Why subscribe?

To read more about this project, see our manifesto / pitch. As we say there, our essays center on the idea of “value-laden aesthetics: the study of beauty as an ethical phenomenon; the understanding of social life as pervaded by questions of our perceptions of one another; the interrogation of the idea of life as art; coming to grips with the ancient suggestion that beauty is itself our aim in living well and living as we ought.”

This publication is a joint effort of Tara Isabella Burton and Dhananjay Jagannathan. 

Tara is a novelist, theologian, and journalist. Her third novel Here in Avalon came out in January 2024 (Simon & Schuster). Her latest non-fiction book is Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (PublicAffairs). Her next book is a history of magic and modernity to be published Penguin Random House in 2026.

Dhananjay is a professor, scholar of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and essayist, who has written about music, literature, politics, and religion for magazines like Plough Quarterly, Breaking Ground, and Commonweal. His academic writing centers on the ethics and politics of Aristotle and his first book is entitled Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology (Oxford University Press). His next book, on cultural heritage and cultural identity, will be published by Allen Lane (Penguin Press) in 2026.

Over the past couple of years, our writing has often been a reflection of our conversations, and it is the fruits of these conversations that we offer here, whether under one name or the other or both.