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We’re Taking The Pickup To OKC!

Mark your calendars for October 24 for a day at the library.

3:17 PM CDT on September 30, 2026

Great news, Pickup readers — we’ve partnered with the Metropolitan Library System in Oklahoma City to host a one-day symposium on the subject of media and culture, two things we’re very much about.

The symposium will be held at the Ronald J. Norick Downtown library in Oklahoma City from 10am to 4pm on Saturday, October 24, where I’ll host a keynote conversation with The New Yorker longform godhead (and Stillwater High School graduate) Burkhard Bilger, who is one of the great craftsmen in modern magazine writing. If you haven’t read his terrifying new story about the tick bites that cause alpha-gal syndrome, you should absolutely do that.

Here’s the agenda for the rest of the symposium, which we’ve organized in collaboration with the library. After the keynote we’ll host a series of panels with a slate of Oklahoma critics, artists, reporters, editors and readers, which you can check out below.

10am-11:30am | How To Pitch A Magazine, a workshop led by The Pickup. Please RSVP here if you plan to attend the workshop.

noon-1pm | Keynote Conversation with Burkhard Bilger

1:30 p.m. | New Gen Z and Alpha Media Habits
1:30 p.m. | Public Art’s Role in Creating Culture

3 p.m. | Criticism as Journalism
3 p.m. | The Future of Political Writing in Oklahoma

I’m quite excited for the conversations we’ll have on these panels, and hope you all can join us for them. Check our social media in the coming weeks to find out who will be participating in these panels, but if you're a regular reader of ours you'll definitely recognize several of the names on the list.

To RSVP for the rest of the event, please click here.

If you liked this story, please share it! Your referrals help The Pickup reach new readers, and they'll be able to read a few articles for free before they encounter our paywall.

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