In her role as a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she has covered Madonna, Taylor Swift, The White Lotus, Severance, and become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Sophie Gilbert spends a lot of time thinking about pop culture, functioning as a kind of Lionel Trilling for the TikTok generation.

With her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves (out April 29 from Penguin Press), Gilbert looks back at the late 1990s and early aughts, endeavoring to find out what happened to feminism in the early 21st century. In so doing, she shines a light on the last few decades of popular culture and their intersections with sex, politics, fame, morality, and much more.

Here, Gilbert discusses culture, celebrity, and how to find light in dark times and places.

Vogue: Where did the idea for this book come from?

Sophie Gilbert: There were two precipitating moments. I had twins in July 2020 in New York City, right in the middle of COVID, and in the months after, I totally lost myself. I couldn’t read or watch TV; I barely slept and was too exhausted to eat. My husband and I took care of these tiny babies in what was essentially total isolation, and in that, we both experienced a kind of total breakdown of self. And so when I went back to work and started engaging with the world again, I found myself circling stories that were about culture and identity: how the art we consume influences who we are, for better and worse.

The other moment was the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. I couldn’t understand how women—a majority of people in America—could have so little power, and the only theory I could come up with was that culture had lulled us into some kind of state of passivity and distraction.

You close your introduction with a sense of optimism: “We try to understand all the ways in which things went wrong so that we can conceive of a more powerful way forward.” Can we?

We’re in a period of profound turmoil now, and it’s truly horrifying what the current administration is doing to trans people, to immigrants and refugees, to women and people who become pregnant. For the most part, the culture we consume isn’t reinforcing these efforts—it’s counteracting them.