[22] She has also garnered favorable attention for essays on topics such as race in publishing,[23] marriage,[24] abortion,[25] and notions of female empowerment,[26] as well as for her no-pulled-punches music criticism.
Club admired "Tolentino's sick burns on Charlie Puth"[27] and Studio 360 observed that even in the near-universal panning of Magic!
[33] In a review for The New York Times, Maggie Doherty wrote: "Tolentino’s earnest ambivalence, expressed often throughout the book, is characteristic of millennial life-writing, and it can be contrasted with boomer self-satisfaction and Gen X disaffection in the same genre."
Slate columnist Laura Miller wrote in her review of the book, "Tolentino is a classical essayist along the lines of Montaigne, threading her way on the page toward an understanding of what she thinks and feels about life, the world, and herself.
"[35][36] Her 2021 reporting on the conservatorship of Britney Spears, co-authored with Ronan Farrow, attracted international attention,[37][38][39] with the piece being described as "blistering" by Tyler Aquilina in Entertainment Weekly[40] and as a "journalistic reference text on Britney Spears" by Dirk Peitz in Die Zeit.
[13][43] In the essay "I Thee Dread" in her book Trick Mirror, Tolentino writes at length about her ambivalence toward marriage.