How Glamour Shapes Our Lives

[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”68923″ width=”590″ height=”360″]

On Thursday, I attended the San Francisco launch party for Virginia Postrel’s new book, The Power of Glamour; the following day, Reason TV released their latest video, an hour-long video featuring past and current Reason magazine editors, as Postrel was interviewed by Nick Gillespie:

Gillespie and Postrel discuss the glamour of the Tuskegee airmen (6:45); the glamour of California (9:30); the distinction between glamour and charisma (14:45); Obama’s glamour vs. Bill Clinton’s charisma (16:45); Marxist art critic John Berger’s “desiccated” take on glamour (20:30); Joan Crawford role in “defining the modern woman to the general public” (25:20); how a “ridiculously glamorous” image inspired dancer Michaela DePrince (27:30); how Naomi Wolfe’s projected her “single mother chic” image on Angelina Jolie (30:45); Oprah Winfrey’s infatuation with the Mary Tyler Moore Show (32:15); David Bowie’s ever-changing personas (36:30); how glamour “tells the truth about desire” (38:45); the democratization of glamour (40:45); the proliferation of glamour in a capitalist society (45:20); how Postrel’s libertarianism informs her work (48:30); the “intense glamour” of planning in the early twentieth century (51:20); how understanding glamour provides insights into human behavior (56:15); and how the breast cancer drug Herceptin saved Postrel’s life (57:30).