The Phil Lind Initiative Speaker Series: Jia Tolentino

Please note, this event will be livestreamed. To receive the streaming link, sign up for the Phil Lind Initiative email list here.

Equal parts compelling and devastatingly insightful, Jia Tolentino’s writing takes us deep inside the constructs and consequences of the age of social media, reality television, and the “feverish, electric, unlivable hell” that is the internet. Author of the instant New York Times bestselling collection of essays Trick Mirror, Tolentino’s work deftly mixes reporting, research, and personal history to shed light on the realities of our hyper-digital society.

Her Phil Lind Initiative talk—Who’s Afraid of Eating the Rich?—will focus on the recent waves of TV shows and media that make the argument, with varying degrees of sophistication and subtlety, that extreme wealth is unjust, immoral, and corrosive to the human soul. What does this mean, when income inequality is only worsening and poverty itself is almost entirely absent from media and pop culture? Is critique in this case a release valve, a sign of unrecognized popular radicalism, or a form of elite capture? How might this change the way we think about our affective relationship to capitalism today?