Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker, formerly the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, went to the University of Virginia, and got her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. Her book of essays, Trick Mirror, was a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, and others. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Trick MirrorReflections on Self-Delusion
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.
Trick Mirror:Reflections on Self-Delusion -
Trick MirrorReflections on Self-Delusion
Spandex—the material in both Spanx and expensive leggings—was invented during World War II, when the military was trying to develop new parachute fabrics. It is uniquely flexible, resilient, and strong. (“Just like us, ladies!” I might scream, onstage at an empowerment conference, blood streaming from my eyes.) It feels comforting to wear high-quality spandex—I imagine it’s what a dog feels like in a ThunderShirt—but this sense of reassurance is paired with an undercurrent of demand.
Trick Mirror:Reflections on Self-Delusion -
Trick MirrorReflections on Self-Delusion
In real life, women are so much more obedient. Our rebellions are so trivial and small. Lately, the ideal women of Instagram have started chafing, just a little, against the structures that surround them. The anti-Instagram statement is now a predictable part of the model/influencer social media life cycle: a beautiful young woman who goes to great pains to maintain and perform her own beauty for an audience will eventually post a note on Instagram revealing that Instagram has become a bottomless pit of personal insecurity and anxiety. She’ll take a weeklong break from the social network, and then, almost always, she will go on exactly as before. Resistance to a system is presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose.
Trick Mirror:Reflections on Self-Delusion
“It's easy to write about things as you wish they were—or as others tell you they must be. It's much harder to think for yourself, with the minimum of self-delusion. It's even harder to achieve at a moment like this, when our thoughts are subject to unprecedented manipulation, monetization, and surveillance. Yet Tolentino has managed to tell many inconvenient truths in Trick Mirror—and in enviable style. This is a whip-smart, challenging book that will prompt many of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror. It filled me with hope.” —Zadie Smith
“The millennial Susan Sontag, a brilliant voice in cultural criticism . . . She remains engaged with her subjects even as she scratches her head and wonders why we do what we do. Even better: She writes like a dream.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post [on Trick Mirror]
“In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino’s thinking surges with a fierce, electric lyricism . . . She’s horrified by the world and also in love with it. Her truths are knotty but her voice is crystalline enough to handle them. She’s always got skin in the game; she knows we all do . . . She refuses easy morals, false binaries, and redemptive epiphanies, but all that refusal is in the service of something tender, humane, and often achingly beautiful.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering
Jia Tolentino is more than a chronicler of our particular moment; she is our critic and translator, a decoder who can see the profound in the ordinary. Her debut collection of essays is a marvel, a book that captures what seems unknowable about the internet and what it is to grow up in its orbit, to become misshapen and seduced by it, defined by it. Tolentino chooses rigor and complexity even at the expense of comfort, interrogating her own complicity in the culture she critiques. These essays are compulsively readable, and shot through with surprise, offering us the delights of eloquence and the satisfactions of her deep, inquiring mind.