Jia Tolentino
The New Yorker
New York, NY, United States
Contact Jia
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by Jia:
What to Do with Climate Emotions
Jia Tolentino writes about therapy addressing climate-change-related grief and anxiety, and about ways activists manage the emotional toll of their work and what they observe about a changing planet. → Read More
Jai Paul, a Mysterious Pop Legend, Is Finally Performing
Jia Tolentino on the musician Jai Paul—who, after dropping the hit song “BTSTU,” in 2010, has been a subject of Internet mythologizing—and his performing début. → Read More
Is Abortion Sacred?
Abortion is often talked about as a grave act. But bringing a new life into the world can feel like the decision that more clearly risks being a moral mistake. → Read More
We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe v. Wade. We’re Going Somewhere Worse
Jia Tolentino writes about the overturning of Roe v. Wade after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization, the future for abortion rights, and the importance of reproductive justice. → Read More
Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?
Jia Tolentino on Angela Garbes’s books “Essential Labor” and “Like a Mother,” the importance of public and universal care work, and the devaluing of essential labor. → Read More
Another Risk in Overturning Roe
The decision rejects the idea of fetal personhood—which anti-abortion groups have been pushing on state legislatures. → Read More
How Britney Spears Got Free, and What Comes Next
Spears fought for years to end the conservatorship she was under, and finally won. But the legal battles aren’t over. → Read More
S.B. 8 and the Texas Preview of a World Without Roe v. Wade
The new law, an employee of Whole Woman’s Health said, has been “nothing short of devastating for our providers, our staff, and our patients.” → Read More
Picturing the Humanity and Dread of the Infinite Scroll
Tabitha Soren’s “Surface Tension” defamiliarizes the touch screen, where our warm animal bodies collide with the machine’s cold and infinite knowledge of the world. → Read More
The Depressive Realism of “The Life of the Mind”
Jia Tolentino reviews “The Life of the Mind,” Christine Smallwood’s début novel about a thirtysomething woman named Dorothy, who is an adjunct instructor of English literature and has recently had a miscarriage. → Read More
The Mysterious “Sweating Sickness” in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” Trilogy and the Private Country of Illness
Because monumental matters are mundane in Mantel’s trilogy, the mundane feels monumental—an aspect that harmonizes with the heightened sensory awareness that seems to mark life in quarantine. → Read More
Jia Tolentino
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose recent work includes an exploration of youth vaping and essays on the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Previously, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, attended the University of Virginia, served in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan, and received an M.F.A. in… → Read More
“Minor Feelings” and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity
Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. → Read More
The PowerPoint Platitudes of “Bloomberg by Bloomberg”
Jia Tolentino reviews the Democratic Presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg’s reissued autobiography, “Bloomberg by Bloomberg,” in the context of the 2020 election. → Read More
Reading J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” During the Harvey Weinstein Trial
The novel does not portray the serial predator that Weinstein is alleged to be, yet it suggests that power exerted without consideration of humanity carries fearsome, unknowable, and often directly retributive costs. → Read More
The Pitfalls and the Potential of the New Minimalism
The mantra of “less is more” still obeys a logic of accumulation—but it hints at genuinely different ways of thinking. → Read More
The Opening Statements in the Harvey Weinstein Trial and the Undermining of #MeToo
No one understands the abuse of power better than a person who’s fallen victim to it, as the women testifying in the Weinstein trial quite possibly know. → Read More
The Pathos of “Cheer” and the Extraordinary Deceptions of Cheerleading
Jia Tolentino writes about the Netflix documentary series “Cheer,” which stars the championship-winning cheerleading team at Navarro College, in Corsicana, Texas. → Read More
The Chaotic, Beautiful Larks of Elizabeth Wurtzel
Wurtzel lived out an advance trajectory of what might happen when your writing career centers on your charisma and the strong feelings that people tend to have about young women. → Read More
The Improbable Insanity of “Cats”
Jia Tolentino on the musical “Cats” and how Andrew Lloyd Webber turned a strange book by T. S. Eliot into a baffling cultural phenomenon, including a history-making Broadway show and new computer-generated movie. → Read More