Empathy Archives - Public Seminar

Art & Design

Rethinking Empathy

A review of Imperfect Solidarities by Aruna D’Souza

March 4, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

A deceptively simple question animates Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), a short new book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza: “What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness ...

The Empathetic Humanities Have Much to Teach Our Adversarial Culture

If they can encourage us to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’ – they afford something uniquely useful today

January 19, 2019 • by Alexander Bevilacqua

As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem ...

Peddling Acquiescence as Unity

Exploring the complexity of empathic communication in the face of Trump

February 19, 2017 • by Laura Hooberman

Alongside the article’s publication, the Times’s political podcast The Run Up announced a three-episode series called “Dialogues” in which pairs of family and friends -- one Trump voter and one Clinton voter per episode -- would pose these questions to one another. Perhaps not unsurprisingly the dialogues, resting on necessarily ...