Let’s Try That Again

In this Episode I speak with Elise Hu, author of "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital." When Elise moved to Seoul in 2015 as the first-ever Korea and Japan bureau chief for the American broadcaster NPR, it dawned on her that she was in fact coming "face-to-face with the future of how we might live, look, and relate to one another." South Korea is one of the world's largest exporters of cosmetic goods and is at the epicenter of beauty innovation-- creating cutting edge technologies of self-enhancement and self-modification. This, combined with powerful AI tools and social media, allows the consumer beauty industry to propose solutions for problems we never knew we had. As the window of who is deemed Beautiful becomes more and more narrow, and when appearance labor becomes conflated with self-improvement, Hu asks "what does consumer beauty culture lead to, if left unconsidered and unchecked?"

To learn about Elise Hu please visit her website: https://elisehu.com/

Is there much more we can say about love? Well, according to the late and brilliant bell hooks, as a society we seem simultaneously obsessed with love and yet find it very difficult to define. And that it's perhaps "our confusion about what we mean when we use the word 'love' that is the source of our difficulty in loving." In this episode we explore what hooks defines as the "original school of love" - that of our childhoods and our families. I also sit down with Lac Su to discuss his memoir, "'I Love You's Are For White People," in which he describes the difficult and tumultuous relationship he had with his father after they settled in the US as new immigrants after having to suddenly flee post-war Vietnam. Before that I talk to Dr. Aneesa Shariff, a clinical psychologist based in the UK, who has done work on first and second generation South Asian families and on the tensions that arise when multi-generational households move from Asian countries to more Western countries. Although love might be experienced as a universal emotion it is certainly not expressed or demonstrated in the same ways, universally.

To purchase Lac Su’s book, please visit: https://www.amazon.com/Love-Yous-Are-White-People/dp/0061543667

To learn more about Dr. Aneesa Shariff's work please visit her website: https://leedsanxietypsychologist.co.uk/ and you can find her on Instagram @aneesashariffphd

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This trailer introduces the Podcast, its themes, and the topics we will explore in upcoming episodes.