Jodi Kantor
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author
How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work
Book Giveaway: FAN is giving away copies of How to Start to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
Before Jodi Kantor became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting toppled media magnates and sparked reform worldwide, she was kicked off her college newspaper.
That early stumble is central to her new book, How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work, a guide for young people navigating political upheaval, skyrocketing costs of living, and the unsettling unknowns of AI. Kantor has spent her career anticipating uncomfortable truths about the changing workplace. Now she turns that same unflinching eye toward the question facing a generation: how is anyone supposed to find and start their life’s work?
Kantor sets aside platitudes and false hope in favor of something more useful. Work, she argues, is not just how we spend our time. It’s our engine of progress: how cancer therapies get invented, political campaigns get won, thrilling art gets made and finds its audience. Against that backdrop, she offers two organizing principles to help young people discover their calling: craft and need. Paired together, they provide a framework for the hardest early-career decisions: how to think about money, how much risk to take on, when to push back against conventional wisdom.
Powerful and provocative, How to Start is a statement of faith for uncertain times, offering wisdom, strategy, and a set of aspirations built to launch careers and sustain them for a lifetime.
In addition to her 2017 Pulitzer, which she shared with Megan Twohey (FAN ’19) for their reporting on Harvey Weinstein, Kantor has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Columbia Alumni medal, the George Polk Award, and Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people of the year. In 2025 she joined the New York Times‘ Washington bureau’s Supreme Court team full-time.
Kantor will be in conversation with Jennifer Breheny Wallace (FAN ’23, ’26), an award-winning journalist and bestselling author of Mattering and Never Enough. She is the founder of The Mattering Institute and co-founder of The Mattering Movement, a nonprofit whose mission is to create cultures of mattering in schools and educational spaces.
This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
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Upcoming Events
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Mary Claire Haver, MD
Board-certified OB/GYN, founder of The 'Pause Wellness, and #1 New York Times bestselling author
Heidi Stevens
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Regina Dominican High School, O'Shaughnessy Theater
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work
Jodi Kantor
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author
ON ZOOM
Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better
David Epstein
Science writer and best-selling author
Megan Twohey
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
Post-event reception in ETHS’s Alumni Hall, open to all.
