‘New Yorker’ Writer Fears We’re Fooling Ourselves In The Internet&
‘New Yorker’ Writer Fears We’re Fooling Ourselves In The Internet’s 'Trick Mirror’Jia Tolentino’s strict Christian upbringing backfired.“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.The New Yorker culture writer was brought up in a Southern Baptist megachurch in Houston. 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 that out via hallucinogenic mushrooms and the drug MDMA, or Molly.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. “The Internet has obviously been an incredible ground for social movements being organized,” she says. “You saw the Parkland kids did it, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo …”But she warns that expressing opinions online can feel misleadingly meaningful. “It’s always a starting place, it can never be an ending place,” she says. -- source link
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