Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 7:00 PM CT

How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work
A FAN webinar featuring Jodi Kantor, in conversation with Jennifer Breheny Wallace (FAN ’23, ’26).

REGISTRATION: www.bit.ly/KantorFANWebinar

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.

Sponsored by FAN, in partnership with Avoca D37, Barrington D220, Bennett Day School, Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School, British International School of Chicago, Catherine Cook School, Compass Health Center, Countryside Day School, Evanston Scholars, Evanston Township HS D202, Family Service Center, Foundation 65, The Frances Xavier Warde School, Francis W. Parker School, Glenview Public Library, Gorton Center, Hyde Park Day School, Illinois Student Assistance Commission, Kenilworth D38, Lake Bluff D65, Lake Forest Community High School D115, Latin School of Chicago, Leo Catholic High School, Libertyville D70, Lycée Français de Chicago, Magnetar Capital, North Shore Country Day, Northwestern University Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy, Pope John XXIII School, Regina Dominican High School, Resurrection College Prep High School, Rogers Park Montessori School, Santa Clara University School of Law, Science & Arts Academy, The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, Stevenson High School D125, Township High School D113, Township High School D214, TrueNorth Educational Cooperative #804, Wilmette Public Library, Wolcott College Prep, Woodlands Academy, Youth & Opportunity United.