Can we ever really tell what someone else is thinking? Tara Isabella Burton opens her review with the observation that in 2026 we are quite sure we can, provided we look closely enough.
Body-language experts decode the unspoken relationships of celebrities on a red carpet. Online forums are full of people who say they can identify clinical narcissists and other abusive types by their tell-tale “shark eyes.” The FBI trains its agents to spot signs of deception in an interrogation: a raised eyebrow, a subtle wince.
And it has consequences. People who are perceived to look honest or trustworthy are more likely to get job offers. People judged shifty get moved to the social sidelines. The underlying belief, held implicitly or explicitly, is that a face indicates who someone really is — people can dress up and lie, but the eyes give them away. The face, as St. Jerome put it, is the mirror of the mind.
The argument
In ‘The Face: A Cultural History,’ Fay Bound-Alberti argues that this belief is hardly universal and — St. Jerome aside — relatively modern.
For most of human history, she writes, people did not put particular stock in the face. Early cave paintings rendered animals with highly specific, idiosyncratic detail while human beings were drawn vague and generic. Greek rulers and Roman aristocrats had their faces rendered more accurately, the better to spread an image on a statue or a coin. But until the Renaissance, ordinary people were unlikely to have a distinct sense of their own faces as a coherent, meaningful part of their identity.
Premodern portrayals of the face, she writes, “were formulaic and symbolic, representing characters and ideals, or social and religious importance, rather than what a person really looked like.”
The shift came with the Renaissance and highly detailed portraiture — Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa,’ around 1519. And it came with a change in who could commission one: money, sometimes as much as an entire year’s wages for an average worker, rather than birth.
Why it lands this year
Burton’s review sticks to the history. The application is left for the reader, and in 2026 it is not subtle.
The faith that a face is evidence is roughly five hundred years old, and it is being asked to carry an enormous amount of weight at the exact moment when a face and a voice are the two cheapest things in the world to manufacture.
Every reassurance mechanism that relies on recognition — the video call that confirms it really is your relative, the recorded message that sounds like your bank, the familiar face in the clip that makes an investment look endorsed — rests on an instinct that a historian can date.
The one practical consequence
It argues for a rule rather than a judgment.
Anything that moves money gets confirmed on a channel the other party did not choose. Not a callback to the number that called. Not a reply to the email that arrived. The number on the statement, the person you already know, the office you already deal with — reached the way you would have reached them yesterday.
That rule works whether or not you are good at reading people, which is the whole point of having it. As Bound-Alberti’s history suggests, the confidence that you can is a recent cultural habit rather than a human faculty, and it was formed in a world where faking a face took a year’s wages and a painter.