Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-BC Egyptian frieze, c. 1920.

Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-bc Egyptian frieze, c. 1920. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930.

Friendship

Volume XIV, Number 2 | spring 2021

Miscellany

A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.

I have often said that if I wish to name-drop, I have only to list my ex-friends.

—Norman Podhoretz, 1999