You've got 10 minutes with Einstein. What do you talk about? Black holes? Time travel?
Why not gambling? The Art of War? Contemporary parenting?
Each week, host Jason Gots surprises some of the world's brightest minds with ideas they're not at all prepared to discuss. Join us and special guests Neil Gaiman, Alan Alda, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Richard Dawkins, Maria Popova, Mary-Louise Parker, Neil deGrasse Tyson and many more...
Conflict Photographer Lynsey Addario on Art, Love, and War
For two decades she's traveled the world, photographing humans in crisis. Pulitzer and MacArthur winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario on what it's all taught her.
- a story of survival that leaves our host speechless
- and a story of casual cruelty that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief
Think about all the images you see in a day. The advertisements. The photos and videos as you search the web or scroll through social media, if you do that. Now think back a century and a half or so to when photography was new. Imagine the first time a British monarch saw a picture of an Inuit family, or vice versa. What did they make of each other? What did it remake in themselves?
My guest today, photographer Lynsey Addario, has spent over two decades traveling the world taking intimate and dramatic portraits, often of lives in crisis—the perpetrators and victims of tyranny, revolution, famine, and rape. Her work spans over 70 countries and has won her a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, but has never been gathered into a book until now. Of Love and War gives her most compelling photos the space they deserve, along with essays, interview excerpts, and letters she wrote home to process the things she was witnessing.
Lynsey's pictures offer people like myself, living out our lives in privileged circumstances, a window into the beauty, suffering, and everyday humanity of our contemporaries across the world. And like it or not, ready or not, when you stop scrolling long enough look into one of these images, it looks back into you.
Surprise conversation starter interview clips in this episode:
Helen Riess, M.D. – Empathy in the brain and the world
Empathy makes us human. Humans make structures that rob us of empathy when we need it most. Helen Riess is trying to reverse that trend.
- Heart – mind = emotional quicksand. Mind – heart = greeting card sympathy
- The doctor burnout epidemic and how to fix it
Ruth Whippman—a mindful, productive, super-positive nation of nervous wrecks
With the help of positive psychology and the happiness industry, many of us seem to be running in the exact opposite direction of happiness.
- "It's almost like the only way we can understand leisure is as a productivity hack."
- "If we think of happiness as an individual responsibility, that stands in the way of building a society in which the conditions are there for everybody to thrive."
Wesley Yang - The Souls of Yellow Folk
What do the "seduction movement," the Virginia Tech shooter, and the Asian-American experience have in common? Wesley Yang thinks and writes with devastating clarity about loneliness, invisibility, and the incoherence of American life.
- What if Asian American cultural "invisibility" is the key to saving America?
- Are liberalism and democracy too tame to survive identity politics?
- "One risks being a pariah...just by saying the things that need to be said."
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