On what we do to our faces

Plus: organ donation and AI, last night's gnocchi, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

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1. the rest of the first item

2. organ donation and AI

3. last night’s gnocchi

4. some recent work

5. matthew pierce
   has figured out that we forgot to baptize Trump!

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

On what we do to our faces

(via)

If you made it to the end of last week’s post, you’ll have seen my little poll on anti-aging interventions and other aesthetic face and body modifications—ranging from haircuts and makeup to Botox and fillers to major plastic surgery and artificial cranial deformation.

As I mentioned, I’m kicking around ideas for a possible Christianity Today piece inspired by the news of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s “MAGA makeover,” trying to figure out if my instinct to divvy these habits and procedures into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” buckets—and to talk about the division in ethical terms—has some legitimate basis or is, in fact, just an instinct.

I wanted to take a sampling of other people’s opinions in hopes that they might be clarifying for my own. Sometimes, seeing someone else be wrong on the internet can help you be right! But with 41 responses as of this writing, I’m not sure if clarifying is quite the right word, and it may be a few more weeks or even months before I’m ready to write anything on the subject for CT.

But if not quite clarifying, the results were certainly fascinating, and I want to share a few with you and posit a few possible unifying theories here—I’m curious to know what you think.