"As a woman, people are going to ask you to write the kind of insipid shit they would never in a million fucking years ask a man to write. They’re going to tell you to make it lovable, to take harsh opinions out of your heroine’s head, to cut your pissy first-person essay off at the kneecaps. They’re going to run out and publish a million and one disconnected, crappy Deep Thoughts by some self-proclaimed boy wonder, but they’re going to read your perfectly delightful work and tell you that it’ll be just great, as long as you only include the stuff on the trials and tribulations of being a mom (Argh! Teehee!) or being a girl (Oh noes! Teehee!) or being a woman (Growl! Just kidding! Teehee!). They’re going to ask you to write about your recent weight gain, or your recent divorce, or your recent (insert humiliating story here), and what lessons you’ve learned from it. They’re going to want you to come up with a fucking moral to your story. Because you’re a lady, you don’t have the option of stomping around in a funk. Because you are a woman, and you feel feelings, you must draw some giant, oversimplified conclusion. You must have blandly down-to-earth protagonists, you must have lovable mommies hugging lost kittens, you must have rainbows and sunbeams spewing out of your ass. They’re going to coach you into writing something you’re not entirely sure about, something you would never in a million fucking years read yourself (if you had free will, which it sometimes seems like you don’t), and they’re going to tell you it’s pure genius. And even though you still might see your piece or essay or snippet of prose as “literary,” they’re going to stick an incendiary headline on it (“Help! I Ate My Own Vagina!”) and it’s going to be an internet sensation, and you’re going to feel Bad with a capital B about it."

Preach, Heather Havrilesky. This is bleak but #letsbereal, several of these things have happened to me already in my admittedly short career as a freelance writer.

"It’s only worth being the first woman anything if at the point you stop being executive editor there are other women, hopefully lots of them, who are plausible candidates to be the second."

New York Times Editor Jill Abramson Talks Boston and Female Editors - The Daily Beast (via nishachittal)

(via nishachittal)

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."

R. Buckminster Fuller (via unequal-design)

CRUCIAL journalism advice in 2k13.

"I use two Moleskines: one (side-bound) as more of a personal journal, holding everything from little drawings to lists to long-winded prose, and one (top-bound) for my pie charts. Though really, I make pie charts on just about anything. Backs of envelopes, cocktail napkins, receipts. I’m not particular about the pens I use. I do not draw the circles with a compass, I trace a round cardboard coaster. (Classy!)"

I talked to The Setup about all of the hardware and software I use to do my job.