Elise Hu: The Beauty Ideal

AI is reshaping the workplace, but at what cost? Journalist Hilke Schellmann reveals the flaws of algorithmic hiring and how workers can adapt to a world where machines decide who gets in the door.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from ... Show More

Since childhood, Joshua Roman's life revolved around the cello. But when long COVID forced him to set his cello aside, he had to rethink his approach to life, faith and music.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a beh ... Show More

Big life decisions are never easy. Should you follow a plan? Make a hard pivot? Improvise as you go? This hour, TED speakers who’ve made extreme life choices and their advice for getting unstuck. Guests include comedian and musician Reggie Watts, biomedical researcher Sonia Valla ... Show More

Humans have always been captivated by beauty, and for almost as long, we've been marketed products and new technologies to help us achieve certain beauty standards. Elise Hu is a journalist and the author of "Flawless: Lessons in looks and culture from the K-beauty industry." In ... Show More

This time of year, folks are being inundated with messages about how to become more beautiful. But beauty is an ever-changing goalpost that has everything do with race, class and power. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy 

“Beauty isn’t all about just niceness, loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming.” Beloved Irish poet John O’Donohue on beauty’s true grit, and finding it in the transformational edges of our daily lives. Find more at onbeing.org/becoming-wise. 

The value society places on physical appearance has never quite made sense to blind presenter Lyndall Bywater and yet she's intrigued to discover why it matters so much to those of us in the sighted world. How much of an advantage is it to be beautiful? And what is physical beaut ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss beauty and its qualities."Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."That was John Keats' emphatic finale to his Ode on a Grecian Urn. It seems to express Plato's theory of aesthetics, his idea that an a ... Show More

When NPR host Elise Hu moved to South Korea to be an international correspondent, she ended up getting a crash course on Korean beauty and the country's billion-dollar cosmetics industry. She explains the rise of the industry, its appeal, and the high standards it sets for appear ... Show More

Big beauty has spent well over a century using fear-mongering to marketing its products to us. Even if today it is more sophisticated in its methods and use of media, the mainstream industry is still telling us we are not good enough or beautiful enough. In effect, it is telling ... Show More

These days, beauty is a moral imperative, an ideal to live by, and one according to which we judge ourselves and others. As a result, we increasingly shape our identities around our bodies – and not just our actual bodies with their lumps and bumps, but our imaginary future bodie ... Show More