…s worth, have a high-paying magazine assignment wherein I got to work at the Oregon Zoo for a week.) But I also would never have imagined that even the most worship-worthy magazine would, in 2021, pay writers a tiny fraction of what it paid in 1996. I would never have imagined that the media landscape I wanted so badly to participate in would eventually devolve into a mud pit of fungible facts and competing confirmation biases. I would never have guessed that a day would come when I longed to do work that was rooted not just in ideas but in actual events that I could evaluate up close and in real life.
