The Complete Midwestern Aesthete

Beautiful things here, there, and everywhere.

Chiropractors never say that your pain is all in your head. But orthopedists do it all the time. What a f@*$^#$ way to try and help somebody heal. Do you know how evil that is?

Best quote I’ve read today, by Ted Kaptchuck, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (The New Yorker 12/12/11)

How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

Most beautiful rebuke of modernist prose of the day: from The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Simple factors that are unaware to the civilian driver the cabby knows.

Beautiful sentence of the day from “Fast and Furious” by Reeves Wiedeman, The New Yorker 12.19.11

What’s Beautiful? Reading an old-fashioned newspaper.

Read a newspaper. Old-fashioned newspapers — the fold-out, table-width, get-ink-on-your-fingers kind — are beautiful. Here’s why: they expose you to all types of stories, not just the ones with intriguing titles that you click on in your Twitter feed. And when you read stories that might not have interested in you in the point-and-click universe, you learn something new. You will also have something new to say at dinner parties (that’s right: no one really wants to hear more about your dog) and people will like you more. I swear.

What’s Beautiful? Skills.

Skills are sexy. If you can play the banjo, replace the foundation on your house, dance the tango, weld, paint a portrait of your sister, make the perfect poached egg, espalier an apple tree, recite parts of the Canterbury Tales from memory, read and enjoy Victorian literature, make the perfect cup of tea — really, perform any real-world skill — you are 15% more beautiful than a couch potato.