Can rich and powerful people be empathetic?
Lately, several things have added up to my asking the question in the title. On The Daily Show this week, Jon Stewart interviewed the author Jon Ronson, who wrote The Psychopath Test. He avers...
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The GIft of Sharing Pain
I have a good friend who has cancer. She was diagnosed with breast cancer last fall, had 3 surgeries, and has been undergoing a grueling series of chemo and radiation treatments that started in...
MILK for MLK Day
We just watched the movie “Milk” this evening, and it occurred to me afterward what an appropriate thing this was to do on this particular day. So many parallels between Martin Luther King Jr....
New Year’s Resolution: More Empathy
My New Year’s resolution might surprise some people. I resolve to be more empathetic. Yes, I am generally a pretty empathetic person. But I want to be less judgmental and more understanding of where...
Religious Intolerance Tsunami
I feel like there is a tsunami of religious intolerance sweeping the globe lately. In New York: The growing controversy over building a Muslim center a couple blocks from ground zero results in a...
follow-up to previous discussion
My son, Zack, sent me this e-mail in response to my query as to whether young people are really less empathetic than their predecessors: Without knowing the details of the study, it’s really hard...
Are young people less empathetic?
I read about a new study that claims that college kids are about 40% less empathetic than their counterparts 20 or 30 years ago. This was a large study analyzing data on 14,000 college...
Gay stigma fading away
Good news on the empathy front! New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow reports on the Gallup research organization’s findings that the percentage of Americans who feel that gay and lesbian relations are “morally...
Empathy for Evil?
Are we required to have empathy for those who are evil? I recently watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. This is, of course, a very disturbing movie about true evil that was committed on a...
Haiti Vs. Congo
I was going to write about how the overwhelming response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti gives us clear evidence that empathy is alive and well in the human population. We see millions of...