Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.She is the kind of writer that is talked about with a mixture of rapturous admiration and pained envy. Her work is marked by forensic attention, generous insight, a tone that is both conversational and lavishly descriptive, and an absurd, sparkling sense of humour crystallised by the internet’s heavy layers of irony and meta-jokes. A staff writer at the New Yorker who built her reputation writing for esoteric and viciously funny women’s sites The Hairpin and Jezebel, Tolentino’s cultural criticism encompasses everything from pop music to rape culture, literary fiction to memes, the rise of youth vaping to the Westminster Dog Show. “I tried to undo their acts of refraction.”įor many, Tolentino is the perfect person for the job. “These are the prisms through which I have come to know myself,” she writes. Thanks to the internet, “commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships,” writes Jia Tolentino in the first essay of her book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, as the web constantly overwhelms “our frayed neurons in huge waves of information.” It is out of this moment that Trick Mirror has been written, and it is this moment that it tries to capture, through nine essays that range across the glossy fitness culture, the modern wedding-industrial complex, her teenage experience on a reality TV show, and much more. Today we permanently live in that deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors and lights.

“To reach the cosmetics counter,” Wolf writes, this woman “must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the “sensory overload” used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility.” Confusion makes her the perfect customer. In Naomi Wolf’s 1990 book The Beauty Myth, a woman walks into a department store.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino