BY JESSICA GROSS
Looking for a new dose of beauty musings? You’ve come to the right place.
- Over at The New Republic’s Intersection podcast, hosted by Jamil Smith, a recent episode on body image features discussions with writer Lindy West, editor Isaac Fitzgerald, trainer Andia Winslow, and blogger Erika Nicole Kendall.
- In an On Being interview with artist Ann Hamilton, host Krista Tippett asks about the similarity between the atmospheres of explicitly sacred places and museums. “How many spaces in this culture do we stand silently and take something in, and soak in beauty, and be in awe of that?” Hamilton agrees: “You’re willing to just sit and be,” she says of both spaces. Plus, they both offer a blend of the solitary and the communal. “What are the circumstances for ‘we,’ that I can enjoy the pleasure of something I’m seeing here, knowing that I’m also sharing that with a person next to me? And there’s an interesting kind of intimacy with this total stranger that the situation makes possible. And that that can change your whole day.”
- Talk about beautiful language: at the New York Times Book Review, famous people from Katie Couric to Ira Glass weigh in on their favorite poems.
- Other kinds of beauty have a cost. Literally.
- “The exact question I’m trying to address is whether the world embodies beautiful ideas. That’s a question about the world on the one hand and beauty on the other. Beauty is notoriously subjective and comes in many forms, but there is a historical record in art and philosophy that one can consult to see what people have objectively found beautiful. We can consult science and compare whether the concepts that emerge from the fundamental laws of nature have something in common with what people find beautiful.” That’s physicist Frank Wilczek in an interview with Nautilus.