when i had entered the work it was in the air of the internet, i was afraid of that and i was very cognizant of the fact that it would be on the internet and i was not willing to sell mine for 50 bucks, i regret slightly that i was too scared to pitch but also very glad that i dont have things following me around because the time i started writing on the internet we were moving out of essays and also i had found i had Something Else that i wanted to write about i dont write personal essays as a personal choice and i never have, so that aspect is kinda clear for me but also meant i took a really long time and all the women predominantly in that time do have quite lucrative that are further along in their careers than i am in the tradeoff to hold back that long. And i was really ashamed essentially that i was not doing the work that my mother could brag about as a baseline and that left a lot of conflict between us when i was at home because she did not understand the industry that i was working in and how to function and it wasnt a matter of applying for more jobs, this is during the time when there was routine layoff, the entire publications were going undone and i was supposed to find a way to become a staff writer at a publication that didnt Hire International people that i couldnt technically work for because im also not allowed to work in the u. S. , it was the whole thing and it was frustrating having to justify why the effort that she thought was nothing was essentially the boundaries of what i could accomplish and it took a really long time in the opportunity help me. And it was enough to keep going, the interpretation was very difficult and it was something that limits me specifically because there are certain things that you cannot do specifically into the did limit available opportunities but im really, i have a strange relationship to how i view the world because they definitely grew up with an understanding that my goal was to not have to do the kind of work that we are not going to recognize, where you can clock out, if i went to school and i did well in school i would not have to work at kfc or whatever it was, they have benefits, it is fine and the antidote in the book about the young woman who said she was going to be a teacher but just wanted to be a manager for Grocery Store, that resonates with me because why is it not okay to simply have enough to support yourself, what more is there, i dont live to work a job, i lived to make money so i can do other things that i want to do in my life, its a lot. Yeah, a lot of people who do not know or do not work closely with people who are immigrants dont know how difficult it is to find an organization that is willing to go through the visa process with you, it is a huge prolonged deal and incredibly stressful on the worker and it sucks, i wish they were massive reforms that made it a lot easier, it is something youre right, its hard to expand to other people, no i can just not apply for that job. A lot of applications will specifically ask if you are allowed to work in another country, i applied for something ages ago to find out two days ago that i needed to be eligible to work in canada and they did not mention that before. Immigration is bad and getting worse every day so currently i graduated from grad school swim technically on a student visa but once that year ends im kind of shipped out of luck, its a process and the rules are changing and its very stressful because there gets to be a certain point where you recognize it has nothing to do with how well you work, how hard you work, its literally about who is willing to take you one as a commodity and willing to invest to jump through all the loopholes in the answers not very many right now. Especially in culture writings, the idea, its not like heres the staff job listings, it is nonexistent, that speaks to people who are not trained to be culture writers, speaks to the difficulty of explaining millennial jobs, the reality of millennial jobs to other generations, people keep asking me how did millennials get this reputation for being lazy and entitled and i think a lot of it has to do that we were raised to advocate for yourselves, many of us, people who were raised middleclass into a lot of our jobs dont necessarily look like traditional understanding of work, im sure you get all the time, you watch movies for your job, i got that so many times over the course of my life, youre getting a phd in movies, must be nice to watch movies all day, there is just a lot more. What about you. My first time extremes in the media, i saved up all my money from working in college to spend the summer in new york city working to internships, they were technically paid, one was 12 a day and one was 30 a post which i would do one post at this other magazine and i think i was paid, this is preet airbnb 6000 a month to share one apartment with six girls, three of us to an apartment bedroom, i spent my night reporting, my weekends not working in this visual brings me such shame and horror like a hundred people in business casual sipping online, like the hudson river trying to network with one another, that is what my summer was. And we saw tips about how to get a job and this is right before the recession hit, we were brighteyed and idealistic of what the prospect of work look like and that all fell apart shortly after words, i left that summer feeling completely depleted, totally exploited in extremes other things that i experienced in reading from other embarrassment and shame and total joy in what i found was the work putting words on paper and that part was excellent and i took away the wrong lesson from the summer and granted it was only three months, i dont know if i couldve gone longer than the three months but because it was only three months, but i felt having gone through it was a challenge, if i could only numb myself to that discomfort, it would be awful the time and so obviously that is not the case and numbness really blinded me to my selfperpetuating within the industry and the workplace and that lesson that i learned or misaligned 15 years ago was the genesis of the grateful generation story. Just a reminder if anyone has questions you can drop them in the q a, we will get to them in a little bit but something that kate mentioned, im curious about how your thinking has evolved over the years about those moments, what perspective you have, and looki