Climate, Culture & Yap
Freelancing in 2024 is hard, but I'm still click-clacking at my laptop.
I’ve found myself back to this newsletter.
2023 and 2024 have been a whirlwind of changes. I lived through a second media layoff in November of last year. I was the last Earthling on the Gizmodo/Earther desk. Sometime in the summer of 2023 my left eye began to twitch from work stress. It got worse over time. It didn’t go away until about a week after my layoff. I do miss the people I worked with. They were great at their jobs and they were also lovely people to share an office with.
I took a breather for a week, and then started the transition back into freelancing. I was independent all of 2021 and I thought that being laid off would just mean slipping back into that. I expected some roadblocks and I expected a lot of rejection. But I wasn’t prepared for just how hard it would be to freelance in the months after my layoff. Budgets have been cut, and there are even fewer people on staff to support incoming ideas.
Sometime earlier this year, I emailed an editor that I had worked with extensively in 2020 and 2021. He emailed me an hour later to reveal that he had just been let go that same day. I checked Twitter/X and saw that the large digital publication that he worked for had mass layoffs. Months later I pitch another editor I had worked for. She let me know that she loved the idea but had to pass due to a shrinking budget for freelance posts. Amid all this I’ve weathered a few health emergencies behind the scenes. There are stories I would have loved to write this year but couldn’t. Those ideas are now in my “kill your darlings” Google Doc in hopes of a miraculous resurrection sometime in the future.
I’m hoping to take some of those ideas out of purgatory and share them in this newsletter. What can you expect in the coming emails? Behind the scenes on freelancing and living in NYC. Collabs with other creators/writers. Photos of my cats. Rants about places that are cool, but could be great with just a lil bit of public transportation. And more rants about how extreme weather/geological events have impacted culture.
I’m still doing the thing:
Bad Bunny dropped a new song in September to commemorate the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria. I wrote an explainer about the references in the song for The Xylom.
Sabrina Carpenter reminded us that ceiling fans feel so nice, so I wrote about why they’re great way to cool off and reduce energy usage for One5C.
Since my second media layoff last November, I’ve had to rework my budget. But I refuse to give up these things.
I’ve also done some fact-checking for Grist, Grist again, High Country News, Vox, and several other pubs.
And… I spoke at Climate Week NYC.
What I’m watching:
I recently binged Netflix’s El Secreto Del Río (the secret of the river). I cried. You should watch it.
I’m rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix. Catholic trauma makes for amazing art and I need to remind myself that the years I spent sitting in a pew could help me connect with the mini-series.
I have rewatched a lot of bestdressed’s YouTube videos while rotting on my couch this year. I know that Ashley has moved on to glossy Gucci commercials, but her editing and pacing is still great to watch.
What I’m reading:
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I saw him speak at The Apollo in Harlem about the book’s release. It was awe inspiring.
👏🏼 congrats on relaunching your newsletter!