Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

(Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you’re enjoying a sunset, for example.)

We still know surprisingly little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so many of the one hundred million women around the world who take them feel awful.

Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided, would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.

Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned,

I reread The Great Divorce, which portrays hell as a drained, gray, hazy town where nothing happens. I reread his sci-fi novel Perelandra,

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape reminds Wormwood, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”