What’s a Freelance Writer’s Endgame Today?

When I was a kid I didn’t know that freelancers existed. I thought that Pitchfork housed hundreds of salaried critics in a large office space. I wanted to be one of them. To go to work and listen to records. To spend a career in the fellowship of other obsessives. To make a down payment off of middling Kaiser Chiefs reviews. It was my first dream.
I went to journalism school at the University of Texas at Austin because I thought I could parlay a couple years of SXSW coverage into some