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 nonfiction book Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians came out in June (Public Affairs); her second novel The World Cannot Give is now out in paperback and the third Here in Avalon (both Simon & Schuster) arrives next January.

Dhananjay is a professor, scholar of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and essayist. His academic scholarship centers on the ethics and politics of Aristotle and his first book is on Aristotle’s account of ethical knowledge and the possibility of ethical understanding.

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Dhananjay Jagannathan teaches philosophy at Columbia. His essays on politics, religion, and literature have appeared in Plough, Breaking Ground, and Athwart, and he co-writes the Substack newsletter The Line of Beauty with Tara Isabella Burton.
Author of SELF-MADE: CREATING OUR IDENTITIES FROM DA VINCI TO THE KARDASHIANS (PublicAffairs, 2023), STRANGE RITES: NEW RELIGIONS FOR A GODLESS WORLD and the novels SOCIAL CREATURE, THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE, and the forthcoming HERE IN AVALON