Every issue has one section dedicated to a particular question. Collecting responses from a range of perspectives, these symposia prompt us to think about the values and ideas that shape our most urgent cultural and personal decisions.
Unnatural Gifts
She was not beautiful, but she looked like she was. She was practically famous for it in the cloistered social universe of the liberal arts…
Routine Appearances
Your Hatch alarm clock gently brightens your bedroom, tricking you into thinking you’re rising with the sun. You yawn as you sit up, stretching out…
The Emancipation of Sensibility
Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in society—it is committed to an emancipation…
On Superficiality
I seem to be getting more and more superficial as I get older. As a teenager, I was a devotee of Hamlet, whose horror at…
The Art of Ugliness
The history of painting is often told as a procession of beautiful achievements, running roughly from the fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, at which point…
The Right to Beauty
Up the street from my house in Amman, Jordan, there is an empty lot. Central Amman is built on steep hills, with narrow valleys between…
