#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

[drdemonprince]

a thing about me is i love the fuck out of a longform essay, and an essay collection is even better because it's just a fuck ton of longform essays. People were underwhelmed by Jia Tolentino throwing out 10,000 words about Little House on the Prairie and female child heroines but i love it. Lauren Oyler failed to capitalize on her literary potential supposedly by waxing philosophical about autofiction and making an elaborate yet thin argument that sally rooney somehow counts as that instead of writing a novel, but you know what, i love it. i love people following the threads of their fascinations in ponderous fashion. i love going on a whole long journey, i love the "attempt" of the essay, the finding of itself, the losing the plot, the more unnecessary the aside the better, i want the intellectual fascination and personal bias of it all. gimme an essay. yum yum

[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.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was murdered on the street in midtown Manhattan, on Wednesday morning, 20 minutes before sunrise. He was in town for an investors’ convention, and had worked for UnitedHealthcare for more than two decades—a company that is part of UnitedHealth Group, a health-insurance conglomerate valued at $560 billion.

The particulars of this murder are strange and remarkable: it occurred in public; the suspected shooter went to Starbucks beforehand; he got away from the scene via bicycle; he has not yet been found. But the public reaction has been even wilder, even more lawless. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than 15,000 likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN.

To most Americans, a company like UnitedHealthcare represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it, Jia Tolentino writes. UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: at 32 per cent, it is double the industry average. “Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another. . . . For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death.”

“The only way to end up in a situation where a C.E.O. of a health-insurance company is reflexively viewed as a dictatorial purveyor of suffering is through a history of socially sanctioned death,” Tolentino continues. “Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?” Read about the reaction to Thompson’s murder.

(The New Yorker)

[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

[taylortruther]

"the 1989 essay just felt like a great example of how many writers project so much onto taylor." Taylor has kind of become The One Woman everybody uses as a subject for (white) feminist critique or analysis. No matter what the feminist topic du jour is, people will write an essay about how it pertains to Taylor. This also happens on tumblr – sometimes it feels like Taylor has become this martyr of womanhood who has gone through every single terrible thing that a woman can possibily go through. A big example is the obsession with Taylor being a child star victim to her parents' and BMR's stage parents antics, which always felt off to me because we have very little reason to think that – Taylor has always been SUPER ambitious herself and also seems very much in control of many parts of her career, and we want to take that away from her for... tragedy points? The beginning of Jia Tolentino's essay is great proof. She is just listing things one can somewhat associate Taylor with, and then she constructs it into A Point. Taylor really is that "She is everything!" Barbie meme at this point. Why do people want her to be this villanous broken mean person so badly? In the fandom and outside of it.

i think it's a convergence of a few things: her passionate and carefully cultivated fanbase, overt control of her image, cultural expectations of women re: dating/purity/her treatment of men/etc, her cultivated "good girl" reputation, being the most famous person in the world at a time when social media and interest in these social issues is pretty high... but a lot of it is just projection because people have emotional reactions to her (for various reasons) and find ways to justify it intellectually

[visiblenostalgia]

Pluto in Aquarius Resource Pack:

I don't know who needs to hear these, but I think it's best to have these things as of late when concerning the transition into Pluto in Aqua. If AI is increasingly running the show, we must go back to our human ways in order for us to keep ourselves sane. These are but some of the tools I have in stock to help us through it, and I thought I might share. They may become very useful down the line if the internet becomes far more decentralized and local.

(EDIT AS OF 12/12/2024 (gasp! angel number day!)) My request: reshare this and link it to whoever needs it most or is inspired by it most. I think this may help to soothe some stresses and woes. My viewers and those that come across this post are my most important people. Thank you for also seeing my stuff as per usual and give me a follow for more if you're interested (even if I may repost some gravity falls stuff so if you're also keen on that, keep a looskie out for it). I'm so happy I'm making a reach with my stuff and I want to continue. Pluto in Aqua has lit a fire under my ass for content related to it and I hope to be a sort of 'lax-messenger about it to my peeps on the web. Y'all are amazing and thank you for the support!

more under the cut

Literature...

Some books to help you gradually ease into this collective shake up:

Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (and Slow Productivity) Might I suggest using these texts to help you navigate this digital dark time. One to use for digital regression and one for staying sane in your WFH space.

The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in The Age of Science by Alan Lightman This one was a quick pick that I channeled while at work. Haven't read it yet, but it poses a good disposition to the Pluto in Aqua transit for some odd intuitive reason.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino It's an anthology that describes to us what the algorithmic design of social media does to its people -- and women namely. If you want a book to capture your attention and also somewhat be part of a send-off to Neptune in Pisces next year, this will be a perfect book to look at.

7 Habits Collection (Of highly effective people and highly effective teens -- Sean & Stephen R. Covey) If you're looking to game up your humanity skills, whether younger or older (both are good refresh books), take a good gander at each for reference. May help you out more than good due to the Saturnian nature of Aquarius.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move The World by Adam Grant If you're stuck on your capability to innovate, or have art block like a motherfucker, this is a book for those in need of a motivational boost for this Pluto Transit. Highly recommend!

Liberalism And It's Discontents by Francis Fukuyama Knowing that political systems have started to fall apart (communism, capitalism and many others), then this is a good place to start giving yourself ideas on what to support or what parties to make (if you're a political science major, PLEASE read Fukuyama's work I beg you). The systems that we've seen historically do not work anymore. We have to innovate whether we like it or not. Save the nostalgia for culture and at-home indulgences. Involving it with politics kills a system.

Robert Greene's 'The Daily Laws': 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature There's an entry a day within this book. The author recommends to read it EVERY DAY. Introspection is also healthy under this Pluto in Aqua transit. You must do so from a detached perspective in order to be successful. If you missed at least 3 days or however many, read however many you've missed. A good challenge for every year. Easy new year's resolution goal or just a good routine add on that shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes to do.

Websites...

Some places online to get you in those smaller, private networks

When it comes to spacehey, you'll find things you'd never be able to on that site. I mainly use mine for blogging books I've read and cooking stuff. I'm in a mom-blogging era put it this way (I'm an auntie of two, a niece and a new half-great-nephew. I love my position in life right now).

P.O.I. (points of interest) concerning Neocities:

In searching by tag: searchengine, japanese, 90s, 2000s, comic, (insert big city name here)

There is a bunch. If y'all want me to make a monthly newsletter on neocities websites and what I've found, i guess i can make another blog for it so I can post my findings there. Keep a look out!

use in tandem with what you've learned from Cal Newport's Slow Productivity

Entertainment...

For those going the economic route:

ROKU's & any true 'FREE Tv Streaming service' available. Good to have these in economically strife-d times.

Ofc YouTube being close second. (not yt. premium)

(START WATCHING LONG FORM CONTENT YALL)

Not to also mention: If you have a video game system that still takes discs for content (like the PS4 and Xbox 360/ONE), you can convert them into a DVD streaming platform. If not that, it's already enabled, start collecting/owning some content of your own. Go to the thrift shops. Go to the supermarket and look for the analog option. Shop eBay. Go on Etsy. ANALOG FTW

If you're going for anything news based, consider also going for newspapers -- make going for a newspaper cool again! Even better if it's local or independent!

SHOPPING:

ofc go for reuseable bags. use the coupon deals at the stores. read the coupons that the cashier gives you and see what you can do with them. tax exemptions don't count sadly enough. get a Costco membership and shop in bulk (still, remember the economic options of going for those deals)

side topic: FOOD & COOKING:

opt for making your own cookbooks and write them somewhere that can be looked back on when you get the chance. It's always useful to have something like that on hand. That way you and neither your family forget the recipes that brought you together.

In a sense:

Stick it to the big man and go for the cheaper, less expensive option (and stick to them)

Learn skills on your own terms

Read, Read, Read, Learn, Learn, Learn

Turn off your phone and laptop, keep them in the office (unless your phone IS the alarm) and opt for the Television or a piece of paper.

Connect with gaming in a communal or skill-based sense. Go for card games. Daily newspaper games too. Think northernlion when he does various trivia games online.

Pluto in Aqua may yet have more in store for us, but in current times, this seems to be (to what I think) is best for us.

Rely on your community, rely on yourself. The world is an infinitely chaotic place, but so as long as we have one another, we'll make it through.

[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.

[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)

[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)

[thirteens-earring]

[ …It was dance that blew up this separation between my work and the world, between my work and other people. It blew up this idea that I had to be detached, internal, solitary, to make things. It changed my writing. I started thinking in terms of stories, of physical settings, of real people, not just of ideas.

You’re talking about “The Sun Still Burns Here,” the collaboration you did with the choreographer Kate Wallich. I understand she got in touch with you after seeing a photo of you arching your back, on Instagram.

It was so collaborative—everyone was in the room before we had made even a little bit of music. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to create anything with all these other people around, but then I was. I thought, Well, maybe my life can be more like this. Maybe I can let some more people into this whole thing, and maybe it can be enjoyable. That was another new thing—this idea that working could feel good. Not that I don’t like what I do, but it always feels hard, or anxiety-producing. Dance was different.

You’ve always written about the body, about expressing things through the body. Did dance change your relationship with embodiment?

What I used to do onstage, before I worked with Kate, was just throwing myself around a lot. It felt very rebellious against my body.

Rebellious against your sense of comfort?

I used to just wear huge clothes in real life—just, like, a big tent, with just my little face at the top. But, then, onstage, I would not be wearing a shirt. For an hour, it was, like, Well, fuck you, whatever makes me think that I need to wear the tent. I’m going to take my shirt off. I was still anxious about performing, still shy, but I wanted to be ferocious. But there was nothing very patient or warm about that. Doing this dance was different. I was doing really slow extensions of my arms, really considered movements. I was really hyper-present with myself, not just fully out and slamming around.

The music on the new album is like that, too—there’s a sense of things being controlled as much as they’re being unleashed. But you also return to transcendence and self-erasure—there are lines on this album about letting your life drift and wash away, about running toward the light. I’m curious what the idea of transcendence means to you.

A sublime quietness. A wash of “I’m where I’m supposed to be.” A sense of everything, of a soup where everything can shift and exist and move, and the whole thing is warm and quiet.

I think that’s why I freaked out with the dance. I was feeling like that in my body, but with people. I thought that warmth and quietness meant I would be a brain in a tank, and I would just upload whatever I was thinking to the Internet or something, just be completely—

Disembodied. I think about that all the time.

But it turns out I can get that feeling by being super bodied. Very weird to me. ]

Mike Hadreas interviewed by Jia Tolentino, “Perfume Genius Wants to Make You Feel Less Lonely,” 2020 (link)

[insomniac-arrest]

Book asks 9 and 19

Yay!

9. Did you get into any new genres?

I wouldn't say I got very deep into the genres yet, but I did taste test more literary fiction (like The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James, Go as River) and horror (The Sun Down Motel and Between Two Fires) this year. Oh! And more essay collections, got much more into essay collections, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino expanded my brain into the galaxy like the meme.

19. Did you use your library?

Yep! I either get my books from the library or work--I work at a bookstore so we get LOADS of free ARCs so I try to read those. I usually only buy a book if I really love it and want to loan it too/force it upon other people at some point haha

End of year book ask