“The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell

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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 .…