Is it worth it to lose that time? To disentangle yourself from the world in order to write? We’re privileged to be part of the subjective arm of the News, where we have the chance to spend more time on individual pieces, where we can use WKND copy stylez, where we can run humor up against serious work.īut were all those pages, all those articles, equal to the effort? We can’t deny that there are better ways to use 26 Thursday nights. We can’t believe how beautiful Mohan and Emma have made our paper, we’re in awe of Brianna’s photography, and by now we’ve run out of positive adjectives for Annelisa’s illustrations. Of course we’re proud of the physical product. We can talk about the beautiful - the perfect image or idea - but whatever we construct is set in time. We believe we’ve interrogated some of the most important issues on campus - mental health, city politics, student life - but no matter how high we set our ideals, we have to admit the physical legacy of our work is minimal: we’ve made 26 12-page issues, 312 pieces of paper, a week’s worth of reading for a moderately difficult class. This is the last time we get to frame the questions. This is the last issue that we, Yanan, Elaina and Jackson, will edit. Our features investigate the value of tradition, at the Yale Bowl, and the implications of image, how photography affects our vision of Africa. Our cover this week takes up the issue of Yale’s purpose. Though, at WEEKEND, we’re more likely to ask Smith for a selfie than pretend to be on her level of astuteness, we believe that it’s important to ask the same questions - to admire the centralizing goals of Scarry’s lectures while dealing honestly with the exceptions to such theories. Her characters bicker about art history, literature and the point of an expensive education. What is the worth of beauty, Smith asked, when our judgments differ so strongly by race and class? Her plot circles around a liberal arts college in New England.

In 2005, Zadie Smith published “On Beauty,” a novel that took Scarry’s lecture, clipped the end of the title, and left the reader puzzling at the conclusions. Her thesis - that the apprehension of beauty leads to (and can be the source of) ethical action, that “beauty brings copies of itself into being” - served as a rallying cry for conservative thinkers who saw “politically correct” thinking at odds with normative values. Dubbed “On Beauty and Being Just,” Scarry’s comments ranged across disciplines, from Plato to Da Vinci in a way that only a DS student could love. On March 25 Elaine Scarry delivered a provocative series of lectures at Yale about the ethical and political worth of beauty. “What is a WEEKEND?” - The Dowager Countess of Grantham (stylization ours)

On beauty smith