Jia Tolentino
speaker
981 appearances
13 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Jia Tolentino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What Now? with Trevor Noah · The Ozempic Obsession with Jia Tolentino (ARCHIVE EPISODE) · 2 Jan 2025
podcast
If you can radically change people's relationship to fullness by one injection, then maybe it wasn't something that everyone should have been judging. You know, then very clearly it's not something that deserved decades of moral, a century, like a full century of moral condemnation by like the entire beauty industry, right? Of course, it doesn't seem to have led there at all.
And I think, I mean, I have no real predictions other than the fact that, you know, one thing about GLP-1 drugs is you, In the vast majority of cases, as soon as you stop taking them, your body reverts to how it was before. So the weight loss lasts as long as you take them, basically.
You gain it back, yeah.
Right. Dieting slows your metabolism. And that's one of the reasons that fat phobia leads to obesity very directly. And so, you know, I think I think we have yet to see the wave of what happens when people come off of this and reckon with the sort of.
exit plan if there is one or the sort of lifetime use for the for the for the sort of like beauty use case you know yeah and i don't know what that'll look like i don't know how people will talk about it or how open it'll be um it still doesn't seem like this is something that people talk about frankly when it comes to their own use of it and i don't know it'll be interesting to see if and when and how people ever do
I think this has been an incredibly interesting story in part because I don't know if you have felt this within your own sort of group chats versus professional networks, but there's a big difference in the way people are talking about this in private and the way that they're talking about it in public. And that always strikes me as the right situation for someone to try to step in and merge them.
I mean, I remember I was covering sexual assault, like, the couple of years pre-Me Too and afterwards, because that felt like, you know, another thing where there was this large social understanding of something being the way that it is, and then with the sort of public discourse lagging behind it, and then an explosive event that tried to merge the two.
And I was interested in that, you know, the mainstream media, of which I am a part, and politicians, everyone was giving these very sort of performatively somber and reverent sort of like, this is an appalling, inexplicable, devastating loss of human life. And then, you know, social media is just full of, you know, the UnitedHealthcare had to close comments on Facebook.
And there were thousands and thousands of like, ha ha, cry laugh emoji. It just struck me as really interesting that the reaction was so sharp. Were there any of the sort of memes or...
I would say the most common joke, you know, and it's, you know, even talking to you about this, it's nuts that we're having this conversation. Like, oh, well, the most common joke that was being made about this man that was murdered in Midtown at 6.45 a.m. or whatever. Like, it's wild. We're living in... wild, wild times, but an incredibly common joke and comment that was everywhere.
And I was checking, like I was checking conservative media outlets, comments. I was checking sort of like a down the road CNN. I was checking the New York Post. I was checking the Times. I was checking TikTok. I was really trying to make sure that I was not locked in my own bubble of maybe like disaffected DSA, Brooklyner, you know, people. And everywhere people were using the cold language
That the private health insurance industry uses to deny people medication and lifesaving procedures like thoughts and prayers were not prior authorized and denied. And it was a real reminder that of the way most of us have experienced these companies as individuals.
cold and uninterested in not only our quality of life, but if we haven't experienced it ourselves, probably most of us know someone whose entire existence medically, if not their existence financially, and certainly their existence spiritually, egg freezing, whatever it is, right? IVF, endometriosis, whatever it may be.
The vast majority of Americans have experienced health insurance as more or less cold-blooded,
you don't have to have any sort of ideology at all to, to think like, why, why is this happening to, you know, to get a bill from urgent care and say like, why, why, why, why, why do I pay thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for private healthcare? Why do I determine my entire employment life around how to get healthcare for myself and my family? And,
And I'm getting billed $700 for taking a child with 105 degree fever to the ER, you know? Like, why is my bill before insurance discounted at $150,000 for, you know, an entirely normal labor and delivery, right?
It is notorious, even within the sort of notoriously awful American healthcare system, it is is kind of known as the most rapacious, and it has gotten these profits, these record profits. It has grown to this size, not in spite of the fact that it denies so much care to so many people, but because of that fact.
So one of the things that I was writing about in this New Yorker piece is that when we think about violence and when we sort of decry violence, it's a very particular kind of violence. It's direct physical violence caused by a person with an intention to harm. But there are a lot of other ways that people's lives are taken prematurely.
There's a lot of ways that people's lives are taken away from them. And structural violence, you could also call that social injustice, but structural violence, like the denial of health care and denial of safe housing. It's like these are a lot of ways that people's lives are taken away from them.
I think those of us who are not subject to it on a daily basis still kind of understand the major things through which people's quality of life or life itself is given, like health, housing, school. the environment. All of these things are structured by deeply unjust systems that spare some people and treat almost everyone like very, very, very badly.
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