Best Of: Jia Tolentino on plastic surgery & AI / ‘Beef’ creator Lee Sun Jin
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This week on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, we talked to legendary Oscar and Emmy-winning icon, Sally Field, about her starring role in the 60s television series, The Flying Nun.
I was on a 50-foot crane and they would fly me into the side of a building.
And I'm like, I'm like like Spider-Man.
Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me podcast and the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, New Yorker staff writer Gia Tolentino. She coined the term Instagram face. Seven years later, we talk about how current beauty standards are changing our relationship to reality. It seems more explicitly anti-human right now than ever before. There seemed to be something that's dovetailing with the age of AI. Also, we talked with writer Lee Sung Jin. He's the creator of the Netflix series Beef. The second season is a story about class and blackmail at an exclusive country club. Lee writes what he knows, so many of the show's storylines are pulled from his own life. And that's after spending two decades in comedy writers' rooms, where he was often the only Asian person in the room.
That's what people thought of me when I was starting. I was a diversity hire. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, another progressive Democrat edges out an establishment candidate. Abdul El Sayyed won Michigan Senate primary, campaigning on affordability, health care, and ending U.S. military aid to Israel. Join us as we break down his victory and what it could signal for November's midterms on the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.
Have you ever been so upset that you can't even think straight? When we're distressed and in high anxiety, we tend to breathe from our chest, which is actually more hyperventilating and is the opposite of relaxing. So we want to breathe from our belly area.
This week on the LifeKit podcast, tips for those painful, stressful moments. Listen to LifeKit on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
What is “Instagram Face” and how did Jia Tolentino first define it?
Oh, hey there. I'm Brittany Luce. And I don't know, maybe this is a little out of pocket to say, but I think you should listen to my podcast. It's called It's Been a Minute, and I love it, and I think you will too. Over the past couple months, over 100,000 new listeners started tuning in. Find out why.
Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR today.
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. In her latest New Yorker piece, Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, Dolentino reports that cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular for teenagers, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under thirty.
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:12
2
What is “Instagram Face” and how did Jia Tolentino first define it?
2:12–12:02
3
How are invisible cosmetic procedures reshaping beauty standards today?
12:02–24:21
4
What role does AI play in amplifying the new aesthetic of the human face?
24:21–33:43
5
How does the “Mar‑a‑Lago” look illustrate the convergence of politics and beauty culture?
33:43–44:28
6
Why does Jia Tolentino worry about the impact of these trends on her children?
44:28–53:25
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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