Her debut collection of essays, “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion,” explores social networks, celebrity, feminism, scammer culture, religion, drugs and weddings. Tolentino, a staff writer at the New Yorker, came of age with this medium. “In the beginning,’ begins Jia Tolentino, “the internet seemed good.” With that sentence, vaguely evocative of Genesis, she neatly encapsulates a collective disenchantment-the unraveling of life in the digital age, the descent from the internet’s initial promise of connection and possibility into a “feverish, electric, unlivable hell.” She also posits the rise of the internet as her generation’s creation narrative, as it were: a medium that, as the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan prophesied, has inexorably “recondition and restructure all our values and institutions.” A woman takes a selfie at a bombing site in Ankara, Turkey.
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