Mandy

“The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A. It’s freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness, it’s freedom to look out the window and think of London and little violets and Paris and cobblestones. It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.”
― Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood

“It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror