#people: jia tolentino

[tayfabe75]

"What do I mean when I say I don't care?" he asked. "What is that apathy I speak of? It's an exhaustion, maybe. The truth is, when I go home, this is not the shit I'm dealing with. I'm not dealing with the crisis of masculinity. I'm dealing with how my mum's feeling, what Ross is going through. I'm trying to be in service to people." He was no longer invested in the project of being publicly correct. "I've done my decade of trying to be that," he said. "I'm more interested in actually being wrong, and people seeing that, and knowing what's right because of it."

May 29, 2023: Matty describes his disinterest in being publicly correct. (source 1, 2)

[snooooooooppy]

yesterday's 3AM research break

[timehascomeagain]

Ironic to say this on tumblr and no shade to this author bc this has made me think about writing in ways I havent done for so long and I love that I love to feel the pistons firing but I find this so interesting because for me, to draw on external artistic sources in my writing IS to be skeptical of how unique my living of my life is, it is a mode of situating myself within a larger conversation and making sense of what I'm saying in conjunction with what other people have said before me. I think there is no way to have a unique thought when being a personal essayist in the form that substack/"girlblogger"/the larger post-leslie jamieson post-larissa pham post-jenny zhang post-jia tolentino post-emily gould post-"men were largely interested in fetishising her water-logged corpse" milieu encourages & I do not trust people who believe that there is, there's just unique ways of saying it and even then half of everything you'll think is a unique way of saying it is just the shadow on the cave wall of something said by someone else. I'm not interested in writing which is not interested in its own lineage nor the pillars which support it

[funeral]

[Simone de Beauvoir] describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life. “If the young girl at about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” de Beauvoir writes, “it is because she feels defenseless before a dull fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is obsessed with this fate.”

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

[crossdreamers]

New York Times Contributors Say The Newspaper’s Coverage of Transgender People is Unprofessional and Destructive

A group of more than 170 trans, nonbinary, and cisgender contributors to the New York Times published an open letter on Wednesday, condemning the paper’s coverage of trans issues, Buzzfeed reports.

The letter, which was written in conjunction with the Freelance Solidarity Project, a group of freelance writers in the National Writers Union, was signed by journalists — including current Times staffers — politicians, novelists, and other news media workers. Prominent signatories included Cynthia Nixon, Pennsylvania state Sen. Nikil Saval, and writers like Rebecca Solnit and Jia Tolentino.

The letter — addressed to the associate managing editor for standards, Philip Corbett — draws attention to the last year of coverage in the Times, during which time, the group writes, the paper of record published 15,000 words across its front pages “debating the propriety of medical care for trans children.”

In the letter they put the current policy of the New York Times into a wider context, reminding them that the paper has been on the wrong side of history before:

As thinkers, we are disappointed to see the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and gender⁠-⁠affirming surgeries have been standard forms of care for cis and trans people alike for decades. 

Legal challenges to gender⁠-⁠nonconformity date back even further, with 34 cities in 21 states passing laws against cross⁠-⁠dressing between 1848 and 1900, usually enforced alongside so-called prohibitions against public indecency that disproportionately targeted immigrants, people of color, sex workers, and other marginalized groups. Such punishments are documented as far back as 1394, when police in England detained Eleanor Rykener on suspicion of the crime of sodomy, exposing her after an interrogation as “John.” This is not a cultural emergency.

You no doubt recall a time in more recent history when it was ordinary to speak of homosexuality as a disease at the American family dinner table—a norm fostered in part by the New York Times’ track record of demonizing queers through the ostensible reporting of science.

In 1963, the New York Times published a front⁠-⁠page story with the title “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” which stated that homosexuals saw their own sexuality as “an inborn, incurable disease”—one that scientists, the Times announced, now thought could be “cured.” The word “gay” started making its way into the paper. 

Then, in 1975, the Times published an article by Clifford Jahr about a queer cruise (the kind on a boat) featuring a “sadomasochistic fashion show.” On the urging of his shocked mother, Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger sent down the order: Stop covering these people. The Times style guide was updated to include the following dictum, which stood until 1987: “Do not use gay as a synonym for homosexual unless it appears in the formal, capitalized name of an organization or in quoted matter.”

New York Times have some really good and open minded journalists. It is time the editors made them write about transgender issues, and not the ones trapped in a transphobic mindset.

[hellyeahscarleteen]

New! My Little Copper Miracle (and what I had to go through for it to be mine)

"If, like me, you are catastrophically disorganized and chronically lazy when it comes to bodily maintenance, having an IUD is akin to a blessing. It’s in there, incandescent in all of its “over 99% effective” glory, and I never have to lift a finger when it comes to pregnancy⁠ prevention - not until it has to be removed, and in the case of the copper IUD, that’s after a five-year period⁠. No more paranoia. No - for me - hormonal side effects, weight gain, weight loss, or acne flare-ups. No more waiting in line in your sweatpants at the nearest pharmacy, hungover and ashamed, fielding judgment and unwarranted high pricing. The first time I was able to say to someone in low lighting, “Don’t worry, I have an IUD,” I felt a stupid, blissed out euphoria not entirely dissimilar to the experience of dissolving in Molly sweats beneath strobe lighting. So, yes, IUDs are largely a good thing, an important thing... But I don’t want to be dishonest about the very real pain that I and many others had to endure in the process of gaining access to this method of birth control. The most common question with regard to the IUD that I am asked by people with a uterus⁠ who are weighing up different forms of birth control, which all have their cons (in the words of Jia Tolentino: “It Sucked, I Took It Anyway: A Universal Memoir of Young Female Adulthood”), is, Did it hurt? My honest answer is always, Like hell. I know I am far from the only person with an IUD who feels this way. And I think that it is vital to be honest with someone who is considering partaking in a potentially invasive procedure - especially as many of the women I’ve talked to who have IUDs feel that they were not sufficiently warned of the pain they might endure during the process." You can read the rest of Emily Wilson's new piece about their experience getting their IUD and their feelings about the pain that was involved here, at Scarleteen.

[gatheringbones]

[“In talking about gentrification in New York City, you write about the “New People” who flocked to New York when it became a whitewashed symbol of post-9/11 patriotism. You say, “Their newness is not the problem,” since new people have always flocked to New York. What is the difference now?

It has long been a struggle to come up with a name for these people. When I started my blog, Vanishing New York, in 2007, I called them “yunnies,” a riff on yuppies that stood for Young Urban Narcissists. But that was too limiting, and too cutesy, so I dropped that. For the book, I wanted to coin some great term, but ended up with New People, which I’m not satisfied with either. What I mean is that these people are a new kind of personality type in the city. They’re not New because they’re newcomers; they’re New because they’re not like the sort of people who’ve historically flocked to the city and, specifically, to countercultural neighborhoods like the East Village. They often don’t feel quite human. They feel android-like, manufactured, and this is because — I believe — their personalities have been engineered by the culture of neoliberal capitalism, especially in the 2000s when social media spreads neoliberalism like a virus. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino just published an essay about “Instagram face,” what she calls a “single, cyborgian” look, and this is part of what I’m talking about. The New People are perfect neoliberal subjects, engineered to conform, perform and succeed, and this makes them quite violent in the way they enter and commandeer urban space — and in the way they approach people who are unlike them, who they see as beneath them. They are also violent toward themselves through de-subjectification, the process of hollowing themselves out. I find it difficult to empathize with them, though. I keep trying, but I feel so assaulted by them, I just can’t.

I love how you eavesdrop on your influencer neighbors to give us the flattened details of their lives. Surveillance has stifled so many of the possibilities of urban life, and yet here you’re flipping the gaze to examine the gawkers and their “contemptuous disregard.” What do you find?

“Flattened” is a good word and it describes well what happens when someone de-subjectifies themself; they smooth out all the bumps that make them human and particular. They are the cyborgian Instagram face, the flat sameness of the glossy catalog image, drained of all personality. And — here’s their violence — they aim to de-subjectify everything and everyone around them. This goes way beyond gentrification. This is about turning the entire urban landscape into a slick, frictionless, endlessly repeating Instagrammable scene, devoid of affect, risk and surprise. To create this nightmarish hollow city, many of us will have to be removed, and if we refuse to go, we will be controlled — by the police, by systems of surveillance, and by the contemptuous disregard that the New People throw like poison darts from their eyes. They are trying to annihilate us. To make us not exist.

At the beginning of COVID lockdown in New York, so many of these “New People” left the city.

The day lockdown began, in March 2020, they fled in droves. The people who stayed behind and roamed the streets were the sort of New Yorkers I used to know. I’m talking about the ordinary people who aren’t cyborgian, along with the poor and working class, the nonwhite, the queer, the weird, the unhoused, the old, the artists, basically everyone who’s not a New Person. So the city refilled with all this gorgeous subjectivity! It was like a cloud lifted and we could see each other again. We could feel each other and look at each other. We became un-alienated.”]

[tetw]

8 Great Essays about Social Media

The I in the Internet by Jia Tolentino - The Internet has gone from being a utopia where everything was possible to a place full of angry people obsessed with their own representation

The New Pornographers by Roxane Gay - It’s a TikTok world, creative and sprawling and strange and anarchic and tedious and gross and you can’t stop scrolling and you can’t stop looking and you just want more. So what’s the problem?

The Machine Always Wins by Richard Seymour - Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked?https://

My Instagram by Dayna Tortorici - We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift

The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety by Kyle Chayka - Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations. Do we want what the machines tell us we want?

The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino - How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look

What Was Twitter, Anyway? by Willy Staley - Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our Brains

The Age of Social Media Is Ending by Ian Bogost - It never should have begun

[transmutationisms]

I remember everyone was talking about jia tolentino’s instagram face essay as a companion piece to the everyone is beautiful but nobody is horny essay. Have you read it/do you have thoughts on it? Thanks!

i think one of jia tolentino's problems as a writer is that she often seems genuinely unaware of how limited her scope is and how it hampers her efforts to develop any social commentary applicable beyond her socioeconomic milieu. so for example, afaik she's right that a certain plastic surgery look has been popular in recent years with the instagram influencer / model / LA set (w/ some changes over time, like the even more recent popularity of buccal fat removal or that cat-eye facelift situation). but she talks about this as though it's like a universal condition of Modern Womanhood, even after pointing out that it costs a fuckload of money to actually have these procedures done lol. like it's the ig version of how like, legacy media journos are always banging on about what the twitterati think about the latest hbo show. these are like, tiny slices of the population who assume their own experiences are universal because they don't think poor and working class people count the same as them. it's almost funny. anyway i think the most interesting part of the instagram face essay is when she points out that the face in question is often aiming to be white, yet ambiguously 'ethnic'—much to unpack here about beauty standards and the role they play in discourses of racialisation, as well as how they're then shaped by the resultant 'scientific' ideas about phenotypic populations and racial categories. i wish the essay had said more about this. instead it felt like it got stuck on the idea that bodies under neoliberal capitalism are 'assets' to be 'improved' upon—which like, true, but not an entirely new phenomenon and it wasn't an analysis that had much to actually say about capitalism or biopolitics. this is connected to the above issue imo because fundamentally tolentino Doesn't Like Capitalism but also doesn't have much to say about it beyond how it makes Women (a coherent category...) feel.

[at-thestillpoint]

People I want to get to know better ✨

tagged by @writergirl28 — thank you!

last song: Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You) by Kelly Clarkson, because it's near the top of her This Is playlist on Spotify. Sometimes, you just have to listen to The American Idol, you know? This also reminds me that I should bring Britney Spears back into my rotation.

favorite color: I'm going with forest green today.

currently watching: I am currently unable to take in any new screen-based media that isn't coming at me in snippets that I can 2x through, so I've been re-watching House and The Newsroom in fits and starts, and avoiding thinking about a potential Newsroom AU.

last movie: For reasons named above, I cannot remember the last movie I watched.

current obsessions: reformer pilates (who am I, Glen Powell?), white nail polish, the pure chaos that is Big Ten (18) football, autumn, the fact that I can get cold brew with apple cider cold foam right now, that it's almost Blundstone weather, Kelly Clarkson, Kelly Clarkson and Miranda Lambert covering Good Luck, Babe, planning for Ireland this November

relationship status: I remain, forever, protecting my peace. But I was also at a panel tonight where a Tinder executive convinced me (I am susceptible to a pitch) to re-download the app, so there's that.

last thing I googled: "When We Cease to Understand the World" after hearing Jia Tolentino recommend it on The Ezra Klein Show

no pressure tags: If you're seeing this, consider yourself tagged!

[thistlecatfics]

This subject came up with my friend last week so here is my attempt at starting a list of the best writers/artists of my (millennial) generation.

Requirements: my subjective personal taste, staying power, being iconically millennial/speaking to my generation, big name in their field even if not big name overall, not just a social media shit-stirrer

Sally Rooney (novels)

Taylor Swift (songwriting)

Beyonce (performance/singing) (gen x cusp)

RF Kuang (fantasy) (gen z cusp)

Tamsyn Muir (scifi)

Ocean Vuong (poetry, literary fiction)

Jia Tolentino, Jamelle Bouie, Ezra Klein (commentary)

Ronan Farrow, Sarah Kliff (investigative journalism)

Ed Yong (science writing) (gen x cusp)

Lin Manuel Miranda (musicals) (gen x cusp)

Other writers/artists I considered: Casey McQuiston (new adult/romance), Leigh Bardugo (YA/fantasy), SA Chakraborty (fantasy), Kai Cheng Thom (?? instagram-y writing?), Chanel Miller (memoir/visual art), Lady Gaga (performance), Jon Favreau (speech writing), Amanda Gorman (poet) (gen z), adrienne maree brown (essays) (gen x)

Who am I missing? Who absolutely needs to be on this list? I'm particularly looking for more nonfiction writers, poets, visual artists and non-Americans since those are areas I'm less familiar with.

BONUS Gen X honorees because I kept thinking of people who turned out to be Gen X:

Emily Wilson (translation)

NK Jemisin (fantasy)

Patrick Radden Keefe (history)

Jessica Valenti, Moira Donegan, Ta-Nehisi Coates (political commentary)

Cheryl Strayed (advice columns)

Susanne Collins (YA)

Kiese Laymon (memoir, essays)

Junot Diaz (fiction, short stories)

Jhumpa Lahari (fiction, short stories)

[tayfabe75]

"Being Funny in a Foreign Language" ended up an album in pursuit of love, rendered plainly. "Before, I always debased myself when I became sincere," Healy told me. "I'd be sincere, and then I'd say, 'Oh, I'm only joking,' or 'Oh, I pissed myself,' or something else unglamorous to negate how much I just let you in." At one point, in the studio, he was recording vocals for a track that became "I'm in Love with You," and he kept trying to sneak a "not" into the chorus. Hann stopped him, and said, "Dude, five albums in, everyone knows you're funny. So if you want to say 'I'm in love with you' then just do it. Say it. That's where you're at." Healy told me, "All of the things that used to define my work, or the nihilistic part of one's twenties—postmodernism, addiction, individualism—they're all cool and sexy and appropriate at the time, but, for me now, are those the things I yearn for?" In his personal life, he had found himself wishing for consistency and reliability, "the things we get from a partner that we don't get from the rest of the world." "I think Matty is a deeply sincere person, who can, at different points, be misunderstood because of how much he enjoys a bit," Antonoff said. "If you don't know him, if you don't get him, because you're not really tuned in to the work, you might assume a cynicism that is literally not there." He mentioned the song "Part of the Band." The lyrics are inflected with Healy's persona games, his compulsion to comment on the politics of pop culture, and at least three references to ejaculation. Healy sings, "Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? / Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke / Calling his ego imagination?" And yet it's a beautiful—and, somehow, even understated—song, set to a "Street Hassle"-style backdrop of lilting, bittersweet strings. "That to me is the most exciting part of him and his work," Antonoff said. "That the façade of it can beg so many questions, but that the heart is still so obvious—that it's this deep sincerity, and a longing for love, to love, to be loved."

May 29, 2023: Matty describes the motivation behind the tone shift for The 1975's latest album, 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language'. (source 1, 2)

[andreablog2]

I think smartphone face is different from jia tolentinos Instagram face where people FaceTune, angle their selfies & get surgeries the same way and more to do with the fact that people are healthier today and so many of the old portraits of Europeans are of multi generationally inbred nutrient deficient anglo saxons who wanted to have their most unique feature’s highlighted because it was a status symbol of the time for people to know exactly what you looked like. Now people also get braces and are healthier/have more genetic diversity, want to generally look average. The fact that the former became seen as “classic beauty” was political and not out of what even is beautiful. So telling people they have a smartphone face is kind of idk…it’s just telling they don’t apply this smartphone face concept to non white people.

[luxe-pauvre]

More than twenty years ago, the writer Michael Goldhaber observed, in Wired, that the Internet drowns its users in information while constantly increasing information production; this makes attention a scarce and desirable resource—the “natural economy of cyberspace.” Goldhaber speculated that, when the “attention economy” had matured, nearly everyone would have her own Web site, and he warned readers that “increasing demand for our limited attention will keep us from reflecting, or thinking deeply (let alone enjoying leisure).” In other words, he roughly outlined the social-media age. Social-media companies monetize everyday selfhood: our preferences and personal data are tracked and sold to advertisers; our relationships are framed as potentially profitable conduits; we continually capture one another’s lucrative attention by performing some version of who we think we are. Over time, we have absorbed these terms and conditions: we might retain very little of the value we create, but we have allowed social media to make us feel valuable. These platforms encourage compulsive use by offering forms of social approval—likes on Facebook and Instagram, retweets on Twitter—that are intermittent and unpredictable, as though you’re playing a slot machine that tells you whether or not people love you. Dependency, eventually, assumes its own logic.

Jia Tolentino, What It Takes To Put Your Phone Away

[bookloure]

Twenty-eight days to go before we say goodbye to 2023. What is time, really? Anyway, a month's ending means a wrap-up in this space. So here are eight books I managed to finish in November, with mini-reviews: 5⭐ 📖 Tagalog Bestsellers of the Twentieth Century: A History of the Book in the Philippines by Patricia May B. Jurilla—this is my favorite reading journey of the month for sure! 📖Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë—i love this book, but I hate everyone. well, everyone Hareton. i love him to death! 4⭐ 📱Garlic & the Vampire by Bree Paulsen—such a cute and wholesome graphic novel! I'm definitely picking up the sequel. 📱Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit by Jen Campbell—jen is my favorite book reviewer, but I think her poetry is not for me. still, I enjoyed this very personal collection of hers. 3⭐ 📱Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Kristen R. Ghodsee—very much a primer book. i recommend it to young people interested in the topic! 🎧Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino—this would have benefitted me more had I read this is 2019 when it was published. now it just tells me things I already know, and nothing in the writing particularly wowed me. 📱Braised Pork by An Yu—not bad. but i was hoping to like this more than i did. would recommend it to fans of weird books! 2.5⭐ 📖 Armor by John Bengan—ah, i love the idea behind this short story collection. unfortunately, the writing did not gel with me.

[julictcapulet]

re. your post about nonfiction, do you have any nonfiction books that you would recommend to people who haven't read any ever?

these are some of the ones i've read that i either loved or just ones that i think offer a bit to the conversation. if anyone has more recs for me, please send some <3

know my name, chanel miller (10/10)

crying in h mart, michelle zauner

i'm glad my mom died, jennette mccurdy

everything i know about love, dolly alderton

trainwreck: the women we love to hate, mock, and fear...and why, sady doyle

dead blondes and bad mothers: monstrosity, patriarchy, and the fear of female power, sady doyle

trick mirror: reflections on self-delusion, jia tolentino (there are people who hate this one, and then there are communications students. i'm a communications student)

bad feminist: essays, roxane gay (really great introductory book to nonfiction/feminist theory)

all about love: new visions, bell hooks

call them by their true names: american crises, rebecca solnit

empireland: how imperialism has shaped modern britain, sathnam sanghera (a little tedious for me, but an important read nevertheless)

the madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination, sandra m. gilbert & susan gubar

mediocre: the dangerous legacy of white male power, ijeoma oluo (READ THIS!!!!)

men who hate women: from incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all, laura bates

a curious history of sex, kate lister (served absolute cunt)