Current Affairs

Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist and the author of the new nonfiction book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, a history of the rise of the idea of a curated self. Tara's book looks at the transition from seeing human beings as made by God to being made by our own individual wills. From Renaissance painters to the famous dandy Beau Brummell to Thomas Edison to contemporary Instagram influencers and reality television stars, Tara looks at those who have carefully manufactured the picture of themselves that they show to the rest of the world. Today she joins to discuss whether, in becoming free to "self-make," we have in fact truly been liberated, and what unseen forces shape people's ideas of the selves they ought to become.“[T]he seemingly liberatory promise that we can create ourselves has, as often as not, been warped into an excuse to create, implicitly or explicitly, two classes of people: those who are capable of shaping their destinies (and who thereby deserve their su