Dayna Carney

" Rick was traveling a lot during the making of this book. He had no printer available and had difficulty making decisions on his small computer screen. We printed out all of his page layouts to size and sent them to wherever he was on the globe. Sometimes I would review the choices with him on a Zoom call, or sometimes he'd make a firm decision

Even so, I was also a teenager, making decisions based on the visibility that our culture teaches us to desire. I knew that my audience wanted to feel authenticity from me. To give that to them, I revealed pieces of myself that I might have been wiser to keep private.

This element of neighbourly communication is hugely important for early warning systems, says Jennifer Trivedi, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center.

"Often, when I ask people in the field where they heard about an incoming hurricane, or changing floodwaters, they talk about hearing it from

" This book is Rick Rubin’s design. While I often made recommendations, I did not make any design choices. All of the choices were Rick’s."

Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are.   When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible   dilemma.

Black teenage girls are the invisible tastemakers creating and popularizing some of the biggest trends simply by being their authentic selves. It’s the everyday Black girl, without a platform or the machine of capitalism behind her, who exudes cool without having to try.

I was entering adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic,” I had to be the product I had long been posting online, as opposed to the person I was growing up to be.