2016: Strangers Drowning: The Price of Idealism

There are individuals in the world who devote their lives, at great personal cost, to helping strangers. As she does in her brilliant new book Strangers Drowning, New Yorker staff writers LARISSA MACFARQUHAR will investigate stories of extreme altruism to ask: How far is too far? We honor high ideals, but when we call people “do-gooders,” there is skepticism in it, even hostility. How much should we help others, and how much can we help? Should we focus on helping people locally or those in often-more-deeply-impoverished far-off lands? The answers to these and other questions may change not just how you see the world but how you live in it.