“The distinctive beauty of the human body derives from its nature as an embodiment”

I keep thinking about Stendhal's formulation that love is born of admiration + hope, and alongside this Augustine's assessment that the degradation of the empire consisted in a turn from a culture of seeking admiration to one of seeking money and pleasure

nearly all the dating discourse that bubbles up is just women saying "men aren't admirable" and men saying back "women aren't admirable" it's very tiresome

No one ever talks about being a ‘face guy’ or a ‘hands guy’ because so to love “I to I” as Scruton has it is no perversion, and necessarily individuated

This is a natural and reasonable thing to expect

It’s so depressing that every right wing take I see on aesthetics is such thoughtless garbage when we had an intellectual giant working in this space a mere five years ago

The inescapable “makeup is deceptive” takes are so stupid bc to anyone with eyes the way a person chooses to apply makeup reveals far more than it conceals

I need to start writing like this

you know what we’re just going to skip glutes today, she said. my female clients, they never want to skip glutes. but for you it doesn’t really matter so much, you know what I mean

somehow the slang meaning of "smash" never showed up on my radar until well after "wanna smash?" had become common usage among my male coworkers meaning "are you up for a few rounds of SSB" and we simply never acknowledged this. they would make jokes about "phrasing" all the time

🌸sports tweeter Matthias🌸 (tonesetter) Harrison butker walking Blake lively down the aisle

not my lane but a giant old mine cushion set in gold filigree is actually tasteful and aristocratic

"the present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were originally aiming at. no man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get"

the essential texts are like - chesterton: what's wrong with the world - chesterton: manalive - capra et al: it's a wonderful life

actually I think chesterton holds up once you reacclimate to his shtick

I complain, but the wanting to write → doing the research pipeline is actually very good. like many things it's hard to get started but feels good once you get going

I think about this little joke very often. gkc so loved the idea of innocence hidden under the appearance of vice