issyd23's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
The reality tv and me and pure heroines we’re my favourite essays. Writing is accessible. Essays are easy to read and entertaining but intellectually add nothing new to the conversation. 3⭐️
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual harassment and Sexual assault
lilygasper's review against another edition
5.0
Started this in 2020 and got distracted halfway through by other books. Picked it up again a few weeks ago and it couldn't be better timing. I think this book is a must-read. She articulates so many things that I feel like I was on the precipice of recognizing and has the best examples to back things up. If you consume any media (so everyone) or know a woman (so everyone), there's something to take away from reading it.
stevenfsantana's review against another edition
3.0
Still thinking over this. I think of it as a sort of making explicit the things we commonly hold to be true in the intangible void of our minds. Like she says, putting to words what we already think and feel in order to make it more real and understandable, but whether you come out the otherwise actually more enlightened or understanding is debatable. It borders on something you just read to agree with and feel better about yourself because of that at the end, but it also has some good quotes that have that effect on me, so.
lindseyhardison's review against another edition
4.0
Really enjoyed this one and hearing Tolentino’s perspective. I liked how she addressed so many issues and the way everything is centered around the patriarchy. It made me really assess my own viewpoints and think about whether I want a lot of things society has deemed desirable because I actually want them, or do I want it because it’s the expectation. Will be thinking about this one for awhile!
heytarajo's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault
mushimilda's review against another edition
4.0
Cette collection d’essais de critique culturelle (est-ce que ce mot existe en français?) de la société américaine est franchement passionnant. L’autrice explore des sujets très divers autour de la politique, du journalisme et du féminisme à travers le prisme de sa propre identité. Cela l’amène à traiter de l’évolution d’internet (et c’est sûrement cet essai, le premier du livre, qui m’a le plus soufflé), du yoga, de Trump et de la culture de l’arnaque, des mariages, des héroïnes de romans jeunesse, de sa participation à une émission de télé-réalité pendant son adolescence, de religion et de drogue et du lien entre les deux, des viols sur les campus et leur médiatisation, de la problématique du culte de la femme difficile dans le pop féminisme et de ses enjeux politiques, et encore bien d’autres choses. C’est franchement très bien mené, sourcé, et très bien écrit, en plus d’être enrichissant.
tsunafish's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
First saw this book on a friend’s instagram story and liked the title and cover, and after reading a summary I was interested enough to add it to my to-read list.
This is my first read of essays that primarily focused on feminism (although not all of them did). I thought her criticisms and themes she explored in her essays of her reflection on self delusion were interesting, my favourites being the ones on capitalism and scamming (all billionaires are scammers), the unruly woman (basically women never win), and weddings and marriages (capitalizing love).
This is my first read of essays that primarily focused on feminism (although not all of them did). I thought her criticisms and themes she explored in her essays of her reflection on self delusion were interesting, my favourites being the ones on capitalism and scamming (all billionaires are scammers), the unruly woman (basically women never win), and weddings and marriages (capitalizing love).
roll_n_read's review against another edition
5.0
I really liked all of this. I took a lot of notes on the internet and scam essays, but I thought all of the essays were great. 'Difficult Women' and 'Pure Heroines' and the one on ecstasy and Christianity were all brilliant—insightful and enjoyable through and through.
-----
The I in the Internet
'The I in the Internet' is one of those brilliant essays that articulates something all of us millennials have observed and thought about, but never had the words to describe so clearly as Jia Tolentino can.
“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”
"It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely... you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.”
--Yes, unfortunately, there is no opting out of the world the attention merchants' built for us, even by trying to live offline. And it's hard to imagine the legislators catching up with the runaway train that is the tech behemoths. All it takes to destroy all confidence is watching 2018 senators squander their opportunity to ask Mark Zuckerberg tough questions about real issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vL4HLTZQ_Q
“The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving."
--I sort of disagree on this point. Though I agree it wears you down emotionally, I think one of the rewards of the internet today is the exposure to problems you might otherwise not see in the course of your own life. It's certainly not enjoyable. And there are many elements that in some ways counteract this benefit of the internet—including volume of information, lack of sources and trustability, as well as how hard it is to understand the scale and severity of a problem, or as Tolentino puts it "no way to teach ourselves how to separate the banal from the profound"—but I think exposure to problems we cannot personally solve is not something to be avoided as such.
"In every human interaction a person must put on a sort of performance." & "All the world is not a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify."
-Erving Goffman
"The assumption that speech has an impact, that it's something like action. The assumption that it's fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think."
“the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life."
--feels truer now in 2020 than I think it did when she wrote it
"I started to feel there was almost nothing I could do about 95% of the things I cared about other than form an opinion."
"Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you're enjoying a sunset. The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation."
"masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme"
“The internet is still so young that it’s easy to retain some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something... and we sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again.”
--I think about this a lot. Is there some way to seize part of the internet back from the money-crazed corporations that have colonized it, and by effect the physical wold with it?
-------
In Pure Heroines
Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood by Adriana Cavarero she explains identity as something we understand as narratives through others. She writes about the scene in which Odysseus hears his life articulated by a singer and weeps.
--------
Ecstasy
Ecstasy and being a Christian believer in her youth. This was cool and thoughtful. I vibed with this.
"15 years dismantling what the first 15 built... Christianity formed by deepest instincts; it gave me a leftist world view. A desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick."
"I hated the prosperity gospel..."
------
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
This was amazing. From the Fyre Festival to Amazon's scamming us into extreme devaluation to student debt to Girlbosses to the financial crash to the Trump presidency as a money-making enterprise.
"I've felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional. To be wrecked or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck."
--This hits.
"I still believe that I can make it out of here... One day I will ascend to an echelon where I won't have to compromise anymore, where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self interested scrabbling that came before... It's a fantasy... Like so many people in my generation I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays."
-----
The I in the Internet
'The I in the Internet' is one of those brilliant essays that articulates something all of us millennials have observed and thought about, but never had the words to describe so clearly as Jia Tolentino can.
“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”
"It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely... you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.”
--Yes, unfortunately, there is no opting out of the world the attention merchants' built for us, even by trying to live offline. And it's hard to imagine the legislators catching up with the runaway train that is the tech behemoths. All it takes to destroy all confidence is watching 2018 senators squander their opportunity to ask Mark Zuckerberg tough questions about real issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vL4HLTZQ_Q
“The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving."
--I sort of disagree on this point. Though I agree it wears you down emotionally, I think one of the rewards of the internet today is the exposure to problems you might otherwise not see in the course of your own life. It's certainly not enjoyable. And there are many elements that in some ways counteract this benefit of the internet—including volume of information, lack of sources and trustability, as well as how hard it is to understand the scale and severity of a problem, or as Tolentino puts it "no way to teach ourselves how to separate the banal from the profound"—but I think exposure to problems we cannot personally solve is not something to be avoided as such.
"In every human interaction a person must put on a sort of performance." & "All the world is not a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify."
-Erving Goffman
"The assumption that speech has an impact, that it's something like action. The assumption that it's fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think."
“the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life."
--feels truer now in 2020 than I think it did when she wrote it
"I started to feel there was almost nothing I could do about 95% of the things I cared about other than form an opinion."
"Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you're enjoying a sunset. The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation."
"masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme"
“The internet is still so young that it’s easy to retain some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something... and we sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again.”
--I think about this a lot. Is there some way to seize part of the internet back from the money-crazed corporations that have colonized it, and by effect the physical wold with it?
-------
In Pure Heroines
Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood by Adriana Cavarero she explains identity as something we understand as narratives through others. She writes about the scene in which Odysseus hears his life articulated by a singer and weeps.
--------
Ecstasy
Ecstasy and being a Christian believer in her youth. This was cool and thoughtful. I vibed with this.
"15 years dismantling what the first 15 built... Christianity formed by deepest instincts; it gave me a leftist world view. A desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick."
"I hated the prosperity gospel..."
------
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
This was amazing. From the Fyre Festival to Amazon's scamming us into extreme devaluation to student debt to Girlbosses to the financial crash to the Trump presidency as a money-making enterprise.
"I've felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional. To be wrecked or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck."
--This hits.
"I still believe that I can make it out of here... One day I will ascend to an echelon where I won't have to compromise anymore, where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self interested scrabbling that came before... It's a fantasy... Like so many people in my generation I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays."
sadi9954's review against another edition
2.0
This is an overhyped collection of school reports.
Apart from one essay which I enjoyed, the rest were tepid and her takes on feminism were pretty stale and 2012. Her parents human trafficking charges have come to light so yeah… skip this one.
Apart from one essay which I enjoyed, the rest were tepid and her takes on feminism were pretty stale and 2012. Her parents human trafficking charges have come to light so yeah… skip this one.
obtuseblues's review against another edition
4.0
tolentino starts out so very strong with her first essay, "the i in the internet" which feels groundbreaking, insightful, and sharp. i really really loved it, tearing through its content, turning page after page. as i continued on i was intrigued but wasn't gripped as much i was by that initial essay until i reach "ecstasy". that essay burrowed into me, as i started to see bits of myself in it. the rest of the essays will drift off into the oblivion of my mind, eventually. many of these essays kind of do have a pessimistic feel to them as she points out what's wrong, what's actually wrong, and how we still perpetuate it in this day and age, which can make one begin to feel a tad hopeless. she gives some disclaimers at times, trying to acknowledge that these phenomena are actually significant shifts in the culture themselves (e.g., the emulation and valuation of "difficult" women) but still leave a bitter taste on the tongue.
i liked how her writing style is easy to read and does sound like her voice. at times, it did still feel like she was writing an inflammatory op-ed. some of her opinions on feminism are super interesting and i do generally agree that we've gotten to a point of glorifying or championing anything any woman does under the guise of feminism but she loses me with her love for hillary clinton lol she, too, is a war criminal....i did enjoy her honesty throughout this and her ongoing monologue with herself about delusion because we all have stories we feed to ourselves to make sense of our lives, and these are just some of her's she's willing to share.
favorite essays ranked:
1. the i in the internet
2. ecstasy
3. always be optimizing
i liked how her writing style is easy to read and does sound like her voice. at times, it did still feel like she was writing an inflammatory op-ed. some of her opinions on feminism are super interesting and i do generally agree that we've gotten to a point of glorifying or championing anything any woman does under the guise of feminism but she loses me with her love for hillary clinton lol she, too, is a war criminal....i did enjoy her honesty throughout this and her ongoing monologue with herself about delusion because we all have stories we feed to ourselves to make sense of our lives, and these are just some of her's she's willing to share.
favorite essays ranked:
1. the i in the internet
2. ecstasy
3. always be optimizing