Adam Kay, the British writer, seems to have pulled off the trick magically with the phenomenal success of his 2017 book This Is Going to Hurt. So what will be? One cheat code is art, because art can mean entertainment, entertainment means pleasure, and while someone is entertained, he or she might be more open to understanding and empathizing with an unfamiliar group. The answer is that yes, of course we should, but simple calls for empathy aren’t effective. Should we care about Amazon warehouse workers, if we don’t work in an Amazon warehouse or know anybody who does? What about UPS drivers? What about immigrants? That one might actually kill us, eventually, but there are countless “smaller” examples that prevent us from understanding the plight of other people.

The obvious example here is climate change, which is so relatively incremental (for now) that even though the concept is widely known, it’s proven impossible to foment a serious mass movement with the power to force real change. One of the most pressing problems for… well, for our entire world… is how to make a large number of people care about something that doesn’t directly affect them, and that may be hard to understand without the kind of effort that the vast majority of people won’t make.

This might hurt book review