Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2019
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded December 17th, 2018
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:08.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:12.5 | Learn more at mercatis.org. |
| 0:15.2 | And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit |
| 0:20.4 | ConversationsWithT Tyler.com. |
| 0:29.9 | I'm here today with the great Larissa McFarcher. |
| 0:33.0 | She is a staff writer for The New Yorker, considered by many to write the very best and most |
| 0:38.4 | interesting profiles of anyone in the business. |
| 0:42.1 | She has a very well-known book called Strangers Drowning. |
| 0:46.1 | The subtitle is Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and The Urge to Help. |
| 0:51.5 | It's about extreme altruists. |
| 0:53.5 | And she's now working on a book on people's decisions whether or not to leave their hometown. |
| 0:58.7 | Larissa, welcome. |
| 1:00.1 | Thank you so much for having me here. |
| 1:02.3 | First set of questions about altruism and extreme altruists. |
| 1:06.3 | Are very virtuous people easy to dislike? |
| 1:10.0 | Not to me, but to many others. |
| 1:12.0 | And this was actually news to me when I embarked on the book. |
| 1:16.0 | I went into it wanting to simply understand the drive and the motives of people who could |
| 1:22.0 | sustain the kind of extraordinary sense of duty and altruism that some of us have. |
| 1:28.7 | Some of the time moved maybe by a poignant photograph for somebody in front of us, but |
| 1:34.9 | can't sustain without those cues in front of us. |
... |
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