And not deep research or new angles or new analysis: it just says what these things are. But Trick Mirror doesn’t just repeat the pop culture of the internet: it tells you about Uber. Being Extremely Online, I usually caveat a review by saying that the book is valuable to folks who aren’t as online - like, for example, New Dark Age. Much of Trick Mirror is devoted to the kinds of things that you learn when you’re Extremely Online. But the vast majority are mentioned and then immediately disposed, never to be mentioned again, never synthesized into an original thought.Īnd then there’s the content. If Tolentino was able to weave together these cultural references in some way that was greater than the sum of the parts, the citations would make sense. And I’d bet other people observed that too.)

(This is the first and last reference to Postman’s work. In 1985, Neil Postman observed that the American desire for constant entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a “vast descent into triviality.” Many paragraphs begin with “In _, _ wrote that”. The citations wreck sentences, do nothing to inform, and leave me with a lingering question: why? Citations are so overused that they fit most of the place where otherwise there’d be an original sentence. But I’m astounded to see the over-citing style run amok in a such a buzzy piece of literature. I’ve noticed this pattern in the writing of people with graduate degrees - probably the result of widespread citation-shaming when folks don’t get that CiteseerX link. She’ll cite one academic for a particular term, cite a single sentence from a book, cite the existence of a film. Trick Mirror gratuitously cites essays, film, and articles that have crossed Tolentino’s path.

The trick mirror