69: Creating Our Identities

Tara Isabella Burton comes on the pod to ask, How did we become a world of self-makers?

Susannah, Pete and Tara discuss her new book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. What were the intellectual and imaginative and social currents that led us from a world where the self was something given or discovered to one in which it was made?

What is the role of America’s Gilded Age millionaires in this story, and how did their own vision of themselves as able to harness the energy of the economy and maybe of the Cosmos contribute to our current vision of the good life?

Finally, via many other rabbit trails, they discuss why you should not eat a bat, and speculate about Albrecht Dürer’s hypothetical hair care videos