A short note: Larissa MacFarquhar’s book Strangers Drowning is coming out in a few days and is up for preorder now on Amazon. It’s series of profiles of “extreme do-gooders,” people whose lives are completely driven by their sense of morals, to the point of seeming crazy to most people—like adopting twenty disabled children, or donating their entire income to charity, or refusing to do the dishes because time spent doing dishes was time not spent averting the suffering of billions of chickens.
I’m incredibly excited for the book to come on Tuesday. My social circles talk abstractly about morality a lot, but mostly not from the perspective of how people actually live it. I’m interested to see how MacFarquhar’s subjects think and live.
The reviews so far have positively glowed. If you want a preview, there are some excerpts/related pieces floating around various publications:
The Children of Strangers about a family that adopted a huge number of kids.
A Guardian piece principally focusing on Julia Wise (and incidentally mentioning some other folks in the effective altruism community as well).
EDIT/conflict-of-interest warning: a little bird told me that the book also features my eyebrows?? (I haven’t read it, so not actually sure what that means…)
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