Words in Slate, The Cut, Food & Wine, Thrillist, The Guardian, Romper and more // associate editor
@parents
. previously: food+drink editor
@matadornetwork
Hi editors, I have a reported story about the at-home bakers (all women! all moms!) who started their own small sugar cookie businesses through instagram. it has a business angle at the moment but can be adjusted. i would love to see it find a home!
What baffles me about kim Kardashian’s nobody’s wants to work comments is that we very clearly live in the era of the hustlers mentality, where everyone has 3 jobs, is a social media influencer, and a freelancer of some kind too. All anybody does is work and it’s killing us
The man who killed Jordan Neely wasn’t protecting himself. He was empowered by a cultural movement that has normalized regular citizens deputizing themselves as judges and executioners in the name of white supremacy. Infamously this also happened in another period of US history
right now a white person can murder anyone who makes them feel unsafe and there is no standards in place to define what unsafe looks like so it’s only a matter of time until someone shoots a mom in a grocery store b/c her baby is crying, basically
I really need to talk to other parents w/ toddlers who hardly ever slept, who had to FIGHT and wrestle to get even a 40 minute nap, who dreaded bedtime because it was always an epic struggle. Because I am at my wits end here folks (this is not a post asking for advice)
Thought the acting on BEEF was next level and want to say let’s not let this clearly very bad dude overshadow the show’s accomplishments but I thought about it for one second longer and realized everyone involved knew he is by his own admission a rapist and overlooked it
Freelance writing advice is fine but you can give 100000 million pitch workshops that simply aren’t useful if you’re struggling against a system that favors a handful of writers, isn’t transparent about how it commissions stories, & disincentivizes even replying to queries
@iWatchiAm
They just made this frail woman sit out there on a brisk day and make this devastating announcement without her husband, as though she alone was somehow to blame for “disappearing.” Its just beyond weird
Stopped reading at "youth is a superpower." Youth is something that everyone has for a short time, and sometimes it makes you hot for a second, but then its gone and you realize it was was never that important. And it was definitely never a super power
Dev Patel on 'Monkey Man' being called the South-Asian 'John Wick':
"I'm a huge fan of the franchise but this film is born from my love of so much action cinema expanding from Bruce Lee to Sammo Hung to Jet Lee to Jackie Chan to the Korean cinema and also Bollywood [...]".
The responses to this tweet from people attempting to justify this murder are so unhinged and violent that it’s time to mute. I hope you all get the help you so desperately need. ✌🏼
If you paid journalists fairly you’d actually get some incredible reporting from marginalized communities, instead we just get the same recycled trend pieces and the occasional (incredible) pro publica report some smart editor took a chance on. It’s incredibly frustrating b/c…
writing about a time you behaved terribly is not an endorsement of that behavior, and neither is admitting that you enjoyed the writing about about bad behavior. our culture's current obsession w/ moral clarity is behind all this pearl clutching, and it's the killer of good art
Ben Affleck and JLO getting married is my MET gala. My Oscars. It’s the biggest day of the year. It’s everything. It’s beyond my ability to adequately process and respond
@cmdicely
@AdaFrame
Lynching is associated with a very specific period in US history which i think you are well aware of but thank you for the history lesson anyway
Today marks my first day as associate editor at Parents. I’ve been working toward this job since I started out in digital media. This is also a day of endings. The end of my time in food media, and as a freelancer. But for now all I feel is gratitude and excitement.
Some professional news: I'm officially taking over the lead editor role on the
@MatadorNetwork
food + drink vertical! i'm excited & nervous for this new responsibility & looking forward to working w/ new writers this year. say hi at the normal place: elisabeth
@matadornetwork
.com
if ur a freelancer noticing that your pitches aren't landing as frequently, your ideas aren't the issue. editors are disappearing (not their fault). even 2 years ago landing stories wasn't exactly a breeze, but it wasn't the teeth-grindingly arduous slog that is these days either
I’m so mad at that tweet that’s like no one likes people who bring a book to the bar. Sitting quietly reading your little book, ordering your little drink (and tipping well), not causing any drama for the bartender — this actually makes u a very good bar patron.
For the
@munchies
package STATE OF THE SUBURBS, I pay tribute to that restaurant in your hometown where all the waiters know you & the decor hasn’t changed in like 30 years. If you ask nicely I’ll tell you where to eat in my tiny jersey suburb
Was wondering when people were gonna start yelling at me over the pretty innocuous take that a good show is tainted by the involvement of a rapist and it has finally begun
I have a rare professional and personal news combo: first, after four life changing years at matador network I am leaving the travel industry and joining the food e-commerce team at Dotdash Meredith where I’ll be a writing shopping content. Second, it is my birthday! Okay bye!!
All joke aside literally all the pitch calls and editor emails I have tracked down come from Twitter. Being real when I say I don’t think I could freelance without it
It’s a little bit hard to talk about this openly on here b/c sometimes it feels like the only thing people want to share is wins but I am really having a hard time landing a story atm. I’m going to keep sending pitches and pushing, it’s just demoralizing.
i just saw that a huge outlet ran a story i had been pitching for months that no one wanted. i never pitched that outlet and im sure the story is great. so i don't feel like my idea was stolen. but its still the sort of thing that feels oddly devastating and deeply frustrating
Hello! It was a dream come true to interview and write about
@foodwishes
and here it is for Munchies. Thank you
@rbhattacharya
for giving this piece a home!
i think to survive freelance writing you need to constantly have the rocky theme music playing in your head because you're going to get knocked down so much and its so demoralizing and the only thing you can do if you want to keep doing it is pick yourself up and keep running
@sonnerly
okay! i'm sorry to hear she's struggling. i hope she can figure out a way to make money that doesn't involve humiliating and traumatizing her children
@zachsilberberg
even weirder given that they intentionally wrote out sokka's "sexism" but decided what really belonged in there was a graphic depiction of genocide.
okay, i guess have to be explicit: if your pitch abt the food of a certain country/culture includes any variation of the phrase "i also dated a person from this country/culture" i will probably pass. your dating history is not relevant to any story that i personally would edit
@OslersBeast
Yes, and I actually have no issue with what plastic surgery or body modification. I feel like people think I am making a judgement here, like saying because he looks his age he looks bad. No. He just looks 45, despite swapping blood with another human in an attempt to look young
i'm coming up on 1 full year of freelancing full time after being a staff editor for four years (although technically that job was categorized as freelance even though it was 9-5). anybody who makes a full career out of freelance writing is a legend b/c this industry is not easy
@brigidkeely
Somebody else who hates co-sleeping come sit by me!! All the mommy blogs were like being near your baby will bring you contentment and bliss. But my baby punches in her sleep so.
I think ultimately my issue is not necessarily that this guy thinks Indian food only uses one spice which is factually inaccurate and also stupid, but more so that it was printed in a “reputable” paper while POC food writers struggle to break into this industry
It implies that anyone not doing that is just being a lazy journalist trying to get away with pitching a story without doing the real work. Actually it just takes a lot of resources to report a story well which we need before we can get started
Any NYC (specifically manhattan) folks have restaurant recommendations for **solo** dinners? I have been blowing through my restaurant wish list lately, and want to try a couple new places this month (superiority burger new location already on my list!!!)
pitch call: I'm looking for indigenous writers to pitch me stories pegged to RESERVATION DOGS; pitches should have a strong sense of place (ie how Oklahoma is represented in the show); rate is $150. elisabeth
@matadornetwork
.com
does freelance writer twitter have a stance on sending two pitches in an email at once (first time pitching the editor)? i've never personally done it before, but wondering what the etiquette -- is it too overwhelming? or totally acceptable?
Btw it’s not ur god given right to go anywhere. I say that as a former travel editor. You do it b/c you have money and you have access. but it’s not 1 of ur human rights, like clean water, to stomp around somebody’s home w/ a mai tai. That’s some manifest destiny level thinking
I feel honored and amazed that I got to write about Deep Space Nine, toxic masculinity, and the show's best power couple for
@StarTrek
- kind of a dream come true honestly!
to me, every tweet that is like "you too can make 10k per month freelancing" sounds like opening line of an MLM pitch (sorry if this is mean, maybe i am just jealous!)
Superfoods, guilty pleasure, and diet are among the words banned from the way I talk and write about food in 2020. I won't be participating in a culture of shame around eating for one second longer.
having a sad girl episode today. feeling incredibly sorry for myself. but does anyone else as a writer feel very fragile now, like things are just so hard and discouraging at the moment
the ozempic article reminds me how much i love food and eating and how much i would love to love those things unconditionally but the way our society is structured, every bite feels fraught and complicated. truthfully, i just want to eat what i want and be left alone
PR pitches about Women's History Month remind me how tired i am of being a strong woman. Where are my perpetually tired, always a little bit cold, I'm skipping the gym today, dehydrated, working from the couch women.
i have a story to assign which requires interviewing a coffee expert (who i am already connected with) about their favorite cities for coffee in america. you should be enthusiastic about coffee and have experience with journalistic interviews. rate is $250, dm me
Got my FIRST ever professional headshots back today and I'm pretty obsessed despite the fact that I have major anxiety around having my photo taken and never feel comfortable with how I look on camera. Yet this feels like such grown up move and I'm proud of myself for doing it!
@lemonsand
does this person think anyone can quit their job, uproot their lives, move to a new state, and find a new job in an unfamiliar city on a whim? does he understand how expensive that would be (moving costs alone)? factors like leaving family & depleting savings make this impossible
There is no such thing as clean eating. You are not dirty or impure if you don’t have the time/money/energy or even the desire to eat the food some random guy on Twitter deems healthy. The suggestion that if only we gave up pasta and French fries we’d be happy is so toxic
kensington palace is so inept at PR, did they really think a 2-line statement that basically amounted to "everyone fuck off" was really going to call off the dogs. its a video of her waving from the window, or nothing at this point
this is such a small, insignificant joy but i after seven years of working food media, I got my first piece of Le Creuset cookware in the mail today, and I am very excited
Does it though? There’s no television show so good that it’s worth willingly working with a rapist to make it. Dave Choe was not indispensable to the production. They could have cast someone else but they wanted to work with their friend. That’s on them.
Shit. Beef deserves better than to be tanked by David Choe’s history of rape normalization. But what he boasted about was grotesque, and if he did it—he claims now he didn’t—it was criminal. And the actions that have been taken since then to stonewall have only made things worse.
Not to be dramatic but I feel like there’s a possibility that the freelance writing / journalism industry as it exists right now for better or for worse will collapse if Twitter shuts down
as a freelancer myself (and editor) i feel like i can say that sometimes the etiquette feels a bit unruly. followups are necessary in this line of work, but emailing on monday to ask if i read your email you sent over the weekend is why i wish we could abolish email forever
I feel like I’m going bananas everyday listening to people on here trying to equate feeling uncomfortable on an Ivy league campus with not being able to leave your house to get your infant clean water because a soldier is pointing a gun at you. Get serious!!!
I’m looking for lots of new writer pals to follow on Instagram! I’m at @/burtsherman …probably not going to be too big on posting on my grid anymore but find me in the stories!
Probably not articulating this well but as a culture we need to stop using mental illness as a cover for causing serious harm. Rape and racism are not inevitable stops for mentally ill people along the path to healing. This language causes even more stigma toward mental ill ppl
‘Beef’ creator Lee Sung Jin, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong released a statement to Variety, calling David Choe’s “fabricated” rape story “undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing” but he’s “put in the work to get the mental health support he needed.”
If there's a writer out there you constantly compare yourself to or wonder if you'll ever be "as good" or "as talented" as that person, remember that everybody gets edited and you have no idea what their back and forths look like with their editors
The fact that I used to freelance write juicy features relatively regularly and now that flow of work has pretty much stalled out completely is my main source of sadness and frustration. It’s absolutely that my pitches aren’t hitting but also…
I understand why people find her preachy and self-righteous but she's 100% right on this one. And she doesn't even touch on the fact that Coco Chanel was a Nazi collaborator. A literal Nazi!!
Jameela Jamil slams ‘famous feminists’ who attended the Met Gala to celebrate ‘known bigot’ Karl Lagerfeld:
“A lot of famous feminists chose to celebrate at the highest level, a man who was so publicly cruel to women, to fat people, to immigrants and sexual assault survivors.”
Nobody in this thread understands how journalism, publishing, or fact checking works. There is no way her story wasn’t verified a million different ways. If she made it up and it somehow got printed anyway, editors would lose their jobs, it would be an epic scandal
The more I consider the details from the scam article, the less plausible I find them. Certain things she claims don't really ring true. I think a much more plausible version of events is she got caught in a romance scam and is trying to hide it from her husband
some people really don't want to live in public spaces. they truly believe everywhere they go should look and conform to country club standards. they resent having to interact w/ aspects of society that are egalitarian b/c their self worth is based on the idea they're special
everyone should feel a real sense of foreboding after this latest round of media layoffs. it's not just writers that suffer, readers should be extremely wary of capricious bosses who care less about quality and talent and more about their own bottom line.
I am THE worst candidate for freelance writing. It takes me a whole work day to write a pitch I actually like, and then I'm like, totally exhausted afterwards.
you know when editors post pitch calls and thread examples of stories they've edited in the past? they should also post successful pitches they've commissioned. i feel like that would be just as helpful
hi, i am looking for a minnesota BASED writer who can potentially travel to the state's largest candy store in Jordan, before it closes on Nov 27, and write about their experience. rate is $200. DMs open :)
Some ~*professional*~ news. This is my dream job and I’m sincerely honored that I have been given this opportunity. Watch this space for deep dives on delicious things you can eat with your mouth!!!
I’m on vacation & it’s super late & I have been indulging so here it goes: there is a current darling of the food world who was so unbelievably rude & unkind to me in public & I will never get over it & I think abt it every time they show up on my feed. I’ll never say who it was