Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara

Jia Tolentino:

Anyone who has a child, which is the majority of adults. You understand how hard, how creative, how holy really, how beautiful, how skilled that labor is. To me is so much harder, so much, clearly harder than whatever the hell it is that I do.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Jia Tolentino. She’s a staff writer at the New Yorker and the bestselling author of Trick Mirror, an essay collection published in 2019. Tolentino is known for her distinctive perspective on contemporary culture from social media to feminism, to parenthood. Her subject matter and prose have earned her comparisons to another great essayist. Joan Didion Tolentino is perhaps best known for her writing on how the internet impacts our daily lives, the way we work, define ourselves, and relate to one another. She joins me to discuss her thoughts about big tech, why she believes our society undervalues childcare, and how becoming a mother affirmed her belief in abortion rights. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Before I get to your questions. There’s exciting news from Cafe. The new season of Up Against The Mob hosted by Elie Honig is here. You can listen to the first episode now. Just search for and follow Up Against The Mob in your listening app. And now onto your questions.

This question comes from Twitter, user Rich McCabe who asks, when the Fulton County DA says charges were imminent on January 23rd, how do you define imminent? It seems lawyers have a loose definition of the term #askpreet. Well, that’s a good question. You’re obviously referring to the Fulton County DA, who in the course of arguing against the unsealing of the special grand jury’s report, tried to minimize the harm that would be done to the free flow of information, an argument brought by media organizations by saying that indictments were imminent. The relevance of that being that the essential and important information in the still largely sealed grand jury report would become public, because indictments and arrests eventually become public. So what did you mean by imminent? And you’re right. Lawyers do sometimes have a loose definition of the term, but sometimes they have a pretty strict definition of the term, usually as a legal matter.

The word imminent comes up as an adjective modifying danger. We all hear about imminent danger or imminent peril. That’s a doctrine that has a fairly specific definition depending on the jurisdiction you’re in. And generally speaking, if someone is in imminent danger, jurisdictions allow the use of deadly force to defend one’s self. And generally speaking, imminent danger means certain danger, immediate impending menacingly close at hand and threatening. Often that means in the moment. That’s what imminent can mean in that context. Now, I don’t think that the Fulton County DA was using imminent as a legal term of art as it’s sometimes used in those other contexts. I think she meant soon. And by soon on the prosecutor’s clock, that does not mean minutes. That does not mean hours. It usually doesn’t even mean days. And in fact, it’s been some weeks since January 23rd when that representation was made in court. My best guess is that she means couple of months. So we’re talking about potential indictments I think later this month in March or in April, but that’s just a guess on my part.

This question comes in a tweet from Jen Hamel who writes, “As it relates to Ivanka Trump’s subpoena, is there anything a prosecutor can do when a witness relies on, I don’t recall as an answer in a case? Can they be held in contempt or can a judge compel them to provide some more substantive information?” Well, that’s a great question. It doesn’t only relate to Ivanka Trump’s subpoena. We see it all the time. It’s standard operating procedure, often sometimes in good faith, often not in good faith. But it’s a very difficult thing to pierce to prove someone is perjuring himself or herself or lying to someone. The answer, I don’t recall, has to be demonstrably disprovable. So you need proof to hold someone accountable for that very unsatisfactory answer. That in fact, they do recall and they told someone they recalled and then they’re acting and lying about it in the moment to prevent themselves from answering a question in a specific way.

That happens from time to time, but it’s rare. And your question reminds me of a story that I may have told before, but I don’t think I have. Years ago when I was working in the Senate on the Judiciary Committee and we were doing an investigation into the politicization of the Justice Department, there was a lawyer and his client, somebody who was a high ranking official at the Justice Department who resigned, whose deposition I was taking. And we went for several hours once on a Sunday and then we had a continuation of the deposition. Some days later, and at the beginning of the deposition, it sometimes happens, either I ask or the lawyer volunteered that there was one correction to the prior testimony that his client wished to give.

So he opens up the deposition transcript and he points to some page, I’ll say it’s page 189, and he says to his client, “Mr. Client, when you answer this question from Mr. Bharara, no, what did you actually mean to say?” And the client says, “I meant to say I don’t recall.” It would be very unusual and very difficult to bring a charge based on, I don’t recall or hold someone accountable just for that phrase. But depending on the context and what kind of proceeding it is, you can imagine a trial that an executive of a company says, I don’t recall many, many times. And that information comes in or that person chooses to testify and says, I don’t recall about circumstances, that you can make an argument to the jury that that’s not credible, based on the personality of the person or the significance of events that that person claims not to recall. And it might help your overall argument in a civil case or in a criminal case.

But the basic recitation of I don’t recall is a tried and true tactic on the part of witnesses the world over. I don’t recall is the answer people rely on. Again, as I said, sometimes in good faith, but very often not. But there’s not a lot in most circumstances that prosecutors or judges can do about it.

This question comes in an email from Sarah, who writes, “Preet. Since you do a great job of explaining complex legal concepts, would you consider providing your listeners with a way to understand beyond a reasonable doubt?” Well, thanks for the compliment. So obviously as you know, there are different standards of proof that are required depending on the type of proceeding that’s at issue. To get an indictment, for example, or to get a search warrant, the standard is probable cause. To hold someone liable, generally speaking, in a civil litigation, the standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence, which means that something is more likely than not. The highest standard we have in our law in this country is the standard burden of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s a high standard and it’s meant to be a high standard because most of the time, if not always, proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal case means that someone might be deprived of their liberty.

And we want to make sure that the burden of proof is high and we want to make sure that the burden of proof always stays with the state or the federal government. They’re trying to do a very, very difficult and substantial and consequential thing to convict someone of a crime. And so it’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be hard, and it’s supposed to take a lot of work. But rather than my explaining to you what it means, what beyond a reasonable doubt means I’ll tell you what judges tell juries throughout every criminal trial. And most importantly, at the end of a criminal trial. Before the jury begins deliberating on the charges presented, a judge will give often lengthy instructions on what the law is, what the burden is, what the standard of proof is, and there are standard jury instructions that explain, probably better than I can, what beyond a reasonable doubt is supposed to mean.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. This comes from model criminal jury instructions in federal court, specifically in the Ninth Circuit. And in most circuits in the federal court, it’ll be something like this. “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you firmly convinced the defendant is guilty. It is not required that the government proved guilt beyond all possible doubt. A reasonable doubt is a doubt based upon reason and common sense, and is not based purely on speculation. It may arise from a careful and impartial consideration of all the evidence or from lack of evidence. If after a careful and impartial consideration of all the evidence, you are not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, it is your duty to find the defendant not guilty.” And there’s more in the federal jury instruction, but you get the gist.

Generally speaking, judges like to tell jurors a couple of things. First, that your doubt does not have to be completely non-existent, not beyond all doubt, but beyond a reasonable doubt. And that doubt has to be based on something from the evidence upon reason, upon common sense. Here’s another way that judges have instructed jurors. This comes from the New York State court system, and here’s what a judge might typically tell a jury in New York.

“What does our law mean when it requires proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? The law uses the term, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, to tell you how convincing the evidence of guilt must be to permit a verdict of guilty. The law recognizes that in dealing with human affairs, there are very few things in the world that we know with absolute certainty. Therefore, the law does not require the people to prove a defendant guilty beyond all possible doubt.” See the similarity? “On the other hand, it is not sufficient to prove that the defendant is probably guilty. In a criminal case, the proof of guilt must be stronger than that. It must be beyond a reasonable doubt.” And then there’s more. “A reasonable doubt is an honest doubt of the defendant’s guilt for which a reason exists based on the nature and quality of the evidence. It is an actual doubt, not an imaginary doubt. It is a doubt that a reasonable person acting in a matter of this importance would be likely to entertain because of the evidence that was presented or because of the lack of convincing evidence.”

So I hope that explains it a little bit because that’s the explanation you would get if you sit on a jury in a criminal case.

We’ll be right back with my conversation with Jia Tolentino. New Yorker writer, Jia Tolentino, is perhaps the most celebrated cultural critic of her generation, the millennial generation. It’s been over three years since she published her bestselling essay collection, and she joins me to discuss how her life and her culture have changed. Jia Tolentino, welcome to the show.

Jia Tolentino:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s so good to have you. We have a lot to talk about. Thank you for your writing. We had, I guess he’s your boss, David Remnick was on a few weeks ago.

Jia Tolentino:

He is my boss.

Preet Bharara:

He is your boss. What kind of boss is her.

Jia Tolentino:

Good boss. I would say really good.

Preet Bharara:

Are you saying that because this is going to be heard by hundreds of thousands of people, including him.

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have handcuffs to the bottom of my desk that will electrocute me if I didn’t say that, but no, he’s great.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote a book three and a half years ago, came out, Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion. I’m going to ask you about some of the themes from the book, but one of the things, since we had David Remnick on that I was going to ask you about, you have said, and it’s obviously you can see it in your book, that in your acknowledgements you thank David Remnick for not firing me for tweeting about your bong. Is that one of the reasons he’s a great boss?

Jia Tolentino:

I will say when I first started working at the New Yorker, I guess that was 2016, it was extremely shocking to me that they would hire me. I had just been blogging on the internet often. I was able to write seriously about things that I cared about, but people have a certain idea of the New Yorker and it’s quite respectable. And respectable was not an adjective that I would really associate with my general vibe at the the age of… That was seven years ago at the age of 26 or whatever that was.

And I was doing things like tweeting about smoking weed all the time. But I guess the jokes on all of us, because one of my assignments for the New Yorker right now is I’m covering the recreational, as New York tries to stand up, it’s recreational weed market. I’m kind of writing about it from the sort of, they’re trying to do what no state has done successfully before, which is engaged with the idea of reparations to marginalize communities through these very particular policies. And my editor brought me this idea and I was like, I’ve been preparing for this my whole life.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, I am the perfect person for this job, but so far to date, I have refrained from tweeting about my bong.

Jia Tolentino:

Do you have one?

Preet Bharara:

And the principal reason for that is because I do not have have a bong. It’s not really on brand for me to have a bong.

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, yeah. Well, you never know.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, my kids, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about this, but I’m a bit older, we had a hypothetical conversation given the legalization and the recreational use that’s spreading, whether daddy should smoke weed. And my kids were horrified and mortified that I would.

Jia Tolentino:

Really?

Preet Bharara:

I think aesthetically they thought just like, you’re too old. They’re just like, what are you talking about? That ship has sailed. You can’t do that.

Jia Tolentino:

Well, I think often. Like I have a two and a half year old and it’s sort of a classic thing that you do when you’re in your early or mid-teens where pot is this taboo thing. And I sort of feel that when my daughter is that age, she’ll be like, weed, that’s that thing that millennials do. Those gummies for old people. I wonder if their generation will skip the weed as rebellion phase altogether.

Preet Bharara:

It’s too legal.

Jia Tolentino:

It’s too legal. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

They may have to do something else. So I’m looking forward to your piece on that. So you have written very thoughtfully about social media in its various forms. We talk about that on the show. There’s a lot of controversy about it and you said many things about it. But one thing you said a few years ago in the New Yorker was… I apologize if I’m taking it out of context.

Jia Tolentino:

No.

Preet Bharara:

But you said social media companies monetize everyday cell phone and you say some other things. And you say, “Over time we have absorbed these terms and conditions. We may retain very little of the value we create, but we have allowed social media to make us feel valuable.” I was struck by how you phrased that. What’s wrong with being made to feel valuable?

Jia Tolentino:

I don’t remember writing that, but I bet it was in a blurb for Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I think is pretty much the error text for all of this. And I think that’s the problem. There’s absolutely nothing wrong at all with being made to feel valuable. In fact, I think that the essential sort of spiritual and emotional and soul level needs that social media and the surveillance economy draws on these basic human needs to be seen and to be loved and to speak and to be heard. There’s not only is nothing wrong with these things to be valued, not only is nothing wrong with these things. They’re so necessary to who we are and to our understanding of connecting to each other and creating a self that can do anything in the world. And the problem is, I think it’s a bit of a trick, right? It’s like the value does not really accrue to us, it accrues to the companies that are scraping our data.

Preet Bharara:

Are you talking about economic value or there are different kinds of values, right?

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah. I mean think that it goes back to the right. It’s like thing that was promised by social media fundamentally by all the companies. And the mission statement is connection. And the actual cumulative emotional result doesn’t feel like connection. It feels like extreme alienation and connection through mostly negative things through the strongest ties are through conspiracy. And the emotions that bind people online tend to be much more negative than the emotions that bind them offline. And I think the same goes with value. What’s promised is the possibility of being seen for who you are, and especially for young people like virality and maybe sudden fame and sudden riches. But I think the actual everyday experience for most people is one in which we are the ones providing value to these companies, that we have the sort of semblance emotionally of it, but are experiencing the structural reality of being sort of strip minded day by day. And being left sort of innervated and empty by it.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask about a couple of these paradox. As you’ve already mentioned, whether or not social media and the internet whose promises that we will be more connected actually causes us to be more alienated. Related to that, do you think that people are more themselves or more performative when they’re on social media and are different people different?

Jia Tolentino:

I think that it varies from person to person. I do think that there is something inherent about the structure of the internet. And I’ve thought I’ve written about this before in some way where it’s like, you can’t just be on the internet the way that you can be in the real world. You can’t just walk around online and someone sees you and you have spontaneous interactions the way you do on a city street in New York. You have to act for anyone to see you. And that’s not the case in real life, in physical life. And so I do think the internet in that way, it values performance and representation inherently because it requires it in order for actions to be rendered visible.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you can just be a spectator online. I mean some statistic, I don’t have it in front of me, let’s talk about Twitter for-

Jia Tolentino:

The most being —

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. The majority of people don’t post a tweet on Twitter. And all the conversations that I tend to have and the things that people tend to write about are those small percentage or minority percentage of people about whom I can ask, are they being themselves? Are they being performative? Are they radicalizing other people? Most people just scroll. Is that good or bad?

Jia Tolentino:

I don’t know. I think as with everything, right? It’s like technology itself, it’s neutral and it’s what we do with it. It’s the value system that we apply it. That we apply that technology to. That’s entirely the thing, right? It’s like every individual piece of context is determinative. And I think, yeah, I mean of course you can name 12 different examples that are all on the spectrum of we want to oversimplify good and bad. There’s like the person who goes straight from never posting anything on the internet to committing a violent crime in the name of some conspiracy theory. And there’s a person who is disabled and uses the internet as a way to understand community as a primary way of a physical connection that can’t happen in real life. And in that way it’s this salvific beautiful tool.

But back to that question of are people more themselves or more performative online. I think you can be yourself on the internet because I don’t think it’s impossible to be a “authentic self” on the internet. In part because I write about the sociologist Irving Goffman in my book. I really buy that model that you naturally, but performative has kind of a deservedly bad rap as a word, as a bad connotation. But I do think we are performing in real life. When we’re on the subway, we perform the role of quiet commuter hopefully. And when we’re with our friends, we perform the role of friend and those different performances, I think there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. And in fact, they’re necessary to what we know as being human.

Preet Bharara:

Well, here’s the other thing you’ve said which I’m going to ask you about. You’ve said something like the internet turns life into an endless performance with no backstage. What does that mean and why is the backstage important?

Jia Tolentino:

So as you know, if we’re going by the framework that the Goffman sets out, it’s like we go about life, right now we’re performing. People having what is hopefully an interesting conversation on a podcast. And later on I’ll walk… Whatever. We’ll go through all these different performances and they change depending on the context and they change over, the audience changes over. We are other’s only audiences right now, if I go to dinner with my friends, they are my audience. And then at the end of the day, we come home and we are effectively backstage and to the full extent we can are performing for nobody. And it’s like the natural rhythm of life. Those performances, they reset, they change every single day. They give us the opportunity to be kind of unseen and backstage.

With the internet, the structure of something like the internet accumulative, your audience has never changed, they just increase. And there is no context separation. So I mean, we’ve seen person after person get into trouble on the internet for this where we have different selves, we have different ways of speaking for different audiences where people on the internet, the structural incentive is to just accumulate as many people in your audience as possible in perpetuity around the clock, in this one stable place where you are performing everything to possibly everybody maybe till the end of time. And there’s something mathematically very different from any other idea of how we enact ourselves. This idea that you just accumulate “followers or viewers” forever and ever, and that’s the implicit end goal of these platforms.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you about something you said along these lines or in this subject area just a couple of weeks ago on the Daily Show. And the host, because Trevor Noah has left. There’s a series of rotating hosts and your host was Sarah Silverman. I’m a big fan of hers. How was she?

Jia Tolentino:

So cool. So cool.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a fun interview. Oh, now you’re being performative.

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, I know.

Preet Bharara:

Or I’ve radicalized you.

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

One or the other. You were talking about some of these issues with her, and you said in the interview, “I think one of the things that drives me personally nuts about all of it is that there’s no sense of scale. It’s like everything is presented as equally and maximally enraging when actually there are some things that matter a lot. Most things matter very little or nothing at all. We’re taught that we should be all be as mad as possible about all of it all the time.” And I’m struck by what you said in the middle there. What things matter a lot and what things matter a little?

Jia Tolentino:

So I used to be an editor for blogs for women’s media, for this little website called the Hairpin. It was wonderful. And then for the website Jezebel. And I was an assigning editor and you had to just put stuff up online every 20 minutes, all from 9:00 AM till 9:00 PM. And the result of that was like I would just be combing my Twitter feed and I’d be like, okay, people are talking about this. Maybe someone should write about it. And that’s kind of the law that especially more 8, 10 years ago than now, there were a lot more blogs that ran on that kind of very quick content churn. I developed a bit of the decontextualization, like everything is equally important brain that the internet inculcates. The idea that if people were talking about it was worthy of continuing to amplify that conversation.

And I didn’t even actually believe that, it was just what operating within that chamber of the physics of discourse. It was just kind of how my brain started to work. And then once I was no longer editing and I was just writing, I remember feeling over the course of a few months feeling that unwind and starting to ask myself what is actually triggering? Do you actually think this is important or are people just talking about it? And that sounds so obvious, but I think that the Internet’s really built to make us think that every single thing that people are talking about is not just important, but that we owe it to something to weigh in. And I think that it feels almost like a siop to erase from our brains the reality of scale and the reality of what structural change is.

And I think about this often in terms of the representation conversation. I think about this with great shame. One of the worst blogs I ever wrote in my blogging career was everyone was getting mad that day that Emma Stone was cast as a half Asian person in some movie. And I get why they’re mad. It’s like, there is so much structural and cultural marginalization of Asian people of all kinds, and that’s what people were mad about. But the thing that they were getting mad about it through was Emma Stone being cast, like an actress being cast in a movie that probably not that many people were going to care about or watch anyway. And I blog just this super angry nonsense blog .

Preet Bharara:

Wait, but what position did you take?

Jia Tolentino:

That she shouldn’t play an Asian person? And it’s ridiculous. And it’s like we can see the reality of structural marginalization and this creative choice and it’s like maybe we can, but the thing to care about is not this casting choice, it’s the material reality of Asian American lives. You know what I mean? That’s another example of the internet focusing on the representation of something of justice or something rather than the thing itself. And I think it happens so often where anything involving celebrities, people will talk about what kind of ideological pattern is visible in things celebrities said or did rather than the way that ideological pattern manifests in the structures of everyday life. Right? Yeah. I think the internet just has a way of making everything seem like it all matters when as you know so well, it’s what actually changes the fabric and the feel of life. It’s not what celebrities are saying. It’s not these little things that people are getting mad about. It’s much bigger issues of policy and of governance and of the system.

Preet Bharara:

I wonder if it’s just the internet amplifies those things because, and I’m going to get mail about this, but long before the internet, people in the world including Americans obsessed over things that I think were not important at all. Every detail of the royal family’s life in the UK. And now we can do that more because Harry and his wife and others can provoke conversations on the internet about a book or about an interview or about rumors and whatever else. And I guess that leads me to the question, which is, was all of this foreseeable, could social scientists and psychologists and behavioral people, they have predicted you think what the internet would be like, two, three, four decades after its inception?

Jia Tolentino:

I think so. Because I think as you say, it’s not the drive that’s new. It’s not the drive towards triviality or distraction or anger. Projection, whatever it may be. These things aren’t new. It’s just that the mechanisms for making them exponential and making them constant and making them inescapable and making them intertwined with the one device through which that also serves as our camera and the way of communicating to everyone we’ve ever loved and our way of checking the bus time and the weather. It’s not these tendencies, these cognitive tendencies, none of that’s new. It’s just what can be made of them and how they can be almost just mathematically amplified.

Preet Bharara:

Do you ever wonder if we are overly negative about the internet and overly negative about social media, given that the impulses that we’re talking about are not new, it’s just the platform is new, that’s all?

Jia Tolentino:

Well, I do think what is really meaningfully new is that the biggest and most change making industries in the world throughout my adulthood have been run on the economic model of, I think really treating the human self as the raw material that you would destroy with a mining ore. I do think that is meaningfully new. And because it’s new, it’s worth being as negative about as possible. There’s in that Shoshana Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she compares this entire economic structure. It wasn’t even invented till about 20 years ago. It’s not inevitable that it stays fixed. It’s not inevitable that the state of things right now where people expect that they have no privacy and that tech companies will work faster, will deliberately try to outrun regulation as hard as they can. The fundamental model, I don’t think it has to be permanent and I don’t think it should be.

I mean, she compares it to, I think there could be a pushback, as I was talking about in the Daily Show, akin to the environmental movement in the seventies. I think that there could be a central regulatory agency like the EPA or whatever, I kind of believe as someone that has taken a lot of pleasure in the internet in her life and the internet has led me to a lot of amazing things. And every protest that I went to in the summer of 2020, I found out about it on Instagram and the abortion activism. There’s always human potential and radical potential on the internet. But I do think that within the confines of this economic structure and what is monetized and what the goal of these companies is, which is to get us to spend as much time on the internet as possible and the way they do that, which is manipulating us into feeling as bad and angry as possible. I just it deserves all of that negativity and more. If there’s ever any hope of getting out of it.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Jia Tolentino after this. What’s your advice for how people should experience the internet and also experience their families and their friends and their occupations? What’s the roadmap for either someone like you or someone like me? Or is it the same?

Jia Tolentino:

I think it’s the same, but that the clauses are probably deeper in people that are around my age. I was with a bunch of college students last week and the extent to which the internet and self surveillance is intertwined with my entire coming of age is one thing, but for them it’s their whole life. They don’t remember they had smartphones and third grade or whatever it was. And so I think that what I have tried to do to help myself, I’ll just say that, is I felt so strongly, I think as many people did during the pandemic. It really clarified for me that the experiences that made me feel the most fully human, whether it’s in an isolated sense or in a sense of connecting to my family or friends, they were the experiences that were marked by all of the things that are not profitable to the internet and to social media companies.

The times when I feel most human and most myself really is when it’s just unsurveilled and totally unmediated experience. To me, that’s what feels good. And does that ring true to you?

Preet Bharara:

It does, with the exception of I feel very human right now surveilled on this podcast.

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, I mean, and it is a gift that technology allows us to do this, but what we’re trying to do is really we’re trying to replicate the feeling of us being in the same room and talking.

Preet Bharara:

This idea of not being surveilled. And I’m sure I still do this. When I was a US attorney and I would do interviews with news outlets sometimes on television. The television camera would go on and the interviewer ask me would ask me questions, and I thought I was being myself. And then the camera would go off and I would continue to converse with the interviewer. And more than once the producer would say, where was that guy during the interview?

Jia Tolentino:

You loosened up.

Preet Bharara:

I loosened up, and it was imperceptible to me, but very palpable to other people. And you think there’s some version of that for all of us all the time now?

Jia Tolentino:

I think that’s possible. And I also think that this is maybe one thing where whatever generational differences could come at play. I mean, part of the reason I’ve taken such an interest in this is that I think I have a personality that adapts very well to all mechanisms of performance. I liked performing literally as a kid and it comes sort of disturbingly naturally to me. I think I’m pretty similar. I think that I have very little changeover between selves, and that’s part of what has made me almost diabolically cleave to the internet, the structures that I believe are existentially destructive. But I think for some people there would be no difference. And those are the kind of people that tend to do terribly well on the internet. I think what you’re saying too is if we know that someone’s looking, know that someone’s recording this, we’re always going to speak just maybe a little bit differently.

And I think during the pandemic, it was texting my friends all day long, but I didn’t want the phone in between us. I didn’t want this magical device where I could send pictures of anything I was looking at to everyone that I love. That’s magical. And I still hated it. I just wanted to be in the same room with them without any recording of it, with just direct human presence, the direct physical human presence and every discussion about police abolition and all of this stuff about the… It’s like all of that felt so different other than the reality of being at a protest or being at a meeting where local policy is… I think that the things that are valued, I think it’s something that’s maybe a particularly millennial trait of mine. These things that have defined value and worth for as long as I can remember in my life, just extreme efficiency and extreme seamlessness and surveillance and amplification. What I want is inefficient experience just sitting around and talking.

Preet Bharara:

You have Zoom now. You can do that.

Jia Tolentino:

And I had a kid in August 2020, and that was one of the things that reiterated all of this for me. It was like this was a kind of experience that is valueless in the eyes of the contemporary economy, arguably. That we think the labor of taking care of a kid is so devalued that we think it should be performed either for free or for just poverty wages basically. And yet, as anyone who’s ever done it has experienced, it is incredibly valuable. And it’s in valuable in part because it is all of the things that the economy doesn’t value. It is inefficient, it’s unsurveilled. It is sort of cyclical rather than following any sort of clear trajectory of payoff or growth, it’s slow, it’s an end in itself rather than a means to an end. And I think, I don’t know, vis-a-vis my relationship to a phone, that’s another thing. So often it’s just a means to not be alone with your thoughts or just feel 2.5% better when you’re sitting in bed kind of listless. Yeah, I think I’ve just sort of tried to steer myself towards those unvaluable values.

Preet Bharara:

So you made the transition, I was about to myself from these issues, and they’re not unrelated, but to issues of parenthood and how you understand from being a new parent, a young parent, how society values certain things. And a version of what you said a moment ago, you wrote last May in the New Yorker about getting childcare. You wrote quote, “We could afford to hire a nanny, because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of emails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of, and not despite their vulnerability.”

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah. I think that’s a review of Angela Garbes’ great book Essential Labor. And as the title suggests, it comes out of what I think many of us hoped would be a larger reconsideration of labor and what kind of work is valuable, that seemed like it would’ve had to come from 2020. I think we saw so clearly that the work that actually makes our society function is often the work that is the lowest paid, and the most devalued and the most invisible. And I think that the thing about childcare has this unique lever into that, is that taking care of a child, having children, this is kind of a crucible and experience through which almost everybody passes. It seemed to me so incomprehensible that anyone could pass through the experience of early parenthood and not think that childcare workers should be paid a hundred thousand dollars a year.

And I know that’s only possible through federal subsidy, but I think that’s what needs to happen. I think it just seemed so… I think there’s maybe some plausible excuse for not knowing how hard and important farm work is maybe or something like that, right? Because most people haven’t done it. But anyone who has a child, which is the majority of adults, you understand how hard, how creative, how holy really, how beautiful, how skilled that labor is. It to me is so much harder, so much, clearly harder than whatever the hell it is that I do. But then the edifices of middle class or upper middle class parenting, they just sweep people on into like, well, let’s just forget about all that and just continue to acknowledge that the world is flawed and it’s just going to be what it is. I just thought it should be a universally radicalizing experience, really is basically the argument of Angela Garbes’ book. And I still am kind of baffled about why it isn’t,.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we valorize different things. In part we say it’s much harder to be a top student in your high school class and then go on to college and then get an advanced degree, and because very few people can do those. So there’s a scarcity. I’m just theorizing off the top of my head a little bit, even though I’ve lived a long time. In some measure, the vast majority of humans, not everyone, but the vast majority of humans raise children. And it may be in part, well, everyone does it. And we’ve been doing it for a long time. We’ve been doing it since before there were doctors, since before there were engineers, since before there was any kind of daycare, since before there were schools we raised our children. And so maybe that’s part of the reason we don’t value it because it’s almost mundane. But to be done well is one-

Jia Tolentino:

The very universal quality is the thing that negates the value.

Preet Bharara:

But if you know something about astrophysics, well, you’re very rare and in demand, I guess, right? Or if you can prepare algorithms for Twitter.

Jia Tolentino:

I mean, it’s the argument why professional athletes get paid what they do, why the people that clean the stadiums get paid what they do. But there was something about 2020 where it was like, there are some people without whom the work of the rest of the world grinds to a halt. And childcare is one of those things.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s also food production?

Jia Tolentino:

And it’s probably more specialized to… And I guess, yeah, those arguments will just always be at odds.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, you made the point about some athletes get paid what they get paid, but as somebody who’s been a guest a couple of times on the show, Michael Sandell points out certain athletes get paid what they get paid because there’s a certain kind of sport that allows that. And some he speculates and theorizes that somewhere there is Michael Jordan’s equivalent in the world of arm wrestling. It maybe could be someone who otherwise cleans the stadium, but no one’s paying a hundred million a year to somebody who’s the best arm wrestler in the world. So even meritocracy has its limits given those financial constraints. You said in the New Yorker also last year, something that I understand because I’ve read more of what you wrote. But if you segregate this sentence, it seems counterintuitive and you wrote, “What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood. How can that be?”

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, so I grew up in an extremely, extremely anti-abortion community. I grew up in an southern baptist evangelical community in Houston, Texas. And so I grew up thinking abortion was murder. And at some point between middle school and I don’t know, 10 years ago, however many years ago it was, now I believe that abortion should be available universally and unconditionally on demand. But the fact is I retain an understanding of the gravity of this question. It is embedded within my thinking and within my absolute abolitionist abortion thinking that it’s an extremely serious thing to think about what potential life is or if let’s say you believe it’s actual life, it’s an extremely serious thing. And I had wondered what the experience of carrying a child would mean. I had wondered would it trigger my childhood? Would it trigger this thought that life in the womb is full life or something?

Especially because it was something that I thought about being pregnant. I mean, one thing that I took umbridge at was the way that well-meaning liberal consumerism plays exactly into anti-abortion language and thinking. Like plenty of women walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn, Bernie voters are downloading apps that tell them what kind of their baby is that week. And you see, I just use that language, baby, you’re six weeks pregnant and the app is your baby is the side of size of a pomegranate seed. What kind of crib are you going to buy for your baby? And there’s some way in which consumerism actually creates the fetal personhood that the far right policy is trying to inculcate.

Preet Bharara:

Is it just consumerism? I know many, many liberals, myself and my spouse included, who did not call the first time we were expecting a child. We did not call it our fetus.

Jia Tolentino:

He called it a baby. Yeah. The doctor does too.

Preet Bharara:

And we named her, she was named before she came out. She had full personhood in our minds and we were absolutely committed to the idea of choice. And I had been my whole life and she had been her whole life. Is that reconcilable or not?

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, I don’t think it’s just consumerism, but I also think that that behavior is, and obviously people have been doing this long since before the Industrial Revolution, I’m sure women in the early modern Europe were picking out names at 16 weeks. But I do think that the culture of parenthood is so deeply shaped by consumerism that it’s would be difficult to fully extricate those things. But back to that quote, I had wondered, if being pregnant, the experience of pregnancy or motherhood would change my understanding of abortion. And I think I came through it and in early parenthood it felt to me that motherhood, to choose it or to not choose it, to not choose to be a mother, is itself a sacred thing? It’s an act of divinity and love akin to the act of affirming.

To me, the decision to get an abortion is it’s always done. I mean, I don’t want to sound glib saying this, but it seems to me a decision of affirming life. And I know that there are anti-abortion people who it’s like this line of thinking sounds insane. It’s literally ending a life. But that’s not the experience of any person in the world that’s ever gotten abortion. They do it because what it is to be a parent is so weighty and so powerful, and that transformation is so profound that it is out of respect for that, that one would choose not to be a parent. I think I remember some of my… I’ve written about later abortion a few times, and it’s an issue that I find really interesting and difficult to write about because it’s something that many liberal people, progressive people, are still squeamish about, the right to later abortion.

And they’re something like only four doctors that are openly practicing later abortions in all of the United States. And I remember, this was a long time ago, I interviewed one of those doctors in New Mexico, and I believe she’s no longer practicing. And it felt to me, talking to this person that does these procedures, that so much of the country would unequivocally consider murder. And it felt to me that what she was doing and was… I just have no other language for it. It was divine that no one understood the nuances and the complications, the irreconcilable complications of fetal personhood the way that this woman did, who performed abortions and took the fingerprints of those fetuses or those baby’s bodies. And she would call them by their name if the parents wanted her to, and she would pray with them.

She was ending their lives almost always because of medical complications, but maybe sometimes not. And yeah, there was just something about that that felt like she was acting out of what felt to me like a kind of divine love. But the quote exactly right, that the beautiful things about motherhood reaffirm my commitment to abortion. It’s like as you and your wife probably experienced. It’s even under lovely circumstances, parenthood is fucking devastating.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s how you put it a few sentences later, which I thought was very beautiful. You wrote, “I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence, that volition felt sacred.”

Jia Tolentino:

Right? That the idea that we would want to force people into parenthood before they felt that they could bring to it their full self and their full ability, and actually make their child safe. And it just seems so unfathomable to me.

Preet Bharara:

I want to switch gears just a little bit about some of these things you write about, because you said something interesting about the platforms from which you’ve done this work and that you write about women’s issues. And you mentioned earlier that you edited blogs and you were a Jezebel and Hairpin, and you’ve mentioned that the perception of your writing and your subject matter is somewhat different when it comes out of the New Yorker than when it came out of Jezebel. Can you explain that and why that is so?

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah, this drove me nuts. When I first started working for the New Yorker.

Preet Bharara:

I was super interested in what you had to say about it.

Jia Tolentino:

I just went from being so frequently dismissed as a dumb young woman working for a feminist rag, to a “serious writer.” And I was writing about the same things, but if I was writing about-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, not jus… I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I wasn’t going to burden you and weight you down with this quote, but not just a serious writer, but someone who’s been called the Joan Didion of her generation.

Jia Tolentino:

Oh my God.

Preet Bharara:

So I just want to add that there.

Jia Tolentino:

I reject that wonderful compliment, but I thank you for reading it.

Preet Bharara:

The alum of Jezebel and Hairpin, the Joan Didion of her generation. Now please proceed.

Jia Tolentino:

I know. But to me, I’m like, that’s so depressing about my generation. But I just found it extremely funny, just the instant veneer of respectability and seriousness that dropped over every email I sent as soon as I was sending it from a newyorker.com email address that I could never have clawed into my possession no matter how hard I tried at Jezebel.

Preet Bharara:

I appreciate a hundred percent how it feels. Is some of that deserved. And remember, David Remnick is listening.

Jia Tolentino:

No, of course. I mean, one place is a place to publish Hiroshima. And the other place… The bad example I always use is I once wrote a column I was writing as David Brooks from inside his own butt hole.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Jia Tolentino:

To some extent, it’s-

Preet Bharara:

Not quoting those back to you. Talking about performative.

Jia Tolentino:

Yeah. I mean so many levels of it, you know what I mean? But I just experienced an interesting thing within my trajectory as someone that was trying to write on the internet where women’s issues started to no longer be siloed as women’s issues. And that’s part of what made it possible. I sort of smoothed the possibility of me even working in a place like The New Yorker, which I would not have been able to do 10, 20, 30 years ago certainly. And it was just interesting to be one of the beneficiaries of this strange wave were suddenly the discourse broadly kind of recognized that women were people in, I mean exemplified most clearly with me too. Where suddenly this was obvious as a justice issue rather than one that was exclusively siloed to women’s, people began to understand that women’s issues are people’s issues and all sorts of people formally considered minorities issues are issues of what it is to be a human and alive in society.

But it was interesting. I deeply benefited from that transition, but it was funny watching it kind of click into place. Even things like the community that ended up storming the capitol. There were seeds, the Dobbs decision, the rollback of Roe v Wade, these were things that feminist bloggers were writing about. We were tracking these men on four chan and eight chan and all of these places. We were tracking the bill by bill, the spaghetti of anti-abortion legislation that was being thrown at the Texas legislature, at the wall of the Texas legislature every year. And this was so much of what we were writing about, and it was frequently dismissed as sort of niche hysteria, and these things turned out to be quite foundational to the trajectory of the American story of this decade. And I think now we know that, but when I first started in women’s media, it was sort of these yapping ladies with Sassy was kind of the caricature of what we were doing.

Preet Bharara:

Do you miss being at those other places and would you go back to something like that?

Jia Tolentino:

Well, I miss the internet that was possible when… So blogs have effectively disappeared, right? The journalistic middle class is getting as hollowed out as the general one. It hasn’t been that long. I started writing on the internet in 2012, really, really not that long ago. And there was a pretty robust ecosystem of pretty small websites run on pretty small budgets that a lot of people read, in places like Grantland, even. Even though that was Disney. But there were lots of blogs, places like the Hairpin, independent publications that were able to be run successfully because just enough people read them that they could be supported on ad revenue. And then the fundamental model of digital advertising changed. And you can’t run a publication just on people reading it because of the way Facebook and Google interact with ad revenue for publications. And so what I miss is not necessarily working at those places. It is nice that people will answer my emails now I can’t. And it is nice. What the New Yorker provides is the one luxury that every writer dreams of, which is time.

Preet Bharara:

A lot of space.

Jia Tolentino:

Lot and a lot of space and a lot of leeway and the ability to write.

Preet Bharara:

Do you get paid by the word?

Jia Tolentino:

I get paid by the word. And it’s fact checking, right? We’re a fact check to hell at the New Yorker, and it’s this incredible luxury of being taken care of and shepherded and to have all this space. I mean that I would never want to give up for blogging every 45 minutes, 9:00 to 5:00. Again, I will never be able to or want to do that, but I do miss the internet where there were just a lot of independently run publications that people would read, and now it’s four places and a bunch of Substacks.

Preet Bharara:

That could evolve too. Where do you think it’ll be in 10 years?

Jia Tolentino:

I don’t know mean right now the most viable model is like you either have a billionaire backer or a bunch of venture capital funding that goes nowhere, or you have a Patreon or a Substak. I mean, do think it should be possible to run a place on ad revenue, this model that has supported publications since for centuries. I do think that with some regulatory change that could be possible again, but I do think that the direction of the internet is siloed conversation. We’re seeing what it’s like when everyone’s looking at everything, or in recent years, we have seen what it’s like when everyone is looking at the same things and it sucks. And the reaction has been a people pulling back into these more gated realms of discourse. It’s like, yeah, the substacks and the Patreons and the Discords and podcasts. Not everything being visible to everyone. And I think that it will continue to refracture into modicums of smaller communities.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, part of the reason for that is the economics. If you make a name for yourself and you have a byline at the Times or the Washington Post or somewhere else, they don’t pay you a ton. I mean, you can be at the height of your field as a breaking news reporter at a major publication, and you’re making a lot less than a first year law firm associate. And the way to make more is to open up a Substack and there you go,

Jia Tolentino:

Totally. And turn into a reactionary centrist, open a Substack. I mean, yeah, we joke all the time. There could be so much a real grift that anyone could… My former colleagues at let’s say Jezebel, it’s like, actually we realized we just get red pilled and start a Substack about how actually feminism is bad. Men’s rights are the biggest issue. And it’s like we could probably make so much money doing that. But yet it does not not appeal.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we could talk about a million more things. I had about a hundred more questions on my list and topics on my list. We don’t want David Remnick to get annoyed, but you’re not writing words for the magazine. So Jia Tolentino, thank you so much for your time.

Jia Tolentino:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Jia Tolentino continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. I want to end the show this week by talking about the overlap of two things that have been in the news lately. The first is the health of former president Jimmy Carter, which has been in the news after the Carter Center announced that the former president was put in hospice care. The second is the possibility of alien life, which has been on people’s minds since the various stories about UFOs being shot down.

Last week something came to my attention that lies kind of at the intersection of these two things. Twitter user at Keith Edwards posted a picture of a message, former President Jimmy Carter left on Voyager One. He found it to be breathtaking, and I agree. For those who don’t know. In 1977, when Carter was president, NASA launched a spacecraft known as Voyager One, which was launched to explore the planets of the outer solar system and the interplanetary environment. It was then the most distant man-made object from earth. The message intended for intelligent alien life was this, and I’m quoting

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit planet Earth. We, human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization. We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future when our civilization is profoundly altered, and the surface of the earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Some, perhaps many, may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization, intercepts, voyager, and can understand these recorded contents. Here is our message. This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday having solved the problems we face to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

And it’s signed by Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, the White House, June 16th, 1977. So I leave you with that message, and I hope you all found it as beautiful and aspirational and hopeful as I did.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Jia Tolentino.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #askpreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24PREET. Or you can send an email to letterscafe.com. Stay Tuned, as presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The Cafe team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.