This note from Michael M——— , responding to Celine Nguyen, resonates a lot with me. One of the things I often say about millennial academics is that everything (everything!) about our professional lives is downstream of the 2008 financial crisis. There were always more PhDs than tenure-track jobs, but post-2008, we entered a new world. Fewer positions, greater power for existing gatekeepers, more fear about alienating the tiny number of established scholars in your field who might plausibly write a rec for you or give you a job. My position is and will continue to be that the only way we’ll see anything like a millennial intellectual movement is if those of us inside the academy start to make common cause with those outside of the academy, rather than incessantly genuflecting to the Gen X/Boomers who are currently at the helm. This doesn’t need to manifest simply or primarily as antagonism. But it also can’t manifest as anti-work defeatism, or as the resigned repetition of the moves we’ve been doing for decades.