Episode
“The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell
- Published
- Apr 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1699
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/f8ee277e
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/episodes/the-banality-of-empathy-by-namwali-serpell/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/the-banality-of-empathy-by-namwali-serpell.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
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.