Larissa MacFarquhar: What is Family, What are Strangers?

Do you owe more to family than you do to other people? But what is family? If you think about adopting a child, should you think first how it will affect the children you already have? Or should you consider equally the welfare of the child you might adopt, though that child is still a stranger to you? Larissa MacFarquhar will tell the story of a husband and wife who have two biological kids and have adopted twenty special-needs children, and who think about these questions rather differently from most people.

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.