My book club just read a stunningly beautiful book: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. It is her memoir of her childhood growing up in both rural South Carolina, with her grandparents as well as her mother and siblings, and in New York City. It’s told in free verse, and every poem is highly evocative of her […]
There is a beautiful article in the Opinion section of the New York Times that never uses the word empathy, but is all about it. Jennifer Finney Boylan talks movingly, and personally, about how we need to bring back Edmund Burke’s concept of “moral imagination”. It is, she says, “the idea that our ethics should […]
Let’s be honest. It’s hard to deliberately subject yourself to pain. Which is what you’re doing if you’re an empathetic person, and you chose to go to a movie about a child who is abducted and murdered; or you read an in-depth article about the victims of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack; or […]
That’s right, for a bird. One tiny, meaningless little gull provoked a great deal of empathy among a group of strangers walking around a lake the other day, as Gail Rosenblum related the story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A gull was hanging from a lamppost, tangled in fishing line, frantically trying to escape. And […]
The New York Times published an article by a psychologist named Paul Bloom, titled “Imagining the Lives of Others.” In it, he reports on a new book by psychologist Nicholas Epley called “Mindwise”, which says that humans are actually much worse at empathy than we think we are. Like several of the commenters on the […]
An article in the Star Tribune by a student named Kate Ross is a reminder that the best way to experience empathy for another person is to actually experience what that person is experiencing. While there are many important and useful ways to increase our empathy–talking to other people, reading about other people, watching films […]
My son Zack just shared this article with me. It’s fascinating and thought-provoking, and highly recommended. It’s called, Six Habits of Highly Empathetic People, by Roman Krznaric. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London and empathy advisor to organizations including Oxfam and the United Nations. Mr. Krznaric contends that science is […]
Chris Kluwe is the former Minnesota Vikings punter who became famous when he published an enraged response on Deadspin to a Maryland state legislator’s demand to the Baltimore Ravens that they silence their player who had expressed support for same-sex marriage. His well-argued open letter, full of colorful and persuasive language, propelled him into working […]
I tried to write about the Boston Marathon bombings a week ago and got one sentence written before I was stuck; I sat there staring at the screen for some time before I gave up. This is a very difficult thing to write about in regard to empathy. Of course, we have empathy for the […]
President Barack Obama recently gave a brilliant speech to the citizens of Israeli, asking them to consider how things are from the perspective of their adversary, the Palestinians. He said that the only way to get to peace between their two peoples is to have empathy for one another. He spoke very forthrightly and directly […]