The Malign Effects of Technology

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I see this problem as predating social media for the most part. I think a lot of people are moving just once, maybe through cheaper travel and also the internet. Their net effect seems to be to keep us at home. And that's the least mixing of all is if you stay at home. The fracturing of our political dialogue is one of only the most obvious of the malign effects of technology.

As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she’s often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town. Motivating her is a desire to place readers inside someone’s head: to see what they see and to think how they think.

In their dialogue, Larissa and Tyler discuss the thinking and thinkers behind her profiles, essays, and books, including notions of moral luck, exit vs voice, the prose of Kenneth Tynan, why altruistic heroes are mainly found in genre fiction, why she avoids describing physical appearances in her writing, the circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives, what today has in common with the 1890s, and more.

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Recorded December 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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