Larissa MacFarquhar | Everything was a Matter of Life and Death

This is an Archive of a Past Event

What does it do to a person to believe he is one of the few who must change the world? And what does it mean to throw off that weight and that ambition? Is humility good, or is it just pessimism? Larissa MacFarquhar will tell the story of a woman from the Los Angeles ghetto who rejected the towering abstractions of the peace and justice movement for the intimacy of nursing, and rejected the radicalism of 1980s Oregon to live in a refugee hamlet in Nicaragua.

Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her subjects have included John Ashbery, Edward Albee, Derek Parfit, Patricia Churchland and Paul Churchland, Richard Posner, and Noam Chomsky among many others. She is currently working on her new book, "Extreme Morality" (working title). The book will be published by Penguin Press. Before joining The New Yorker, MacFarquhar was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review.