What Has Happened to Taste?
The article explores the concept of taste in the modern world, particularly how technology and algorithms influence our perceptions and choices. It discusses the distinction between genuine taste and the superficiality of following trends. Ultimately, the author questions whether our understanding of taste has been diluted by the overwhelming access to information and the influence of social media.
- ▪Taste is often described as an active and unruly sensibility that cannot simply be subscribed to or defined by consensus.
- ▪The abundance of choices provided by technology has led to decision paralysis, making it difficult to cultivate genuine taste.
- ▪The article critiques the idea that following trends or mimicking others equates to having taste, suggesting it creates an illusion rather than a true understanding.
Esquire files mainly under fashion. We currently carry 58 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Esquire |
| Canonical URL | https://www.esquire.com/style/a71276009/what-has-happened-to-taste/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T11:05:02.097Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T11:05:02.097Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Getty Images / Photo Illustration by Leigh CohenStyleWhat Has Happened to Taste?Follow StyleView feedWhat Has Happened to Taste?Technology has made it easier than ever to broadcast the things we like. Do any of us actually know anymore why we like them?By Tiffany NgPublished: May 20, 202613 min readEvery morning, on my pilgrimage to a Japandi coffee shop in my neighborhood in Brooklyn,I encounter taste, so much taste, often in the form of copies of the same guy. He wears selvedge denim, thumb rings, and a well-groomed mustache. He is a film bro, with a preference, inevitably, for anything directed by Akira Kurosawa. He likely lives in an intentionally cluttered Greenpoint loft. The clutter includes first-edition copies of Dune.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Esquire.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Esquire
