Gia (Jia) Tolentino

speaker

556 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 8 Aug

Gia (Jia) Tolentino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Fresh Air · Best Of: Jia Tolentino on plastic surgery & AI / ‘Beef’ creator Lee Sun Jin · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

Over the past couple months, over 100,000 new listeners started tuning in.

Find out why.

This is Fresh Air Weekend.

I'm Tanya Mosley.

Something strange is happening to the human face.

Plastic surgery in the U.S.

is increasingly designed to be invisible and it's working.

Faces are being lifted, filled, and reshaped to look naturally youthful and at the same time unnatural.

My guest today, writer Gia Tolentino, says this new era of cosmetic enhancement.

is quietly changing the way people think about aging and what we believe a real face should look like.

Some are even posting photos online asking strangers whether a facelift is their only hope.

One influencer got famous by striking his jawline with a hammer as part of the online movement known as looks maxing.

Other young men followed suit, and artificial intelligence trained on millions of these new faces is generating new beauty standards.

Tolentino argues that what's changing isn't just our appearance, it's our relationship to reality.

Her argument is that when every face can be optimized, filtered, or surgically refined, the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived.

She argues that the thing we've long treated as a window into another person is

Is becoming less human and more like a product.

Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the best selling author of the essay collection Trick Mirror.

Seven years ago, she coined the phrase Instagram face, capturing the beauty ideal of the social media era.

Her new essay asks what that face has become.

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