Jia Tolentino doesn’t seem to write essays so much as drop them, like hit albums, or bombs.

Reading Sour Heart was like walking into surgery without anesthesia. Zhang and her girls poke with childish glee at the dark, painful wound of growing up as a perpetual stranger. The ugly, twisted parts most of us would rather forget, they happily devour.

A fighter jet slices through the mute heat of the desert, momentarily chasing off strange mirages and small lizards. Tucked away in the desiccated hellscape between California’s Death Valley and Mojave Desert sits a sprawling military research complex—the largest U.S. Navy landholding in the world.