Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life.

They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else.

There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to calibrate this information correctly—no

The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one.

There is still a drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get better and women’s lives often get worse.