To celebrate the paperback release of her New York Times bestselling debut essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino speaks with Sixth & I’s Rabbi Aaron Potek about the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time.

Capturing the pulse of the millennial generation with verve and intellect as she delves into the forces that warp our vision, Trick Mirror is about the incentives that shape us and how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self.

In each of the nine essays, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. From growing up in a megachurch in Houston to takes on feminism to the concept of athleisure as capitalist fetish-wear, Tolentino offers insights that are at once compassionate, intelligent, humorous, and resonant.

A staff writer at The New Yorker, Tolentino was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, and other publications.