It's Monday, January 9th, 2017, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Indravis Gontas.

You'll notice now we have switched to Mondays.

We hope that you will join us for new episodes every Monday.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters. You can find us online at motherjones.com or inquiringshow

Tumblr.com. You can also find us on Twitter, at InquiringShow, and Facebook. And you can

subscribe to the show on iTunes or any other podcasting app. Well, I want to wish all of you a very happy New Year, and I hope that you had a

wonderful holiday season. And of course, you've probably encountered some things in the

holidays that weren't quite as pleasant. Whether that's people in your family

that you don't have a lot in common with anymore, or some kind of rituals that maybe aren't as

meaningful to you as they were in the past. This episode in some ways is for you, because this

episode is about questioning the very things that we often take for granted, like empathy being always a good thing.

I've really been interested in empathy for over the last few years, as it's a way I feel that music can really touch us.

And since I'm a musician, I always want to know what it is about a particular performance that makes it more or less effective.

And for a long time, I've been thinking that one of the answers is empathy, that when I'm an

effective performer, then I am allowing the audience to see what it is to be me, to get step into my

shoes, to feel what it is that I'm trying to express, to come across or get

across some ideas that are in my mind that are difficult to verbalize, but that I can portray

using music and emotion. And that's why I was so excited to hear about Paul Bloom's newest

book, Against Empathy, The Case for Rational Compassion.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale, and we've had him on the show before

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