In writing that article, and this book, I haven’t cured anyone’s burnout, including my own. But one thing did become incredibly clear: This isn’t a p… - Anne Helen Petersen

[Burnout] isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one — and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.

Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work: the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy. Which is why the success of these unruly women is inextricable from the confluence of attitudes toward women in the 2010s: the public reembrace of feminism set against a backdrop of increased legislation of women’s bodies, the persistence of the income gap, the policing of how women’s bodies should look and act in public, and the election of Trump. Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

According to Pew Research Center, the youngest millennials, born in 1996, will turn twenty-four in 2020. The oldest, born in 1981, will turn thirty-nine. And population projections suggest there are now more of us in the United States — 73 million — than any other generation.

But that lie – whose purpose was to allow white people to continue to think they weren’t racist, even when their actions and words indicated otherwise – was one in which the Williams sisters, like their father, refused to participate. They rejected the idea that they would assimilate to the white codes of the tennis world. Instead, they posed the question of their difference over and over again – in every clack of their densely beaded hair, in every powerful serve.