“The world is beautifully and uncomfortably and terrifyingly ungovernable. Life is not something that we can just Apple watch and pregnancy tracker our way into whatever counts as a successful outcome. There’s this idea that in the old economy bosses had to exploit the workers, but now we happily self-exploit. We happily submit ourselves to surveillance. And with pregnancy, it felt important to recognize that the experience would be better and perhaps safer if I didn’t track it relentlessly.”
-Jia Tolentino, episode 399 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
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. 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 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].
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Show-notes:
Books
- Trick Mirror (Jia Tolentino, 2019)
- Poverty, by America (Matthew Desmond, 2023)
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Andreas Malm, 2020)
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Articles
- A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing? (The New Yorker, 2024)
- The Hidden-Pregnancy Experiment (The New Yorker, 2024)
- A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right (The New Yorker, 2024)
- Jia Tolentino on The Ezra Klein Show (The New York Times, 2024)
- Oxford’s Word of the Year (2024)
- Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston (The New Yorker, 2019)
- Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218 (The Paris Review, 2013)
For more talks, hear our conversations with David Remnick, Zadie Smith, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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Illustrations by Krishna Shenoi. Reference photograph by Elena Mudd.
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