A New Year with Writer Jia Tolentino (‘Trick Mirror’)

Writer Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker) became a literary sensation in 2019 upon the release of her best-selling essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567511/trick-mirror-by-jia-tolentino/. She joins us this week to ring in 2025. We start by discussing the erosion of privacy online (11:26), the potentially forthcoming TikTok ban (13:32), and how she circumvented self-surveillance technology in her Hidden Pregnancy Experiment https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-hidden-pregnancy-experiment for The New Yorker (15:28). Then, we unpack how data is monetized online (18:00), as depicted in an unsettling scene from Succession (21:50), the harmful effects of screen time on children (26:10), and her writerly upbringing in Houston (31:48). On the back-half, Jia recounts a formative summer in Venice (41:55), her subsequent decade working at The Hairpin and Jezebel (50:43), the trad wife phenomenon (55:00), how she swings between pessimism and optimism (1:12:19), and why writing still retains the power to liberate (1:17:00). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, I'm joined by writer Jia Tolentino. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection, Trick Mir: Reflections on Delusion. The book turned Tolentino into a literary sensation, with publications often referring to her as the Joan Didion of modern American life. A comparison she's admittedly uncomfortable with, but is not entirely untrue, as both frequently circled the systemic dread bubbling beneath the surface. And although Trick Mir was published back in 2019, its insights on social media, bodily autonomy, late-stage capitalism remain as relevant

• 1:19Sam Fragoso?

  and damning now as they did then. In the five intervening years, Tolentino, the daughter of Filipino immigrants who ended up in Houston, has had two children of her own, which she's written about extensively in the pages of The New Yorker. She's also recently written pieces about the erosion of privacy, the wave of young alt-right men that helped put Trump back in the White House, and the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, all of which we discuss in today's episode. But before we get into it, I explained the premise to Jia a little bit at the top, but I think it bears repeating. Basically, I

• 1:59Sam Fragoso?

  wanted to start 2025 with a talk that reflects the conversations I've been having in my life over the past couple of years, and really dating back To March of 2020. And that conversation often returns to just how bad people are feeling day to day, how destructive and corrosive the internet has become, how our phones have made us feel less human and more agitated. And for most, myself included, it started to feel like this unhealthy and destructive relationship to these technologies is almost faded, as if it can't be repaired or amended, as if we're just stuck with this until we

• 2:44Sam Fragoso?

  all fade away and AI takes our jobs and then presumably our souls. And maybe I'm delusional on the matter, and I'm probably delusional, but I don't think this has to be. Or maybe I just don't want it to be, or perhaps I don't think it's the only way we can be. So that's where I wanted to start Talk Easy in 2025. And it's where we start this episode with Jia, which is ultimately a circular and at times a circuitous conversation about being, as she says, inexplicably alive, which I think is just a perfect term to

• 3:24Sam Fragoso?

  describe this moment in time. And so with that, Happy New Year to you and yours. This is Jia Tolentino.

• 3:49Sam Fragoso?

  Hi, Jia.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 3:50Sam Fragoso?

  Nice to meet you.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  You, too.

• 3:52Sam Fragoso?

  You are our first guest of the year.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Really?

• 3:58Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The last one was Harris Dickinson. I saw that.

• 4:01Sam Fragoso?

  The last one was Harris Dickinson. You're following the hottie that is Harris.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:07Sam Fragoso?

  Are you a resolutions person?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  No, are you?

• 4:10Sam Fragoso?

  Not at all. I kind of like offer that as a preface because the reason I wanted to have you on to kickstart the year is that I just feel like at the end of 2024, everyone I talked to was like, this is not working. The way in which we are moving through the world, and specifically the way the internet and technology has shaped and grabbed hold of our lives. Is so unrelenting and I think untenable in the next year. And so I thought we could talk through many of the problems at play, like how we got here, where this is heading.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:45Sam Fragoso?

  And then perhaps, this is ambitious, but perhaps try to chart a path forward out of this decay.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Simply figure out exactly what's wrong with the entire economy of surveillance capitalism that we're encased by and figure out how to solve it. I think we can do that.

• 4:59Sam Fragoso?

  While also telling a part of your story.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:04Sam Fragoso?

  This, this is, it's an ambitious ask, but I feel like I have faith in us. I mainly have faith in you. Did you see what the Oxford word of the year was in 2024?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  No, what was it?

• 5:17Sam Fragoso?

  Brain rot.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Oh God, I did see that. But I was like, you know what? This is a play for virality on the part of the Oxford English Dictionary. Like they always do this. It's like, oh, it's a woke, it's whatever, you know? I was like, fuck off.

• 5:29Sam Fragoso?

  I don't think it's that far off, though.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  No, I know. I mean, they're right.

• 5:33Sam Fragoso?

  For people who don't know, how do you define brain rot?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think we all know itself. Brain rot is the feeling that you feel in your brain right now. There's sort of a tautological, um, physical explanation that just nests within the lived experience of probably every single person listening to this because they have an iPhone and are listening to this on their iPhone. So they know brain rot. Brain rot is the condition of feeling like your brain is rotting. And that you're getting dumber and dumber and that you can't pay attention to anything. And, you know, I talked to college students and high school students, like a good amount, you know, I'll go to schools and whatever, talk to writing classes. And I was at a couple of high schools over the last semester and they were all very self-conscious about Gen Z brain rot. And they were also conscious because I guess the oldest members of Gen Alpha are about

• 6:19Speaker 01

  to enter high school or have already. It was fascinating. It was, it was Zoomers talking about Gen Alpha-ers and about how like they have really bad brain rot.

• 6:31Sam Fragoso?

  The way like we millennials think about Gen Z.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like, oh, boy.

• 6:37Sam Fragoso?

  What did they feel?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a function of, they're like, oh, these iPad kids. And I'm like, listen, I'm raising two of them. Like, but they, there's kind of like an obvious, like, almost so obvious that it doesn't bear speaking overtly about that brain rot is a one-to-one, you know, there's a one-to-one correlation with how much you spend looking at social media. And I think that if you have been since, basically, I wrote a piece on Cocamelan for The New Yorker, like, last year, and, you know, probably, if you don't know Cocamelan, it's like, you know, it's by far the most successful entertainment property that's ever existed, if you go by minutes watched. And this is like entertainment property for any demographic, but its target audience

• 7:23Speaker 01

  is like children who are too young to speak.

• 7:25Sam Fragoso?

  Right. By successful, you mean profoundly addicting?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  By successful, I mean, successful by the metrics of the economy that encapsulates us, which is eyeballs. Like, how much eyeballs, how much attention has it retained? And can you even really call it attention when it's like literally a pre-verbal child? Like, they, but, you know, for the function of ad buys and metrics, internal metrics for whatever. Anyway, so Gen Z sees Gen Alpha, I think probably correctly, and again, I'm raising two members of Gen Alpha, it's like, but they, you know, basically since infancy are experiencing the thing that we as adults have understood as the thing causing our brain rot, which is a non-stop stream of increasingly shortened, truncated, like, viral, engineered-for-virality

• 8:10Speaker 01

  content that is fed to them by like an increasingly personalized algorithm that, whose only intention is to get them to watch a screen for as long as possible every day. And Gen Alpha has had the opportunity, like, at least for us, it was, we got to develop a bit of our brains beforehand, but I've hated my devices for a very long time and done all sorts of things to... To blunt my own sort of compulsive, dopamine-seeking nature.

• 8:38Sam Fragoso?

  What do you do for that?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think about this with my kids. Like, I think I don't really get far personally with the idea of like, discipline or doing things because I'm supposed to. Like, that doesn't really work for me.

• 8:50Sam Fragoso?

  I've heard about those things, yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Does it work for you? Like, are you?

• 8:54Sam Fragoso?

  Intermittently.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Intermittently. Discipline works for me with work only. Like, I can be disciplined about writing, but that's about it. But pleasure really works for me. And so, like, I think the more, the more overarching thing is I've made sure that there are physical things that are much more compelling to me than my devices. And so, you know, such as like, being stoned in the park, you know, or like, going for a walk, listening to music, going out dancing, being with my friends, you know, like, specifically about the devices. When I started writing my book in 2017, the first essay in it that I started writing was an essay about the internet and why. And like, my question at that point was like, a mere, like, eight years ago, and this is when I came, when I was in the Peace Corps, and when I came back, I was like, the internet, and before that, I was like, the internet

• 9:38Speaker 01

  was so fun to me. And now it seems so, so, so bad. And it, and we elected Trump, and like, you know. And that was only the first Trump election. And I was trying to figure out why it had seemed good, and then at what point it had started to be really bad. And right after I wrote that essay, I was like, I gotta change my whole life. I installed an app called Freedom on my phone, and an app called Self Control on my computer. And it basically, like, my computer, I couldn't look at social media, any social media for more than 45 minutes per day. And then Freedom, for a while, I could only look at it between, like, 1:00 and 4:00 p.m. Now, it's looser, but I still can't look at it between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m., which helps.

• 10:19Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, this is something you've been grappling with since you were 10 years old. On the website, Angel Fire,

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:27Sam Fragoso?

  You wrote, "I'm going insane. I literally am addicted to the web," said 10-year-old Jia.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was the best it would ever be. That was the best my addiction would ever be.

• 10:40Sam Fragoso?

  I think on the Mount Rushmore of brain rot culprits has to be TikTok.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, because you know, like that that 10 year old me, actually, what I was doing was like, oh, it's like actually so crazy how fun it is to make little dolls and put them on my angel fire page and figure out how to make the gifs glitter, you know, and like and like make little friends on LiveJournal. It's like, actually, that was that was Mount Olympus compared to the pit of hell that we're in right now. Like, it was like, like, that was completely unsurveilled activity, right? Like, there were no, I was not being tracked and targeted and just constantly surveilled. I actually was basically just being a huge dork and spending too much time with a computer. But companies were not making so much money watching every single one of us and anticipating all of our desires.

• 11:28Sam Fragoso?

  They were making money on your dorkdom.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And they were not really making that much money, you know, like, and, and like, you know, there weren't probably the average 10 year old right now, I'm going to guess there's between 50 and 175 companies that have profiled that 10 year old as like a matrixed data nugget and know exactly what they like. And it wasn't like that in, you know, 1998 or whatever that was.

• 11:52Sam Fragoso?

  Describing children as a matrixed data nugget really just makes me want to have kids in a big way.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. To know that Instagram values the average 13 year old at about $1,700.

• 12:04Sam Fragoso?

  Is it only 1,700?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think, again, that's taken from this braided brain. Like, it's that's probably not exactly correct, but it's something around that. But that's global. Like, for an upper middle class American teenager, the number is probably significantly higher.

• 12:18Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, good.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  So fun, right? So cool.

• 12:20Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, I think anywhere between 1,700 and 2,500, I'd feel comfortable with.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:26Sam Fragoso?

  TikTok may be banned in the US as early as January 19th, and I'm sure you've been reading about this, if its parent company ByteDance doesn't sell the app to a non-Chinese buyer. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear out TikTok's case against the US government and will begin listening to oral arguments later this week. Now, many users are understandably upset about this potential ban. How have you tracked and made sense of this story?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I don't think it's actually gonna happen. You know, the Occam's razor of the situation is that the giant, giant company that has everyone addicted to its 15-second videos is just gonna prevail. Or if not, something will step in to take its place, you know? Like, I, it's funny, I mean, I don't find TikTok like luckily the neurons in my brain are too old to really, um, you know, like, like, I'm too hopelessly millennial, you know, like.

• 13:26Sam Fragoso?

  You are 36 years old.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, like, the internet belongs to people that are 20 to 10 years younger than me. You know, like, it's made to capture their attention. It's made for their attention spans, it's.

• 13:42Sam Fragoso?

  So you, so you think it's not going to get banned?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  I don't know, you know, I mean, I think it might. And I think like, stuff gets banned and then there's, there's a waiting period. And then there's enough time to appeal, like, you know, just following what's happened with abortion, like, it's, there's, the back and forth is just seems so likely to be so long. And there's just so many other people trying to copy it, you know? Like, isn't currently, isn't Pornhub banned in like, half of the South right now? It's like, that's not gonna last, like, it's, you know?

• 14:07Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, I haven't tested it, but yeah, I think, I think so. The case that the US is mounting against ByteDance, that it's a potential matter of privacy and breach of privacy and security and data, and things I don't totally believe. But they are subjects that you've returned to a lot in The New Yorker. While pregnant with, I believe, your second kid, you conducted this hidden pregnancy experiment, which explored how we are trading our privacy for a sense of security. For those that haven't read the piece, can you explain what you did and why you wanted to write about this exchange we're making?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and it's funny about the China thing. It's like 100% the data that ByteDance is gathering from people's viewing habits and just the sheer amount of video logged on that site. Like, all of that stuff is being used for nefarious purposes, like 100%. There is state access to this sort of. The highly advanced Chinese surveillance repression state like is intermingled with that in, you know, fucked up ways. But it's, it's so funny, Americans complaining about that because it's like, oh, oh, now we're, now we're afraid of a loss of privacy and our data being misused? Are you kidding me?

• 15:17Sam Fragoso?

  That's what I mean by it. I don't think it really matters in that it seems very selective in that stateside, this is not something we're thinking about. Or rather, we've just accepted it as part of our life. But when it's coming from a foreign entity, it feels somehow bigger and more dangerous.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Right. Like a conveniently positioned, yeah. And, and the pregnancy experiment, I, so I'd had the kind of accidentally amazing, kind of transcendent experience of experiencing almost an entire pregnancy in private the first time around because it was 2020. And I was kind of, you know, I was pretty grateful to be pregnant through the pandemic because it felt like I had a clock in my body, like, like my body was keeping time. And I found that to be really wonderful. And then I had a baby and the baby was that little clock in front of me, just growing and growing, whatever. And I was on Zoom and you like,

• 16:05Sam Fragoso?

  you said, you described kids as a matrix of a data nugget or something and a clock in front of me.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a really sentimental mother, as you can tell. Like, I'm just, I'm just super, super sentimental about my bundles of, I'm like, what, what do moms call it even? I will say, I love having kids, though. It's, it's great. I, I have loved it a lot. I've loved having babies. I wasn't sure I would love having babies, but I, I love babies. They're like little animals.

• 16:34Sam Fragoso?

  I, I trust that you are warm and loving in plenty of ways.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I'm an incredible mom. But, um, but the second time I got pregnant, I like, I miss that sense of privacy. And, and I just like, I resent so much. Like, I'm actively hating and blocking and staying away from my phone. And it still knows me better than the man I have been living with for 15 years, you know, like than my, like, it knows every little thought. It knows every passing question I have in my brain. It knows desires before I have fully encapsulated them myself. You know, and I detest that it knows these things. And by it, I mean, The tech companies and the subsidiary data brokers and ad tracking companies that are making the internet what it is, like making it this place that wants our attention

• 17:22Speaker 01

  so that it can make us do things, it can make us angrier, that it can make us buy stuff, it can make us focus on all of the things we don't want to be thinking about and blind us to climate change, whatever it is, right?

• 17:32Sam Fragoso?

  But it also has the flip side, which I just want to add, there was a piece on Last Week Tonight where John Oliver is going through TikTok and the algorithm and showing out all these kids who were, like every teenager, figuring out their sexuality.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:49Sam Fragoso?

  Their algorithms knew that they were gay or interested in other stuff before they could even articulate it. And that is not inherently negative, but it is bizarre and fully in a Black Mirror world.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, and the internet has done, I mean, the internet gave me my entire career and it allows me to like stay in weekly touch with the woman that I taught school with in a village of a thousand people in Kyrgyzstan. And like, it is my main connection to every single person or thing that I care about and love. Like, it's, the internet's amazing, but surveillance capitalism specifically is deathly. And it is profoundly anti-human and profoundly dehumanizing. And it's the reason we feel so bad all the time. And it takes the things that are the most human and important about us, like our desire to be loved and to love each other and to learn about the world and to act upon it and to be seen and to see other people. Like, that is the most human that it gets. And that is the, like, that is the raw material that they're mining

• 18:49Speaker 01

  for profit. And like, and we're all feeling the way that we inevitably feel after, you know, 10 to 15 years of this being the dominant paradigm of the biggest companies in the world. But, um, but the pregnancy thing, I was like, I was pregnant again. And I was like, I'm going to have the annoying experience of being pregnant and having people talk to me about. I don't know, like narratives of maternity and like, oh my god, like what gender? Which binary gender, you know? Like, I don't know, I just was not, like, being the cutesy things and like, I'm just not about that.

• 19:19Sam Fragoso?

  It feels like you were singling out one friend in particular there with that voice.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, my friends would never talk to me about binary gender, are you kidding me? But it's New York, it's the subway, people are always like, ooh, boy or girl, boy or girl, boys are like this, girls are like this, you know, that stuff. And like, there's also so much specifically about pregnancy and maternity where like, you're supposed to just Google whether it's okay to do everything. And I, and I just was so sick of consulting the internet about every desire. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna try to keep my pregnancy secret from my phone. I'm just gonna try to do that, see if it's even possible. Because when was the last time I like, watched a whole movie without keeping the thought of like, oh, what else was she in? You know, I can't even keep that thought away from my phone. But I wanted to keep a whole pregnancy away from it and to see what it would be like to like, have to wait to ask a question.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Or to just trust myself on a given thing, you know? Or be like, maybe this is not the most important question you should be asking, is like, whatever. And I was able to because I barely have apps and I don't have Siri, like, I don't have any smart devices. I don't have voice activated anything, I don't have passive listening. The thing where like, you know, you talk about something and then you're served an ad for it. I do have Instagram, but it turns out when you do that, it's not actually Instagram that's listening, it's other apps. Like whatever, the app you have to track your constellations or whatever. It's a bunch of other apps that secretly have passive listening enabled. And they're logging that data and selling it and laundering it and selling it to Instagram. So, anyway, I just wanted to settle that because people are always like, is Instagram listening?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And I, I really seems like the answer is no, but it is, you know, buying the data that, from people that are.

• 20:55Sam Fragoso?

  I just find it so unnerving that our lives have become like that scene in Succession. Where they're trying to figure out the tagline for the company. I think it's like, "We hear you."

• 21:05Speaker 01

  "We hear you. We hear for you."

• 21:06Sam Fragoso?

  "We're here for you. We're hearing, we're listening to you. We're here with you."

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is the final tagline? It was like, "We hear for you."

• 21:12Sam Fragoso?

  "We hear you."

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then they're like, "But it seems like we actually are hearing them."

• 21:16Sam Fragoso?

  And that's where we are now.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yeah, no, like fucking Alexa or whatever. Yeah. But, but we, but sorry, back to your, your actual point, like, I do think, I mean, I, I hate ring cameras. I think they're, you know, they're, it's, it's like with pregnancy. I mean, pregnancy seemed like a very intimate encapsulation of an impulse that has been generalized to a lot of other areas of our life, which is, let's surveil and surveil and quantify and gather as if like, we had learned that there was a morality inherent in that, like that in doing that, it was good, that we would actually be safer if we were gathering video at all times. If we were generating video of our front porch at all times, we'd be safer. And ring cameras don't make people safer. They, there is no, like, there's actually like statistical evidence

• 22:02Speaker 01

  that they increase paranoia, they increase police violence, you know, there's like all this racial dimensions to this. And it's the same with pregnancy. It's like, and, and this matters to me as someone that has written about reproductive issues a lot, right? It's like, if you, you know, you're, you're logging your shit on an app every day, like, that's not gonna, you know, the world is beautifully and uncomfortably and terrifyingly, like, it is, it is ungovernable. Like, like, life is, life is not something that we can just Apple Watch and pregnancy tracker our way into like a six, into whatever counts as a successful outcome. And it feels like,

• 22:40Speaker 01

  and around pregnancy and with, like, all of the sort of criminalization, criminalization of pregnancy outcomes and stuff that's happening, it was sort of like, there's this idea that surveillance in all cases but TikTok or whatever, like, it's, it's a desirable thing, something that we are doing to ourselves. There's this, um, There's this idea that like in a, in the old economy, you know, bosses had to exploit the workers, but now we happily self-exploit, right? Like, we happily submit ourselves to surveillance through the Ring cameras, through social media, through, you know, all of these things. And it felt important to be like, I'm not, this, this thing that's happening in my body is really important and I want to say that actually the experience will be better and perhaps even safer if I don't track it relentlessly.

• 23:24Sam Fragoso?

  In that piece, you talk about how nearly a fifth of US households are estimated to be using these doorbell cameras. Most of them are from Ring, which of course is owned and operated by Amazon. And there's this quote you have with the CBC where you said, "There is this growing idea in contemporary life that tracking everything about our lives, our steps, the people that walk by our front doors, that tracking and surveilling will keep us safe and will somehow allow us to improve our lives." But it does feel like the only thing that's increasing with all of this tracking and surveillance is our own anxiety and paranoia.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:04Sam Fragoso?

  As you say in that piece, these technologies that are designed to soothe our anxieties are actually creating new and potentially worse ones.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, it's like there's little socks you can put on their, on your baby that monitor their heart rate all the time and send you an active, like a live tracker to your phone. And it's like, what? You know, like, that would give me a panic attack every second of the day. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's really, it's the functional equivalent of, of, you know, funding police rather than funding schools and housing, right? It's like, you know, that, that surveillance and discipline rather than improving the things that actually make people safer and happier. Like, like even just with, with our bodies, right? Like, it's like the Apple Watch stuff. It's like, it's, there's a lot of other stuff that actually would make us feel good rather than make us feel like we have to be looking at numbers all the time. And yeah, anyway, that's connected to my whole, like, the way out is pleasure and not.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Figuring out a way to do the right thing.

• 25:01Sam Fragoso?

  I do think you're on to something with that. But sticking with it for a moment, I want to go to a more pleasurable and less surveilled time in your life. Because growing up in the late 80s, early 90s in Houston with Filipino parents, you often attended service at this big, massive evangelical megachurch that you and your friends, I believe, would call the Repentagon.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:27Sam Fragoso?

  And so to understand what is potentially lost for your kids and their respective generation, I want to talk about what we had, and in particular, what you had. So that name, the Repentagon, where did you come up with that?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Well, it was the Repentagon. There was no other name for it. It was a, I mean, and I was like, like, I, I guess I was being tracked and surveilled. You know, I was kind of under a sort of discipline and punish style, like panopticon of whatever, just being at this extremely repressive evangelical school. But I, but, you know, yeah, I didn't, like, I did, and it's funny because it's, this is not a lifestyle that I'm willing to provide for my children because I live in Brooklyn. But it's like, I lived in a, I lived in a very, like, anodyne, safe suburb, you know, just a lot of, like, boring model homes and a lot of children.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And we were, like, and my parents, too, I think it's like an enormous reason, the way that, the way, an enormous reason for the way that I am, the way that I am, is that they, I was extremely independent as a child from a very young age, and they basically respected that, you know? Like, they were not the stereotypical immigrant parents, and Filipino parents are not really like this often, anyway. But, um, but like, they didn't, they let me do whatever I wanted. Like, I would do the thing, I would leave the house in the morning with my little brother in the summer, and I wouldn't come back till the sun came down. And they didn't need to know where I was. Like, I would bike to the pool with all my friends and, you know, it was basically unsupervised all the time.

• 27:09Sam Fragoso?

  Why do you think they were fine not knowing where you were?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think, I mean, we did like it's the privilege of living in a middle class neighborhood where there was, you know, not a lot of, I think even parents that do track their children on like life 360 or whatever. I mean, and that's like, again, like, I don't have Find My Friends on, like, I don't, I don't know where anyone is at any time. Like, I, but a lot of people do. And even people who do that to their kids. And I, and, you know, I mean, at some point, I'm going to have teenagers that are taking the subway in New York City. Maybe I'll want to track them. I hope I can resist. But like, you know, there are legitimate reasons, I'm sure. But I think probably plenty of the parents that do track their teenagers kind of wish they didn't. And I feel really glad. I mean, I realized during the pandemic, every time that I've really felt like really

• 27:54Speaker 01

  human, like really myself and really, really human, it was outside of the realm of any sort of surveillance whatsoever. You know, it was like those experiences as a kid or just even parties in high school, like going out dancing. The first time I was, you know, like in a sweaty crowded room, you know, with music playing, like just these moments where I felt, you know, hiking with friends, like doing drugs outside in the woods or whatever. These moments where I really felt like I was getting to the center of something, like some reason to be a human animal. All of those were unsurveilled. And, you know, and it was like that even with kids, right? It's continued. Like, the moments when I was with my little tiny babies, and it was just us, like that, you know. And I point my phone

• 28:39Speaker 01

  at them a lot because they're beautiful. But it's like, the most human moments that we had together were utterly unsurveiled. And I hope that I'm able to give my children the freedom to be unsurveiled as much as is like humanly possible.

• 28:54Sam Fragoso?

  But you, you were like the type of high achieving teenager who would read while roller skating. Like, I think you got a perfect score on your SATs your sophomore year of high school.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. How did you know that?

• 29:09Sam Fragoso?

  But experientially, for the brain, do you think reading a book while on rollerskates is different than kids walking and scrolling on their cellphones? Is one experience better for a kid than the other?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  I've been thinking about this because like, I was never content, I've always had a really hard time having an idle brain. And so, yeah, I was reading constantly. I would read, like, always read while I was eating, while I was in the bathtub, you know, whatever, like, constantly, you know, you're in the shower, memorizing the back of the herbal essences thing, right? Like, it's just like, your brain wants and seeks constant stimulation and input. And, you know, I try not to be like, I'm also conscious, as we are talking about the internet, it's like, people said this about the printing press, people said this about written manuscripts in medieval times, right, that all of these things would erode our concentration and lead to the sort of cognitive downfall of society. People said this about the newspaper, the novel, like, whatever, all these things, radio. But the

• 30:03Speaker 01

  difference now is that the phone is dynamic. The phone watches you back. And I do think that makes a huge difference, right? Like, the book is not surveilling you. The phone is. And I don't think we can overstate the difference that that makes, right? Like, you are free to act upon the book. You are free to transform it, whatever you're reading, like, you're actively doing something to it with your imagination. You have to, you're doing some work. And the book is just there. It's just an object. And the phone is shaping you much, much, much more actively than you're shaping it. And I think kids now, like, I felt free, even when I was reading a book on rollerskates. I don't, I think from a

• 30:46Speaker 01

  very early age, children already understand they don't feel free in front of a screen.

• 30:50Sam Fragoso?

  I heard you say once that before you were a published writer, you would, quote, "process your life in narrative form." You would write your life into existence. As a teenager, what would that look like?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Kept a diary. I found probably from, I don't know, third grade on that I couldn't understand little fights with my friends, or like what I was feeling about someone's, you know, anything without writing it. And I just developed a compulsion, like I was a daily journal keeper since third grade. And I'm not still daily, but I still, I still keep a notebook.

• 31:25Sam Fragoso?

  When you say you couldn't understand, like you couldn't comprehend it in real time without writing about what had happened?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  I just didn't understand what I was thinking. Like, I would have thoughts, but they don't exist in an actual way until I, until I write them down. Like, I just knew that there was kind of a confusing flutter of things inside my head, but I didn't know what they were. And the only way to look at what those fluttering things were was to write them down. And then I became able, became able to understand my life.

• 31:53Sam Fragoso?

  So as a teenager, what were those things that you wrote down?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I went back to my journal to fact check my book. And I should give myself more credit. Like, I want to say a lot of it was just like, social stuff, right? Like wanting, thinking like, oh, no, these two girls are my best friends, but maybe they like each other more than me right now. Or like drama about cheerleading tryouts, or like wanting a boy to like me and not knowing if he did, or like, all of this, like, drama that had happened at a party, drama that had happened at the football game, you know, teachers that I hated, like, but you know, probably a lot of it was like me also trying to figure out rudimentary ethical structures and me winding myself out of this extremely strict evangelical theology that I had grown up thinking structured the world

• 32:41Speaker 01

  and the concepts of good and evil and morality and like the idea of should, like what you should do. What is the teleology of life that is being offered to me and what do I actually want it to be? Like, what, where do I actually want the end goal of my life? Like, what do I want it to actually look like? And it was, it was all of that. But I guess probably parsing the daily drama of high school is also parsing that. Like, it's still kind of the same function as writing now. It's like, what do I feel a sense of friction around and why? And what do I feel a sense of attraction around and why? And usually those things relate to the larger questions that are floating around somewhere in my head.

• 33:20Sam Fragoso?

  In the chapter Ecstasy in Trichmir, you wrote,

• 33:25Sam Fragoso?

  Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality. And Christian theology convinced me that I had been born in a compromised situation. That phrasing compromised situation, what do you mean by that?

• 33:41Speaker 01

  One of the things that I feel that I end up writing about in some way a lot is that, I want to say the American relationship to self-righteousness, but it's just maybe just the general human one, right? Like, I think, and the whole internet, the whole social internet is, its primary incentive, or one of its primary incentives is to make people feel self-righteous and superior. And to do that by differentiating themselves from other people. And this, again, this is a normal, human, tribal, atavistic impulse, but that leads to like January 6th, right? Like, you know, and believing-

• 34:14Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, by the way, how are you celebrating it this year?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  I'm gonna storm the Capitol. I will be there with my fellow, you know, patriots, obviously.

• 34:22Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, it's a good thing that we taped it before then.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll probably, I'll probably be a-

• 34:26Sam Fragoso?

  This will be your last interview, because you will be going to jail.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  I'll figure out a way. I've actually been talking to, I wrote about the Luigi, you know, our Saint Luigi Mangione, whatever, like for The New Yorker right before the break. And I, and I said, I haven't watched it, but I did a TV interview where I think they must have let through something that I said, where they pulled up a clip of all these prisoners shouting, "Free Luigi," like in the background of a TV interview. And, you know, they were like, "What do you make of this? Like, it's so shocking." Whatever. And I was like, "I don't know, I bet a lot of people that are in jail are in jail because they had to commit crimes because of something that somebody needed healthcare-wise, right? Like, it's really, and I've gotten a bunch of requests from the horrible correctional communication systems that make them pay to send emails or whatever. And I was like, maybe I was right, you know?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Like, it seems like I was right. Anyway, so I will be talking to them internally from jail after I storm the Capitol on the 6th.

• 35:18Sam Fragoso?

  Right, sort of on-the-ground reporting you're doing.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 35:22Sam Fragoso?

  Did David Remnick commission that?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm the man on the inside, literally. I think, how do I put this?

• 35:28Sam Fragoso?

  Honestly?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Well, I just, I want to be honest, which is like, I don't want to be too exculpatory about myself. Like, I, like, I'm sure I am self-righteous in so many horrible ways, and I will just say that and admit it. You know, I have a classic lefty, whatever, self-righteousness, I'm sure. But I also, like- It is completely fine and necessary for me to understand that I am embedded in immorality pretty much every second of the day. And that's OK for me to understand that the food that I get at the grocery store, the clothes, despite my best efforts, probably many of the clothes that I'm wearing, the things that I buy, the, you know, the rare medals in my iPhone, who's harvesting them, right? Like, it's just weird. It's like my default position to understand kind of structural equivalent of the thing

• 36:13Speaker 01

  that Christianity teaches you, which is you're born a sinner and you have to, you have to look at that and you have to try to be good, you know? And I think like, I feel like, I mean, in America, it's, I feel like we're all born sinners, like even if we, and there's so much pushback on that, right? Like, the entire reactionary right of the last decade has been like, how dare you say that we should continue to teach slavery? Like, we're past that. This is a good country, you know, 1619 Project, like, get it out of here, right? Like, there's a real resistance, and there's a particularly American flavor to it, of wanting to believe that this is like, that this country is moral, that we are moral people, that just by like, having a family and trying to do good and you're, work hard and take care of your family, that like, doing that is a profoundly moral thing.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  And I think that in fact, actually, like, having a family and trying to take care of them, that is what leads to, you know, our most profound enmeshments with immoral structures. And when you order your kids shit off of Amazon or end up, you know, just trying to run United Healthcare as best as you can, and if that means denying 33% of claims, so be it, right? And I do think that was something that Christianity and this thing were like, every single night, I would basically be on my knees trying to audit my conduct, being like, what did I do wrong today? There's something about that that has stuck around, but I don't find it unpleasant. Like, I actually find it really useful. It's still quite easy to have a good time.

• 37:32Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  You know?

• 37:34Sam Fragoso?

  When you're a teenager, making that daily critical self-assessment, did you think of it as a useful act, or was it a way of like, self-punishing?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not much, I'm not much for self punishing. Or if so, I have figured out ways to do it in ways I kind of like. Like, I like the ways in which writing is kind of masochistic. But no, I think it felt useful. It sort of felt like, I guess, as I was starting to question the sort of seven days of creation, biblical Christianity, like, OK, wait. You know, if I'm not actually here because a god in heaven took a rib out of another human and, you know, like, wanted Christian soldiers on earth, or, you know, whatever, the sort of, honestly, fairly extreme thing that I was being taught for all of my life. I was like, OK, but like, why am I actually here then? You know, like, we were so in touch with a creation myth and an idea of why humans existed, and that was such a part of, and I'm not sure that every single person I went

• 38:31Speaker 01

  to school with understood that, but it would just seem like these enormous existential questions seemed to be the foundation of, like, that's actually what was interesting to me the entire time about the, about the religious framework, right? And so I guess I was still, I hung on to it, and I guess I still hang on to it. And so I was always thinking, at the end of the day, I was like, OK, like, another day of being inexplicably alive, you know? Like, another day of being inexplicably alive in kind of an amazing time with antibiotics and functional plumbing and women's liberations, you know, so to speak, and more freedom available to me than would ever have been made available to, let's say, a Filipino girl at age 15 at any other point in history, right?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Like, it was just so clear to me that, like, somehow, not just to be alive, but to be alive in this way in the 90s, early 2000s, like, I was like, this is, what, what is this? Like, what are we, what am I doing here? And like, and I, and I'm like greedy, I'm greedy for experience, and I'm greedy for, like, understanding, and I'm greedy for knowledge. And it seemed like, kind of, trying to understand what I was doing with every day was a way, the only way that I could continue to live in a way that I would not regret it later or something like that. Like, I was, it was doing it in the service of, like, I want to do a lot. Like, we're here, why not, right?

• 39:54Sam Fragoso?

  Well, after the break, why don't we talk about an experience of being, in your words, inexplicably alive?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  OK, what's it gonna be? Don't tell me, you'll surprise me.

• 40:04Sam Fragoso?

  We'll be right back with Jia Tolentino.

• 40:15Sam Fragoso?

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• 41:46Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back. In the spirit of processing your life in narrative, I want to talk about the summer of 2007. You're 19 years old, working as an unpaid intern, doing bibliographical work for a poet in Venice.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Wow.

• 42:04Sam Fragoso?

  And it's there, in that loneliness, that you have some kind of awakening. And before we get into that, would you be open for reading a piece you wrote years later called, "Venice on Silence and Three Euro a Day"?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Whoa, I totally forgot about this. In the midst of the splendor of Venice, I, for the first and only time, began to feel that my life, or more specifically, my parents' life, was unfair. I was angry randomly at senseless things, at men, at trashcans, at rain, always at money. I dipped my thumb in canal water and blurred the date stamp on my vaporetto pass so that I wouldn't have to renew it, and I started looking for change on the ground. I felt a gulf of hatred rise between me and the breezy, tanned families who took pictures of each other as they feasted on inky risotto at the outdoor cafes. And I was briefly a little crazy. Small triggers like piano music floating through an open window could give me the feeling that I was about to die. Throughout all of this reduction, I had the grim happiness of becoming completely aware of myself,

• 43:01Speaker 01

  of having the workings of my body and mind open to me, like a house being aired out for the first time in years. God, I haven't thought about that summer in so long. It was 17 years ago?

• 43:13Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, I remember being wildly broke. I, you know, I spent my entire educational career convincing people to give me huge amounts of money. Like, I was on scholarship at my school. I was on, I was on a scholarship to my college. And I was there on, basically, a scholarship that was like, the foundation that gave me my scholarship for college, they also funded you to do an internship. And I was like, OK, I'm gonna do this internship, but I'm gonna do it in Venice, which is an incredibly expensive place to be. And the hostel kicked you out in the morning, and I didn't speak Italian. And I would work for this poet for a few hours a day, but, you know, I was just wandering. Like, I felt almost transparent.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Like, I, I had these strange encounters. Like, I was, I was lonely all the time and, like, obsessed with food because I was just, like, not eating very much. And I didn't have internet access. And so I was just reading whatever I could find, wherever, like, books at the hostel. And I was wandering around this kind of lonely, spooky, gorgeous city, and very much, like, more on the outside of things than I had ever been and will ever be again because of just how little money I had to do absolutely anything at all. But it led to some interesting things, too. It led to- Like, I remember a lot of men that summer. Like, there was one day that one man followed me around wherever I went.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Like, I went to completely different areas of the city and I would see him lurking behind me. And I couldn't lose this man. And this is an experience that has happened to me many times before in the past, but not this extensively. And I think about it, like, I was like, oh, I was 18, 19. And I was like, this happened to me so much as a teenager and never happened to me after that. But then, like, I let myself get picked up a couple of times, too. Like, I spent a couple of, like, nights, like, I remember riding around on this man's motorboat with him for hours and having, like, a horrible kiss. And then this guy in the Navy who taught it, an Italian naval school, like, took me out on a date and started weeping because his mom was about to die. And it was raining and it was, you know, whatever. So it's like that I remember.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, I remember, like, feeling really lonely and really sad. It was like, I felt that I was learning something really important. Like, I was, like I wrote there, it was, it was like the doors were flung open and I was seeing the bones of the structure that I was living in. It was an experience almost of, like, X-ray vision, that it felt like something I was gonna hang on to. And I feel really glad now for that summer. I feel grateful that I only, the only times I've had to eat for $5 a day was limited to one summer, you know? It was the same with, like, the P score. It was kind of the times in the P score that I was lonely and felt, like, so utterly disconnected and outside of things.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  It was like this, it is important for me to know how this feels. And it's important for me to really understand even just the most minor experience of being outside, some taste of the marginal. I mean, it's turned me into a person that, like, does not complain, hates complaining, hates, you know? I've never complained about work for a second in my life, because it's like, how could I? You know? Like, I will never, like, I've never complained about a flight delay, you know? It's like, and it's partly because of the kind of cellular memory of things like that summer, you know?

• 46:42Sam Fragoso?

  But before you became, like, a writer, people read and you wrote a book and you worked for these places, at 19, what did you need to air out of the house?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  I think it was seeing who I was with no one around me and no familiar context and no purchase on anything. And it was the same, and I have, I have an instinct to drive myself to this anyway. It's like, one of the reasons that I like hallucinogens so much is that you kind of get pushed to your edge and you feel the same feeling of like, every window's open. Like, there's, like, there's, there is nothing but bare experience here. And like, sort of, my metal is being tested, my like, fortitude, my ability to retain stability in the midst of like, profound waves of dazzle or fear or terror.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's like, I enjoy seeing what's left and, and remembering that what's left is actually a huge amount. And I think that's what it was. That's what was being aired out. It was like, you know, I had lived this really safe, pretty coddled existence. I had parents who cared so much about me and took care of me. And I had always had friends and I always had this assurance that like, I was going somewhere or something. Like, I had these sort of structures of achievement and reward and social reward and a sense of myself that came through, like, always having people around me who were telling me who I was. And this was the first time, you know, like, I just was around no one.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I was, I was alone all the time with, with nothing. You know, it's like, now I'm the person that, I'm the asshole that is walking into the restaurant and ordering the $40 inky risotto. And, and you know, it doesn't, my life does not require that kind of existential searching, you know? It's, it's just like, I am, for a variety of reasons, like, there had been a clear sort of positioning of narrative that, that governed the way that I lived. And I think that was the first time that I had a lot of those surrounding things just instantly taken away and was tested in the absence of those things. I both hope that my daughters never are having to like, ration their crackers and their internship job and like, literally hoping they find money on the ground.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  But I think it's good for someone to experience that.

• 49:02Sam Fragoso?

  Also, the lack that you had there. Years later, when you moved to New York City and you try to take a stab at this journalism thing in a post-recession economy, a journalism job market that was precarious then and is somewhere else even now.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  It's worse than that now.

• 49:22Sam Fragoso?

  Did you find it daunting, coming to the city and trying to make something of yourself?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  I would not have dared to move here without a job. I was like, I can't afford to live in New York. But so when I was in grad school, I started writing for these beautiful blogs, The Hairpin and The Billfold, that no longer exist, where I wrote that.

• 49:41Sam Fragoso?

  You mean the ones I've excavated for today?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, excavated from the clutches of the AI demon that has taken them over. But apparently archives exist somewhere. I had started writing for these places while I was in grad school. And then I got hired to be an editor at this blog called The Hairpin. And so I was just like, I was working all throughout grad school. And this woman, Emma Carmichael, who had hired me at The Hairpin, got hired as the editor in chief of Jezebel. And she asked me if I would want to move there, if she could get me a job there. And I said, sure. But before that, the concept was just like, no, I can't. I can't do that. I mean, I obviously know people move to New York without a financial safety net all the time. But it did not seem like something that I was interested in doing.

• 50:22Sam Fragoso?

  Looking back on this era of small, women-focused publications, you said once that the positive thing about why there is nothing like Jezebel anymore is that a lot of all these feminist publications succeeded. They transferred their worldview into, if not absolutely, the rest of the media industry. They planted the word worldview with a firm hold pretty much everywhere.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  When did I write that bullshit?

• 50:47Sam Fragoso?

  About exactly a year ago for The Georgia Straight.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Oh, God, The Georgia Straight. Probably a student newspaper somewhere. Oh, God. Well, that makes me feel really dumb to have said that in 2023. I was so wrong. Now I know I was so wrong. I thought that for a while.

• 51:07Sam Fragoso?

  Given the current climate, I was thinking about that era of blogs and your words there and your hope there. Entering a second Trump term, do you still believe these publications succeeded? And if so, what did their success yield?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for a long time, I mean, around, like, I worked for, you know, quote unquote, women's media feminist publications from, I don't know, 2012 to 2016. And this was sort of the tail end of what had been like a decade plus of like Double X at Slate and Jezebel and, you know, places like that. And then everybody, like, those places more or less all shut down. And a lot of people that worked there, like me, went to work at mainstream, you know, non quote unquote women's publications. And then, right after I started working at The New Yorker, which was 2016, like, I started covering sexual assault right away, like, it was the Cosby trial. And then Me Too happened. And that seemed to me to be like a watershed.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Like, it was like, oh, OK, we are finally in agreement that women are people and that when they are, you know, harassed and assaulted, it is like a general, kind of, it's a business story, like, it's a news story. It's not like a women's issues thing, right? And, yeah, it felt, I mean, I was not a fan of the huge, like, celebrity uptake of pop feminism. Like, I was not into it when Beyonce did the thing in front of the big letters that said feminist. I was not, I was not interested in the sort of girl boss era. I thought it was actually, like, really horrible. But the fact that feminism was so commercially viable seemed to me like, OK, it's in the mainstream now, you know?

• 52:49Sam Fragoso?

  Did you not like it because it seemed commercially viable?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it seemed like feminism is something that's important. It's like, it was so clearly top down. It was this intense celebrity focus. And I think celebrities are wildly unrepresentative of normal life and celebrity narratives about women are not interesting to me. But I worked at a blog that was, like, famous for celebrity coverage, so it was like, I was part of the machine. But it was like, yeah, feminism is so clearly, like, it's a, to me, it's a material ideology. It should be about, like, raising the minimum wage and getting benefits for domestic workers. And this was just like, ooh, like, look at how many women are starring in network TV shows and being CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. It was the, it was top down, it was horrible. But it was commercially viable because of that. It was like the Raging Bull statue and the Fearless Girl in front of it, right? I found it untrustworthy and I feel vindicated

• 53:38Speaker 01

  in having correctly found it untrustworthy because it doesn't exist anymore. But what I did think You know, I know feminism exists in a perpetual cycle between advancement and backlash, advancement and backlash. But it seemed like something had happened.

• 53:51Sam Fragoso?

  What did you think at the time had happened?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Well, what had happened was like, women, for the first time, were saying like, that actually, that was assault. You know, it seemed like a certain discourse around, I don't know, parenting was changing, right, like, like, equal parenting was becoming more possible. And, you know, there was a general, I mean, just speaking exclusively in terms of media, it seemed like the coverage was getting to be such that, like, women's issues were not a narrow, sidelined thing. Like, I remember by the end of my time at Jezebel, our readership was half men and half women, which felt like proof of concept. Like, it was like, yes, women are people, you know? And the thing is, I don't think I was wrong about that. I was wrong about how profound the backlash would be and how, because I think all of those things did happen.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And because of that, now, we have tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok, and the, and the second Trump administration, and people being like, actually, we should go back to one-income households, and, and the voting data that we had out of the 2024 election, in which young, Gen Z men are swung 30 points to the right. And what we got as the result of that pop feminism, which I thought was grounded in sort of a real sea change, and not just Dove commercials, and I think that was partly right, but what we got from that was the rise of Andrew Tate, and, you know, all of these sort of streamers, and YouTubers, and Twitch guys, that are like, actually, women

• 55:18Speaker 01

  are property, and, you know, like, women are less than men. And, and now, what we have is this sort of incipient gender war among young, straight people that feels like something that I'm going to end up writing about. And I've just, yeah, I mean, after that voting data came out, especially like, the exit polls, I was like, wow, that is the wrongest I've ever been about anything in my professional life.

• 55:38Sam Fragoso?

  Days after the election, you wrote a piece called, "A New Rallying Cry for the Irony Poisoned Right."

• 55:46Sam Fragoso?

  He said, "At the time, I had the naive idea that something had permanently changed. I thought we had already seen the backlash, that it was represented by Donald Trump's first electoral victory, and that the idea that women are full people was enough of a consensus that seismic, if messy, progress could still happen, as it did in 2017 with Me Too. Now, there is no more Roe, and Trump is about to be president again, and it took less than 24 hours after his reelection for young men to take up a slogan that could define the coming era of regression: Your Body, My Choice." Which, of course, is a horrible play on "My Body, My Choice," which dates back to 1970, right before Roe became law of the land.

• 56:31Sam Fragoso?

  As I was rereading that this morning, and I don't normally feel this way in reading your work, I could feel how genuinely angry you were.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was disgusted.

• 56:43Sam Fragoso?

  Disgusted. And not to say that you write this passionately, but I found that it was so palpable

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:51Sam Fragoso?

  That it made me angry, it made me have a lot of questions about how we got here and why we're here, and it left me with wondering how you have been, how you think of this moment, how you're grappling with it, both as a writer and just as a person.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that I've been thinking about, I mean, gender dynamics are fraught enough, like, I was like, is, are the millennial men the best it's gonna get? Like, was this actually the peak? Like, I mean, I'm with a millennial man who is the primary parent to our children and, you know, quit his job for a year to take care of the baby, and like, my older daughter has my last name, I don't wear a ring. Like, I have felt in my personal life that such an enormous amount of freedom is possible at the individual level, that ideology actually can transfer to the domestic, that an ideology of equality can last through the thing that tests it most, which is childbearing and childrearing, especially in the early years.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And that has been enormously affirmative and important to me. And again, I think was maybe part of the thing that made me so blind, you know, in my sort of socialist Brooklyn bubble, you know, where there's still plenty of gender trouble, but it's I did feel disgusted writing about this because having grown up in the environment that I grew up, I know the avenues that you walk down to take comfort and even find it attractive, even sexy, you know, to look at the reactionary ideal of a man who has power over a woman in all aspects of life and think, actually, that's how it should be. And I grew up around people that basically thought that. I like, I understand it and it, I find it so disgusting. You know, it's like what is clearly like a sexual ideology

• 58:34Speaker 01

  being ported into all other aspects of life. But I felt sad. I think that's my primary thing. Like, because you know what's so sad to me is that, and I think this has to do with the phones thing. One thing, the thing that I've been thinking about most is you can, we will be able to quantifiably measure the impact of what I've been terming in my head, this like gender war between young straight people. Because, you know, people have been talking about the South Korean like 4B movement, right? This like women fully pulling away from men. And it's like, we're not repressive enough in America to do that. We're not going to do that. We're going to have straight couples that fucking hate each other and, and, and learn to, learn to shape their attraction and love and cooperation around some sort of fundamental enmity and difference. And I think like, what a travesty of just what it could be otherwise.

• 59:19Sam Fragoso?

  But straight couples fucking hating each other is not new. What's the difference that you're getting at?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  The difference I'm getting at is there, the movement seemed to be against that, right? Like, the movement seemed to be towards equality and it swung, I've felt that difference, the way that people are with each other in my life as opposed to the way they are with each other in my parents' generation. It's radically different.

• 59:41Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  That, you know, like, you can have situations like, you know, my husband stayed home from, to take care of the kid for a year and it's, it is what it is, right? Like, it's like, like, that's normal now, or, you know, at least in Brooklyn. And it seemed that like both halves of a straight couple could at least say they wanted equality, if not actually live up to it. Like, and the thing that makes me so sad is that I think one of the most important things you get in late childhood and adolescence, if you are a straight person, is, yeah, you might be internalizing these things about how to make yourself attractive to the other sex and how to get someone to like you and how to be hot or whatever. But what you actually have, like you are making these friendships and you're getting

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  these crushes and you're having these early little relationships in private. In our generation, we were on the phone, I was physically on the phone for hours, right? Just talking to someone that was like, was he my boyfriend? Or were we just really good friends? But either way, we were fumbling towards the other in privacy and we were getting to learn what it is like to be friends with someone that you want to make out with or have sex with. It was the place where straight people learned to see their romantic partners as friends and equals. And that is so important, like learning to be friends with boys as a straight person and boys learning to be friends with girls. People that actually do this, I think, are much happier and more whole in their romantic

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  relationships. People that never learn to do this because they're too cool from third grade on, like they never really see their romantic partners as true friends and true equals. They see them as hubby and wifey. But we had the ability to do that because we were not looking at Jake Paul on TikTok starting at age nine, right? Or Andrew Tate on Twitch, starting at the same age, right? Nick Fuentes, whatever. And to get that stuff in your ear before you've had the chance to do any of that fumbling, it precludes the possibility of that fumbling. And I've been talking, anecdotally, it seems to me that cross-gender friendship is dramatically

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  different and dramatically lessened for most people in most places around the country in like middle school and high school. And there are a lot of boys who, from a very early age, are thinking, like, it's kind of funny, but also kind of true, that like, women are bitches and you have to, you know, you have to subdue them. And then girls are thinking, like, boys are disgusting and why would I want anything to do with them? It seems sad and kind of unquantifiable in a way that... Abortion deaths are not, you know, deaths from lack of abortion, I should say, are not. The idea of what my life would have been if all of the boys around me had been looking at this stuff on their phones, right when we were actually getting to know each

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  other as proto adults. My life would be so different and so much less complete and so much less interesting and full. And like, it's hard to imagine that it'll be anything other than that with, you look at the voting data and you look at the people that are popular on these platforms. And if you have that in your ear every second of the day before you go to bed at night as you're scrolling, how do you ever learn to just be the way that you actually have to be to be friends with someone?

• 1:03:08Sam Fragoso?

  After another quick break, we'll be right back with Jia Tolentino.

• 1:03:29Sam Fragoso?

  When you wrote Trickmir, each section had a question that you were trying to answer, or at least interrogate. I think you had nine questions in nine chapters.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Privately, yeah.

• 1:03:41Sam Fragoso?

  As you think about the year ahead, what are those questions that are top of mind?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I think the question that's top of mind is like, how to make more trouble. Like, I think, like, what is a productive way to make some trouble? I think it's been on my mind, especially since the, you know, the UHC shooter story, right? Because I think the response to the murder, you know, as we all know, has been so vehemently pro. But I think I was like, what this shows is like, there is just an enormous sense, and in this case, it's across the political aisle, there's an enormous sense that things are wildly immoral in this country. And, you know, and like, there's certain inconsistencies here, right? Like, Gen Z doesn't want billionaires to exist, and they're like, massive fans of Elon Musk, right? There are inconsistencies in our sort of the populist potential that emerges in moments

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  like these. But I think what I was thinking was like, there is an enormous discontent and energy and rage that could be directed towards the things that we know are bad and are forced to participate in any way, like the American healthcare system. Like, I'm a, I'm a big fan of the Andreas Malmberg, Katablopa Pipeline. Like, I'm a big proponent of property damage as a form of protest. I think it's a good test of what we think of. Like, I'm, I'm interested in violence and what we consider violence and what we don't. But the, the murder, it was like, actually, there's a lot of us that have considered all of the people with their denied claims and their healthcare bankruptcies. We, we have considered that violence all along. We know that's violence and we, we want to do something about it.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  And so I've been thinking about, like, what ACT UP did in the eighties to get the FDA to cover HIV/AIDS drugs. Like, there's a lot of ways to make trouble that are not murdering people in the street, but that are being extremely, extremely disruptive. Like, ACT UP shut down the stock exchange. They, like, shut, they, they went to healthcare companies. They went to the FDA, like, they shut it down. Like, there's, we saw it happen. Repression happens. We saw what happened on college campuses after the Palestine protests. But it's like, that is the main thing on my mind right now. Like, temperamentally, I was, I always liked getting into trouble in school. Like, I was telling friends over the weekend, I have, like, a near fetish for getting in trouble in a group. I like doing something together with people that I get in trouble about.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  And I have been feeling that be extremely dominant in my, in, in where my mind wanders these days. Because we're, we both came here with the same question, kind of, right? It's like, what do we do? What do we do? We know something's bad, what do we do about it? Like, clearly, voting is absolutely insufficient. I'm like, I think it's completely wild that in the weeks that have elapsed since the UHC shooting, there has not been, like, a massive Democratic Party replatforming of single, single payer healthcare. You know, it's like, there's all, I'm kind of losing faith in at least national politics in enormous way and just trying to think, um, what else can be done.

• 1:06:37Sam Fragoso?

  You know, in your piece on Luigi Mangione, you, you write that the structural violence and, and social decay that appears Here's to be animating American life. And I think before we go, like, thinking about 2025, where do you see those ideas manifesting?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Structural violence is one term for what it is when a society has all of the resources necessary to sustain a good life for all of its people and does not and withholds it. And like, there is no more, I mean, this is true on a global scale, but in the US, the wealthiest civilization ever to exist, where we're like, in New York City, I mean, you think about it all the time, like, an enormous amount of the public school population is homeless. Like, 20% of my kids' public school is technically unhoused. And it's like, we have everything. We have all the resources. We have all of the money. We have all of the money in this country to make sure that people could live in safe places and have healthcare and not go bankrupt because of cancer treatment.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  And we withhold it from people. And that is, you know, structural violence is one term for it. Social injustice is another. But I think the term structural violence is important. It is violence that we have not built enough housing for people to live in. It's structural violence that we don't have universally guaranteed healthcare like any comparable country does. And I think like, yeah, where do I see it? It's like, back to the concept of the audit. If you think about your day, it's like, I mean, Matt Desmond wrote a really good book, Poverty by America, that argues that basically that the way I think about it is like that extreme wealth is as much, if not more, of a moral problem than extreme poverty, because extreme wealth depends on poverty. It depends on the sucking of resources upward from people.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  And that's the entire pattern of life in America, and I participate in it. I buy cheap groceries that are picked by undocumented, ununionized workers for, you know, $3 for a 50-pound box of strawberries, or whatever it might be, right? Like, it's, that structural violence is visible in probably almost everything we buy, everything we eat, in the transit system in New York. And, you know, it's visible in everything. I think it is the static background condition of American life that Some of us enjoy extreme comfort from email jobs and other people are working manual labor for a minimum wage that at this point needs to be tripled. Like it's that public school teachers make what they do and, you know,

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  I bankers right out of college make what they do. It doesn't make any sense. It's.

• 1:09:14Sam Fragoso?

  You know, what's amazing is my dad's been a public school teacher for 30 years in Chicago. But I was, I was driving to the studio today and I was, I was thinking about how every single person I've emailed has a bounce back and is talking about going back to work on January 6th or 7th, or who knows, January 12th. And on the way to the studio, I was like, wow, no one's really working. And then I looked out my window and I was like, oh.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Everyone's working.

• 1:09:47Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, no, everyone's working.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:50Sam Fragoso?

  There's a home being built here. There's people clocking into Trader Joe's there. There's construction next to the office. There's construction next to my home. There's someone gardening, there's someone taking out. And it's amazing to me how we don't reckon with, and I guess I am trying to reckon with, the immense privilege we have.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Right, it was like people in COVID being like, oh, I'm bored. And it was like, oh, like we're just, but we're in the class that's getting stuff delivered to us every day by people that are peeing in water bottles. Like, it's like.

• 1:10:21Sam Fragoso?

  But the thing, Jia, with this immense privilege, we started this conversation, now ending it, going, but I feel horrible. But I feel terrible. I feel this is untenable and I just don't know what to do with that.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  So I will say, like, I feel horrible when I am looking at a screen for too long. Otherwise, I feel good, you know? Like, I mean, I don't feel good about where the country is going. I don't feel good about the Democrats. I don't feel good about Eric Adams. I don't feel good about, and I don't feel good about any of the governing structures that ruin my, but like, I think it is possible with everyday living. You know, I mean, it's true. Like, when I was thinking about structural violence, like I was hungover on New Year's Day after my rager. Ordered delivery and you know, something that happened is like the Workers' Justice Project, they got New York City to guarantee like a minimum wage for delivery workers. An enormous victory for a city that runs on delivery of people getting incredible food

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  delivered to their house on the press of a button. And because of that, the apps have now changed it so that the options for tip are like 3%, 5%, 8% because they're like these greedy workers that are on their damn bikes all day long are getting paid too much because they're getting paid in the twenties per hour to slog it out through the rain and the ice and get fucking run over by cars and whatever. And I was like, yeah, it's the fact that that was seen as too much and now Seamless is you have to enter in a different thing if you want to tip more than 12% or whatever. It's like these little things, you know, yeah, what is there to do in that situation other than like tip 30% and be like, ugh. But I do think the idea that I always have in my mind is the Antonio Gramsci and conception

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  of pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

• 1:12:07Sam Fragoso?

  What's that?

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  It's what it sounds like, you know? It's like, I also feel that it's incumbent, like, I would talk to like people that were volunteering at abortion hotlines in Texas, right? And it's like, that is the spirit that like all sort of movement workers and activists and people that are like actually deep in the work that is necessary to change all of these things. That's the spirit that all of them that I have ever known and been friends with or talked to for work, they've all embodied pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, you know? Like you, you can know that everything is bad, but what do you have other than the day in front of you to just try to be a little bit less bullshitty? And I think that's an amazing opportunity that we have.

• 1:12:49Sam Fragoso?

  On that, it's so funny you went there because it's exactly where I was going to go. The question I keep circling, and it's the reason I thought you'd be a perfect first guest to kind of table set for 2025.

• 1:13:02Sam Fragoso?

  Is what to do with this information? Like, what amount of information of news is right to take in on a daily basis? Like, what is the human suffering quota? We have to meet each day to be a good, responsible citizen. And it reminded me of, after the Uvalde shooting, the writer Min Jin Lee said something like, "Our bodies are not designed to absorb and process this much violence, loss, and grief." And as we wade into another Trump term, 2025, all the problems with surveillance, capitalism, and technology that we've been talking about that make us feel depleted and less than,

• 1:13:45Sam Fragoso?

  I guess I want to ask you, how do we keep going?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  I think that the basic question of being alive right now is like a two-part thing that folds onto itself. And one is understanding the extent of, you know, the immorality of the structures that surround us. But the other half, which is equally as important, and it's the part that I rarely talk about because it's the answer for each of us is so extremely specific to everyone's life, right? Like, after I wrote my book, people would always be like, "But what should we do?" And I was like, "I can't tell you what you should do because what you should do is extremely specific to your own position and agency." But I think that the other half is as important. It's constantly, constantly negotiating an awareness of what is constraining you and constantly negotiating

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  and renewing an awareness of what freedom you do have. And so I think like that question of, "How many pictures of babies dead from hypothermia in Gaza should everyone be looking at per day?" I don't know. The answer is not all day, but the answer is probably not none, you know? And I think the answer, I mean, for me, how I calibrate that is, whatever's the right amount that cannot paralyze you, but that can compel you to remember whatever agency you do have. And, you know, and maybe people, like, when I was, let's say, had a one-month-old baby on my boob all the time. Agency arguably at an all time low there. You know, like I volunteer with my local mutual aid group. Wasn't volunteering at that point. You know, I started again at two months or whatever. But I think like how you do it is remember actually probably a lot of us have a lot more

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  room in our lives to do things differently than we thought. Right? Like we actually, you can block this shit off of your phone for 22 hours a day, 23 hours a day, 24 hours a day if we wanted. We could do that. We can, we have the technology actually to do that. Right? We can actually stop ordering from Amazon. We can actually not participate in certain things. We can, we can say no. I mean, you don't have to just be like, well, everything's corrupt. So I'm just going to go work with this person because everyone's bad. Like every single person listening to this could be volunteering on a weekly basis, probably. Right? Like there's, it's a simple answer, but I think the act of reminding ourselves that

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  there is actual, there is still individual flexibility against these things. That is as important as the actions themselves. Right? Like, I think that's why I'm always thinking about like, what are ways to get into trouble? Just to remind myself that I can, just to remind myself that perfect compliance with the kind of person that the world wants us to be. It's not a given. It's not guaranteed. It's not forced upon us. Like it's possible. It's possible to push. And but the question of what every individual person can do to push against whatever it is that's around them, that is entirely up to them.

• 1:16:30Sam Fragoso?

  Well, my last thing, I know you don't like epilogues, but, but I do. And I've heard you say before that I, against the old adage of hate writing, but love having written, you actually love writing in, in real time. And I thought we could end with a passage from a former teacher of yours on writing. This is from Deborah Eisenberg in The Parish Review.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Sure. I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history, and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you. It seems so ridiculous. Why can't I just buckle on my sword and leap on my horse and go charging through the forests? But the real-- I know this passage, I'm realizing, I love this, I love this paragraph. But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There's an incredibly inflexible set of instruments, our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it's awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate, but with

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  effort, you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma, or add, or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it's so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. I think that is so true about writing, but I think it's also relevant to what we were just talking about, right? And maybe that's exactly why you put that there. But it's like, you know, we're talking about a world where it seems like there's an inflexible set of givens, but the act of writing reminds you can make those givens yield, and I think the act of really living reminds you you can make those givens yield. And every writer will write whatever they do in only the way that they can, you know? I think that's the thing that I like about writing. You can only write the piece the way that you would write it.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  You can't write it the way that a smarter person or a different person would write it. And I think we get really tangled up, both in writing and in life, when we try to answer the question that's too big. It's like, what do we do about all of this in general? Who the fuck knows? But what do you do about the sentence that's in front of you right now? Like, actually, you can really do something with that, probably. You can really get somewhere with that. I think there's something to that.

• 1:18:47Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I so appreciate you doing the 30,000-foot view and also going line by line with me and trying to figure out all this stuff and getting in the weeds of it all.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I fear that I have not given any, you know, concrete resolutions, but--

• 1:19:04Sam Fragoso?

  Okay. Jia Tolentino, thank you so much for the time.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:19:36Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed our first episode of 2025 with Jia, best thing you can do for us is share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to go above and beyond, leave us five stars on Spotify, leave us a review on Apple. All of this really does help our team continue making the show each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Harry Nelson, Jake Loomis, Hyperobject, The New Yorker, Penguin Random House, and of course, our guest, Gia Tolentino. To read any of the pieces discussed in today's episode, visit our show notes at talkeasypod.com. For more conversations with other great writers, I'd recommend David Remnick,

• 1:20:20Sam Fragoso?

  Zadie Smith, and Talahasi Coats. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, or the vinyl record we made with writer Fran Lebowitz, visit our website at talkeasypod.com/shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janixa Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Kevin Core and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shannoy. Research assistance is from Pierce Harvey. I also want to thank our team at Lemonada Media.

• 1:21:05Sam Fragoso?

  I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back next week with another episode.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Until then, stay safe. Happy New Year. And so long.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

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