Video: An Ode to Envy — Parul Sehgal

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What is envy? What drives it, and why do we secretly love it? No study has ever been able to capture its “loneliness, longevity, grim thrill” — that is, says Parul Sehgal, except for fiction. In an eloquent meditation, she scours pages from literature to show how envy and jealousy are not so different from a quest for knowledge.

Parul Sehgal is a book critic at The New York Times. She was previously a columnist and senior editor at The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Literary Review, among other publications, and she was awarded the Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle for her criticism. She has been a featured speaker at TED and teaches at Columbia University and the Center for the Humanities at CUNY.

Running time: 13:07

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Photo credit David Surowiecki