Just make sure to swing by on a monday or tuesday because we can certainly busy for us. Just remember your purchase is supporting our bookstore and staff. Also you can order a copy of the book from bookpeople today you will be entered to win free book and sweater so make sure to grab one. Just think of everyone after this introduction, our guests will be joining us on the screen. There will be taking some questions so please make sure to submit them in the q a bubble below. If you look at your zoom screen, the bar below all the way to the use two little bubbles. Please submit in them there ind of the chat so we can find them. With that just a quick note, we will be recording the nights event which will be aired on cspan at a later date so just a heads up. Now on to introducing our guests for the night. Anne Helen Petersen is a Senior Writer for buzzfeed, she received her phd at the university of texas at austin where she focused on the history of celebrity gossip. Her previous book, too fat, to slutty, too loud and scandals of classic hollywood were featured in npr and the atlantic. She currently lives in cate young as an analyst based film and culture critic from trinidad and tobago. Her books on the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, and has appeared in jezebel and impure music, nylon, glamour, cosmopolitan, culture and paper magazine. Kate has a ba in photojournalism from boston university, masters and mask your medications from university of and a masters in specialized journalism in the arts from the university of southern california. In 2015 she served as an article pop cultural criticism developing entwined gene she was awarded the Rotten Tomatoes fellowship a Digital Innovation and film criticism. S. E. Smith is a National Magazine awardwinning essayist injured list based in northern california. She is an editor at west beat and also writes in the daily meet newsletter, and has published work in the cult, gq and catapult. Then we have connie wang, executive editor of refinery 29. Before she was packed features writer and covered consumer culture, race. She also hosted and coproduced a refinery 29 documentary series titled style out there. That report on fashion, cultures around the world. The Second Season 18 news women plug avenue new york front page award. And with that i would like for you to help me welcome our guests for the night, and thank you all for being here. I am anne Helen Petersen. I am so glad you could be so grateful to bookpeople for hosting, but i lived in austin bookpeople was a real refuge for me and every time i i come baco austin it remains as much of that so grateful for the work they do in the community and the place to visit in the community for books and for reading. So very happy to be here. I want to actually go around and i will have each of the panelists say just one thing about themselves, like a place with a can find a piece of work being done there really proud of because i think one of the talks of these panels is introducing you to new thinkers. And then also to say thank you for being on this panel im donating 250 for an organization of each of their choice of want them to say just a little bit about their organization, get it on all of your radars as people are watching picky. Two dollars, five dollars to throw their way, a little bit can add up to a lot. That i along with my Editorial Union addressed the people and the structure that were responsible for the inequities and make sure that thingschanged and the changes were implemented and were sustainable in a meaningful way. And when people ask why why were the changes if they happened in 2020, why are we working from home and assorted this decentralized, a lot of people said it was because of what was happening in the world but i think that doesnt give credit to the people that made it happen but what i notice is it was his shift that happened was based off of older generations versus younger millennials entering the works force and the difference in the way that we saw what was possible and what we were capable of. And the possibilities of collective action. But i wrote about all of that and wrote about how my generation had a lack of vision and what we learned from those people in all of the various reckonings that werehappening. And what your organization . I forgot about this. Thank you for reminding me. I just had a baby two weeks ago so my brain is a little bit fried. I will nibble on this idea but at the end of the question i will have an organization. Sorry. So im kate, the piece that i thought of is an essay that i wrote called the past president in which i talked about essentially homecoming as a project inmythmaking. And i thought about it because i think it does kind of encapsulate the kind of life that i most enjoy doing, specifically around how women are represented inthe medium. As for my organization, i would like. [inaudible] i think it has always been crucial but now especially in the retail a case is more crucialthan ever. Absolutely. Hello, i guess i already gotintroduced. My piece that i think is most relevant in this conversation and to my larger body of work is called, this appeared in the sixth issue of bench thats also online and the future is looking at the colonization of grief is tied so closely to you get your monday off and come back and you need to be over it. And this came out but is more insightful than ever because everyones experience loss and is not able to process it. You have to go get sick, you need to get therapy. And grief counselors say sometimes grief justsucks and thats how it is. So it was an amazing feature to work on and it was great to be supported by event who is one of the few black editors i get to work with. My series also looks at the coast Childrens Fund, i live in one of the lowest income counties in california with really significant classes there where you have the techies buying out and people sleeping on the streets and the Childrens Fund provides a ton of services and support. I would say they punch about their weight and right now we have refugees and covid issues that are really testing their ability so id love to see them get some more support. I shout out to betts which is currently fundraising for the campaign, there a nonprofit that does truly intersectionalbalance work. Just google bench magazine and youll find a link to this important projectthat i donate to every year. Celia, i guess our newsletter mission i would love to be the q and a i did with tiktok interns. Ive spent the entire pandemic getting into tiktok and just sort of being excited by how creative everyone is, especially the young people so in one of the accounts ive been blown away with is the planet money tiktok so i was able to get in touch with the guy who runs the whole thing and just got stuck in his brain, if you guys look at that site its weird, its such a weird account but it explains economic symbols in a way where now i get. And so i got to ask him about like his background and everything and it turns out he had studied experimental film in college and explained everything. So if you just google these links, planet money tiktok or theres a link inthe chat , his name is doctor corbett by the way. But i highly recommend that. And the Organization Im into tonight is the city which is a nonprofit that covers new york city at the grassroots level. Ive been checking the coronavirus tracker every day. And ive also just been really impressed by these things they have, one of which is their building a structural memorial to help from covid with it a huge undertaking and we also have this project and a few other local news outlets in order to keep the covid19, the nypd accountable in black and brown communities and theres so many people i want to talk about their experiences with the nypd. Theres never a bad time to support this but i think its informative especially right now. Thank you for this. Yesterdays panel we were talking about the labor and social media participation and one thing everybody talks about is how the only problem that doesnt make you feel in the crowd is tiktok because you dont feel even the youngest are no millennials, you have a compulsion that you have to go out and make a difference. There are college kids who can go do that so i can just consume it and find the algorithm for myself. The first question that were going to do is a little more personal and talk about a time in their lives when we felt that we had social skills and like the broad theme of this panel is freelance culture. Like, you have to be working allthe time. Whether that is a salaried job that goes into all parts of life for them together a bunch ofdifferent gays. That compulsion which existed for millennials but then has become much more prevalent as millennials have integrated in the workforce and after the 2008 recession has become a defining feature of millennials relationship. So just feeling like i can always be trying to put together other odd jobs in other to finally get a job. But im curious to hear about cecilia, do you want to go First Western mark. For me it was definitely college but we have this amazing chapter in the book about what im doing is this kind of it reminded me of these colleges, its supposed to be this time in your life or whatever and i went to the Journalism School there and it was just sort of on top of just normal having the time of your life every day but also there was this pressure i think coming from the administration and our peers in terms of you have to get your internship the next year and you have to never stop stop letting up because thats how youre going to break into the medium in the midwest. And theres this real sense ofonly a few will ever make it out of here. It was so competitive and even if you have a weekend off you have this sense that you are falling behind so i think that was definitely the most stressful time in mylife. From my time as a professor, how do you make those connections to get those internships . Sometimes the routes there through the university or college but sometimes theyre like, try to reach out to some people in their business and you dont know how to do that. You dont have the connections through my parents or anything like that thatwould make that possible. I felt like it was such a huge boulder to keep rolling upthe hill. Absolutely. What about you . Ive been a fulltime freelancer for 15 years so basically all those years, probably the most relevant point was my father had a heart attack in 2012, a triple bypass. He had some Health Problems and you throw out and thats something that had to do with you was an adjunct faculty member. He had no savings and could have worked for a long time without leaving the workforce altogether which in a normal world where people retire at 50 is fine. But was not for me and i realized i was going to be keeping two households on one income in a county that weirdly is a poor and a very highcost of living. That was when i started traveling to the bottom of the barrel basement job. 50, i will take it. Every sense counts area and i think that travel is familiar to a lot of freelancers but it comes with this dark side because it comes back to bite me in the. [bleep] later when someone pulls off thatshady personal essay you wrote for 50 in 2013 or whatever. Which is something that i think we dont talk about as much as we should in this pressure to do it all and do all those things, sometimes you are laying traps that future you say really, you really needed to pick that assignment . Youreally did. Okay. I have those dotted over the internet if anyone wants to find them and many of them i didnt get anything for. This thing that connie talked about, this great thing that was published on the internet but that those down what other people can expect to be paid and what i can expect to be paid because i workedfor free at that stage, why would they pay for someone else . Kate, go ahead. So for me it was slightly different because i went back to college and it was especially interesting to me as i had the opportunity that culturally we dont have that expectation. That was kind of not really the passion that i wanted but i had this passion to find work that held that range in the waythat you talk about in the book. So for a number ofthings , that was what the bulk of my life was. I was trying to. [inaudible] my friends had never heard of and happened to kind of continually justify that work that i was doing. And i was also kind of behind it away because when i went into the workforce it was during the peak of the internet era and im very cognizant of the fact that it was on the internet forever and i wanted to sort of mind my commas. I regret slightly that i was too scared to get this but i dont have things following me around because by the time i started writing on the internet i was moving out of that phase and also i have found that i had Something Else i wantedto do. Its not that i made a specific personal choice and i never have. So that aspect is kind of clear to me but i also meant that i had trouble in the industry and a lot of the women predominately who started inthat time , you had slightly different monitors that i had so theres this payoff, was it worth it to have that backcatalog . I was really ashamed that i was doing work that my mother could bragabout. And i felt a lot of conflict to us because she didnt understand the industry that i was working in and how it functioned. This is during a time when there was routinely entire publications were going under and i had to find a way to become a staff writer at the publication that was going under, that didnt Hire International people , that i couldnt legally work for because also i worked in the us and it was just how you can justify the average achievement was nothing was essentially the boundaries of what i could accomplish and it took a long time and when they started their scholarship internationally, that was how i was able to get a byline and become recognized enough to keep going and im quite proud of the things i did with those other publications but it was very difficult and it was something that alerted me specifically because for me there are certain things that you have physically to attempt, that give you more confidence so that gives you available opportunities but im really, i had a very strange relationship to how i view the work because i definitely grew up with this founding that my goal was to not have to do the kind of work that is always the best kind, you can clock out. And but that was something that was drummed into me. Like in school that i wouldnt have to work at kfc or whatever. They have benefits, its fun. And that anecdote, we talked about the young woman, why is it not okay to have enough to support yourself. What more is there, i dont live to work a job, ilive to earn money so i can do other things. So yes, it is a lot. I think a lot of people who dont know or dont work closely with people who are in advance dont know how difficult it is to find an organization that iswilling to go through the visa process with you. It is a huge prolonged deal andits incredibly stressful. Two workers and it sucks. And i wish that there were massivereforms that made it a lot easier. I tried to explain to other people know i cant apply for that job. A lot of applications will ask if you are allowed to work, i had a few agents ago only to find out i was not able to work in canada,its like you didnt mention that before. That would have been important to me now and so its like, apparently im separate from that school so technically im doing my own bta so. [inaudible] its a long process and its very stressful because theres a certain point when you recognize it has nothing to do with how hard you work, how skilled you are. Its really just about who is willing to take you on as a commodity that is willing to invest in all the loopholes it wouldtake to retain you as a worker. Especially in culture writing the idea of a staff job, its not like its heres this staff job, its just nonexistent and the people who are not trying to be culture writers, theres the difficulty of explaining a lot of millennial jobs to othergenerations. Like, i keep saying people keep asking me how did my nails get this reputation for being lazy and entitled and i think a lot of it has to do with one, we were raised to advocate for ourselves, many of us and to, a lot of our jobs dont necessarily look like additional work. Im sure you get all the time, you watch movies as a job. I got that so many times before for the rest of my life, i have a phd in movies, just to watch movies allday. But theres just a lot more. What about you . First time experiencing burnout was my first time experiencing media. Just i saved up all of my money working in college to spend a summer in new york city working through internships. They weretechnically paid , then i worked at 12 hours a day in condc nast and one was 30 hours a day for one post at a magazine thats nolonger around. And i was paying three airbnb so i was paying 1000 a month to share a room and spend my weekends working and its like hundred young people in business casual drinking diy one wine at thehudson river trying to network with each other thats what my summer was. And we had tips about how to get a job and this was right before therecession hit. We were all bright eyed and idealistic about the prospect of what work looked like and that all fell apartshortly afterwards. But i left that summer feeling completely depleted. I experienced whatever you can experience working in exploit of your job going from embarrassment andshame to total joy and euphoria. What i found was the work and the craft, putting words on paper excited me and told me so that part of it was excellent and i perhaps took away the wrong lessons of that summer. Granted it was only three months but because it was only three months to some percent i felt i had gone through with the challenge. I can only twomyself to that. To me it was all work all the time and it wasnt the case and worse yet it blinded me to how i wasperpetuating that within the industry. And that lesson that i learned or miss learned years ago was the genesis of the grateful generationstory. So just to remind us if anyone has questions you can drop them in the q and a and we will get to them in a little bit. But i think ian touched on something kate mentioned, im curious about how this thinking has evolved over the years of how those moments of culture, what kind of respect did you have, kate said looking at someone with a 95 job a lot of us may be perceived as not what we wanted in ourlife , but thinking about the attractiveness for the ability or how that has shifted. Lets go back, are you in there . I was just going to say that i think coming out of college i had this idea there was going to be one perfect job that would fulfill every note and cra