Welcome to Editor's Picks.
I'm Charlotte Howard.
I'm the co-host of our American podcast, Checks and Balance.
You are about to hear an article we have chosen from the most recent edition of The Economist.
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Perhaps you smilingly cajoled a child to eat or joined a Zoom call and tried not to look at yourself.
Central to all those actions was your face,
the particular shape and arrangement of your forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chin.
Those dimensions are used to identify you on your passport, for instance, or via your phone's face ID.
They will determine whether people trust you, fancy you, or believe you are the right person for a job.
If you are ever accused of a crime, they could influence whether or not the jury is inclined to find you guilty.
In a fascinating new book, Fabian Alberti, a cultural historian, gives full expression to the many meanings of the face.
She peers across millennia and regions looking at anthropology, criminology, medical imaging, portraiture
and more to argue that faces may be made up of skin, bone and muscle,
but perceptions of them are shaped by belief systems, languages and environments.
Her interest in the subject stems in part from her own experience of prosopagnosia, better known as face blindness.
A neurological condition that means she struggles to recognise even close family members.
Humans have long taken each other at face value.
Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher, supposedly chose his pupils based on whether they looked intelligent.
In the wake of Euclid's writings on proportion and beauty, i.e.