As someone whose job is to write down what I think, it's something that I have to remind myself - that it doesn't really matter when I say what I think. Moral clarity, these days, it means a lot less than I would like it to mean. like this - and then nothing happens.Īnd so the gun control debate is just a continual reminder to me: An opinion doesn't necessarily translate to action. We will have a mass shooting in America and people will get online and express their very true anguish, and people express their anger and their righteousness, and this formidable undeniable moral narratives about how children should not be dying in the U.S. On her belief that opinion doesn't necessarily translate into action 'It's always a starting place, it can never be an ending place,' she says.

'īut she warns that expressing opinions online can feel misleadingly meaningful. 'You saw the Parkland kids did it, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. 'The Internet has obviously been an incredible ground for social movements being organized,' she says. In her new book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Tolentino writes about how social media shapes identity, public discourse and political engagement, particularly for millennials such as herself. She says the 'lasting legacy' of that upbringing is a lifelong desire to replicate the ecstatic feelings she had experienced in the religion - which she sought out via hallucinogenic mushrooms and the drug MDMA, or Molly. The New Yorker culture writer was brought up in a Southern Baptist megachurch in Houston. 'I am sure that you don't send your kid to Christian school for 12 years and hope that they'll do what I did: Which is have The New Yorker publish 7,000 words about how the church led me to love doing MDMA and love rap music,' she says. Jia Tolentino's strict Christian upbringing backfired. 'It was the kind of place where you had a daily Bible class from first grade 'till senior year.'

'The population was extremely white and wealthy, which my family was not,' Tolentino says. When she was growing up, New Yorker culture writer Jia Tolentino attended a Houston megachurch with her family.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino