Jessica Bennett

My algorithm is already f*cked from reporting this so might as well give it a grid slot

1: Caitlin Moran’s funny but sort of lazy imho take on “men”

2: The best line from the Britney Spears memoir, in which she absolutely drags JT 😂

I remember EXACTLY what I felt like at 13 — I was angry at my parents, sad for no reason, insecure about friends and boys and my body and skin, my feelings too big to articulate in anything other than song lyrics I hung from my wall, bad poetry I wrote and delivered to my two best friends on lined notebook paper we intricately folded into origami shapes, and the sounds of Nirvana’s “In Utero” that blasted from my boombox in my bedroom — which didn’t lock, because my parents wouldn’t allow it, but had a metal sign my best friend and I had stole from the girls’ bathroom at school that said DO NOT ENTER. Occasionally, we’d ride our bikes to the park next to the house where Kurt Cobain shot himself, and burn candles while we scrawled our darkest feelings into the wooden bench.

There’s a meme TikTok these days, about how we are all teenage girls. Maybe we are — this is when identities form, estrogen spikes, when we figure out who we are. It is also, as researchers and journalists from Carol Gilligan to Rachel Simmons to Peggy Orenstein to Donna Jackson Nakazawa have documented, when some girls suddenly revert into themselves, their confidence dropping three times the rate of their male peers.

And that was all before the age of social media.

For the last year, I’ve been following three remarkable 13yo girls — London, Anna and Addi — as they made their way through the minefield that is 8th grade. What happens, I wondered, when the challenges of any teenage girl — hormones and friendships and finding your place — clash with the thing that so many parents and health officials are worried about, which is their phones?

The result is BEING 13, a window into what it is like to be 13 today, from the perspective of three girls.

THANK YOU to these brave and honest and remarkable young women, to their parents, to the incredible designers and editors who made this project happen. This is not an exhaustive account, but it is, I hope, an illuminating peek inside being 13 in the age of social media.

🫶🫶 @22.8miles .graham