“The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell

In March 2019 Namwali Serpell wrote for the NYR Online about a choose-your-own-adventure-style episode of the television show Black Mirror, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hannah Arendt, and Violet Allen’s story “The Venus Effect,” among other subjects, in an expansive essay on about narrative empathy. In this episode of Private Life, “The Banality of Empathy” is read by the writer Lovia Gyarkye, whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and Aperture. Gyarkye is also an editor at Hammer & Hope magazine and was previously a critic for The Hollywood Reporter.  

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring a conversation with Serpell. Read “The Banality of Empathy” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.