March 25, 2020 Whiting Awards 2020 Jia Tolentino, Nonfiction By Jia Tolentino Jia Tolentino. Photo: Elena Mudd. 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 M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (Random House, 2019), was a New York Times best seller. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn. * An excerpt from Trick Mirror: The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At ten, I was clicking around a web ring to check out other Angelfire sites full of animal GIFs and Smash Mouth trivia. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. At fifteen, I was uploading photos of myself in a miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unlivable hell. Read More
August 6, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Jia Tolentino By Jia Tolentino In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. I just realized, having never before had an occasion to consider my thoughts on the matter, that I feel incredibly fond of the front of my fridge. Life should be more like the front of my fridge: entirely made up of postcards from your friends, pictures of babies, an upside-down magazine photo of a rocket launch from a seventies aviation magazine, old aura readings, photos of when you blacked out at a Pistons game watching Fat Joe (no longer fat) play at halftime, novelty magnets that remind you of everywhere you’ve been that you love. The best thing on this fridge is a magnetic sheet featuring four incredible photos of my friend Jackson—it was a Christmas present from Jackson’s partner, Kate. Mostly when I go to the fridge, though, the only thing that registers for me visually is a glimpse of my dog Luna’s fluffy puppy face. Inside, my fridge’s vibe is almost always “last night’s dinner plus snacks.” If I lived almost anywhere else, I’d probably be working less and cooking constantly, and my fridge would always be bursting with some Martha Stewart shit, pizza dough and herbs and iced green tea with honey, as it was in Texas and Michigan. But here it’s like, we got some eggs, we got that bodega Vermont cheddar, we got Simply Orange so I can choke down my vitamins in the morning, we got limes that have turned into moldy rocks since the party. Read More