Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
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This is a collection of personal essays about a constellation of issues in our current cultural moment from a New Yorker staff writer and former editor of Jezebel. The essays deal with: the internet's transformation over the last 20 years; reality television; optimization (especially of appearance); literary heroines; the rise of scam culture; campus sexual assault; modern feminism and the cult of "difficult women"; marriage culture; and, oddly enough, religious and drug-induced ecstasy (filtered through an extended riff on DJ Screw). The essays are whip-smart and carry the reader through the roots and branches of the cultural problems she tackles, but they're also personal essays, reflected through the prism of her own experience (as a reality TV star), her own reporting (on modern feminism and "difficult women"), or both (as in the case of her essay on campus sexual assault).
That personal connection is one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses of the book. The author has a distinct voice and presence and a wide range of interests, which lends a multivariate pointedness to a lot of the observations, and her lived experience also helps to ground some of the finer points firmly in reality. Sometimes, though, the personal focus has a way of trivializing or derailing the broader point. For example, there's an extended anecdote in the Optimization essay that's kind of baffling, didn't really relate to the topic or advance the narrative in any meaningful way, and took me completely out of the book for a bit (you'll know it if you read it).
But minor focal issues aside, my only serious gripe with the book is the author's engagement with statistics, which is sometimes good, and sometimes kind of misleading. The author will, for example, present a series of stats in a way that suggests they're comparable, but in reality they're not really commensurable. Likewise, the author will present statistics in a misleading way that more thoroughly reinforces the message. The most egregious section is the one dealing with student loan debt (in the Scams essay); there, she recites a string of stats that are confusing or misleading (e.g., mixing inflation-adjusted and nominal dollars, uncritically repeating the 99% denial rate for student loan forgiveness, etc.). The author isn't alone in this, it's a common journalistic issue, and I think most of her analysis is still (in the broad strokes) correct, just, perhaps, less convincingly correct than the stats she offers would suggest.
That said, the book is immensely entertaining and the author comes up with some clear and fairly convincing explanations of some thorny issues that I've been struggling to fully articulate for years (like "what the hell went so wrong with the internet?"). So, provided you stay alert when the numbers start dropping, this book is definitely recommended.