Get to know our editors and writers with a New York Minute, our interview series in which we ask staff about their lives and their careers. Next up: writer-at-large Rebecca Traister.

In a news environment that often has more clutter than substance, how do you decide what to cover?

I wish I could tell you there was some formula. There’s not. In these past few years, when things have moved so fast and so much on my beat has happened politically and culturally, I cannot count the scores of stories that have whizzed by me: stories that, in other periods of my career, I would have jumped on but now I look at helplessly as they go by because I’m working on one of the 20 other stories I need to be covering. It’s been very hard, and there are so many stories I wish I’d had time to write.

Your latest book, Good and Mad, is about the transformative power of female anger. What was the seed that inspired you to explore this history?

It’s a topic I’d been writing about without knowing I’d been writing about it for years. So much of writing about political organizing and the history of marginalized people in the United States is inherently a story about the anger of women, but women, including me, have been trained to not take anger seriously, not consider it politically consequential.

In the wake of the 2016 election, I was sorting through what my responsibilities were moving forward — as a journalist and as a feminist and as a white woman, a member of the demographic that has long voted to uphold the kinds of political systems that had just found their apotheosis in the election of Donald Trump. And I felt like I couldn’t think clearly because I was so angry; the anger, which I’d been taught was irrational and not valid in and of itself, was surely clouding my judgment, I thought. And then my husband said, in very casual conversation, “Maybe you should write about anger.” As soon as he made this suggestion, it’s like I was at the optometrist when they put a new lens on. And the idea that, instead of trying to move around or avoid or not look directly at anger, I could stare straight at it, take it seriously — so much became clear. This was not about my own anger but about the anger that had undergirded so many of the stories I’d already been telling in my work, the anger that had shaped so much of the organizing and social and political transformations that had happened in the United States.

What advice would you give to readers who want to become more politically or socially active but aren’t sure where to begin?

Two things: First, reading and learning the country’s history is a form of engagement that we’re too rarely encouraged to undertake. So my first suggestion is to start reading journalism and books that seek to put today’s politics in a historic context and then follow the names and references to other books. So much of what’s happening now has roots in what’s happened before, and I think it can be both galvanizing and weirdly comforting to see the bigger picture emerge. Second, and this is really the only piece of solid advice I give anyone, is to talk about what’s motivating or frustrating you with others and make it a point to ask them about what’s driving and frustrating them; listen to what they say and begin to form the connections that could become a network, which is the beginning of organizing. We’re encouraged not to talk about the stuff we’re mad about because it’ll be disruptive or impolite or we don’t know enough about it to sound knowledgable, but in fact, when we don’t talk about it, what happens is we remain isolated, and that’s not an easy position from which to become engaged in making change. So find someone — a friend, a neighbor, someone at work, a family member, a person who’s organizing on the street — and start asking them how they feel, what they think, what they want to do to make change. Tell them what you’re thinking, what questions you have. It’s a lot easier to track down a meeting or plan a protest or begin the process of unionizing or start volunteering for a campaign if you have someone to do it with.

You can follow Rebecca on Twitter.

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