Jodi Kantor was asked early last year to give the commencement address at Columbia University in New York, but she said she would only do it if she could speak to the students first. When she met them, investigative journalist found a class living through campus chaos, protest, arrests and fear, and she turned that conversation into a book about beginning when life feels unsettled.
Columbia was in turmoil amid continuing pro-Palestinian protests. Kantor said students were expelled, arrested or detained by immigration officials, and she said President Trump had ordered a $400m withdrawal of federal funding that was later reinstated as part of a settlement with the administration. She was horrified by what she saw and wanted to hear directly from the students before speaking to them herself.
They told her they were united not by politics but by anxiety over what comes next. One student line stayed with her: “Our class, despite all of its political differences, is united in anxiety over one question. When everything feels so broken, how do we start? How do we find our life’s work in this environment?” That exchange became the seed for How to Start, a book Kantor wrote in the early mornings before heading to work at.
The timing was personal as well as professional. Around the same period, Kantor was diagnosed with breast cancer and successfully treated, turned 50 and watched her daughter leave for college. “Those all happened in a flash. Like, tick-tock, do it now, don’t wait,” she said, adding that the diagnosis encouraged her to write the book. She also said, “If there are five young people in the universe who would be helped by this book, I want to act on that.”
How to Start is framed as advice for students trying to enter adulthood, but also for readers who feel stalled, rerouted or ready to change course. Kantor, whose reporting on Harvey Weinstein with Megan Twohey helped drive the global #MeToo movement and earn a Pulitzer prize shared with Ronan Farrow, has spent recent years investigating the US Supreme Court. In that work and in this book, she said, she is trying to make explicit what has long run beneath her journalism: “I feel like the subtext of my journalism is always, like, we can find answers, and I wanted to make that text.”
For Kantor, the book began as a response to a frightened class at Columbia, but it ends as something larger: an argument that starting is still possible, even after disruption, illness and doubt. That is the point she carried from the campus and into the pages of How to Start.
