# “The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/the-banality-of-empathy-by-namwali-serpell
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/the-banality-of-empathy-by-namwali-serpell.md
Podcast: [Private Life: A New York Review Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958)
Published: 2026-04-15T12:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/f8ee277e
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/f8ee277e/abe01432.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/episodes/the-banality-of-empathy-by-namwali-serpell
Duration seconds: 1699

## Resource

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.

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## Transcript

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