Jodi Kantor said she was horrified by what had happened at Columbia University when she was asked early last year to give the commencement address to students in New York. She said she could not simply arrive and speak without first talking to the graduates themselves.
"I’ll do it if I can speak to the students first," Kantor told the university. What she heard changed the shape of the project. Several students told her they were united in anxiety over how to begin their life’s work when everything felt so broken, and one question kept coming back: "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?"
Those conversations became the seed for How to Start, a book she wrote in the early mornings before heading to her job as a reporter at. Kantor said the idea took hold around the same time her life was shifting in several directions at once: she was diagnosed with breast cancer and successfully treated, her daughter left for college, and she turned 50. Those changes, she said, happened in a flash.
Kantor said the diagnosis pushed her toward writing in a different register, one that tried to connect with readers beyond her reporting. "I feel like the subtext of my journalism is always, like, we can find answers, and I wanted to make that text," she said. She also described the book as a response to the students who came to her with their uncertainty, adding, "If there are five young people in the universe who would be helped by this book, I want to act on that."
The Columbia assignment landed at a particularly fraught moment for the university. The campus was in chaos amid pro-Palestinian protests, student expulsions, arrests, detention by immigration officials and a Trump-ordered $400 million withdrawal of federal funding that was later reinstated as part of a settlement. Kantor, who called Columbia her alma mater and said it was a place she loved, also described it as a place that stands for discussion, ideas and progress.
The book is also part of a broader career built on reporting that often asks where answers can be found in plain sight. Kantor and Megan Twohey reported on allegations against Harvey Weinstein and helped trigger the global #MeToo movement, later sharing the Pulitzer Prize with Ronan Farrow. She had previously investigated the US Supreme Court for, and she said students on campus were not alone in their doubts. "She and her friends were asking the same questions," Kantor said.
That is what gives How to Start its force now. It is not a book about certainty. It is a book that came from a reporter trying to meet fear, grief and ambition at the same time, and from a university moment so unsettled that even a commencement speech had to begin with a conversation first.