“As a reporter, you can look into the eyes of the people you're talking to and try to evaluate what they're thinking when they say what they say. But you are not really gonna get into their brain. There's only one artistic form that allows you to do that. “


What can fiction reveal that history and journalism leave hidden? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lawrence Wright turns to the novel to explore the lives caught in conflict in Israel and Palestine.

His book The Human Scale uses narrative to confront the unequal ways lives are valued in this region, asking whether storytelling can expose truths that politics can obscure.

0:00 The Human Scale
1:37 Deriving truth and meaning from fiction
2:26 The uneven weight of human life
4:28 Why narrative can get into the mind of another
6:28 Confronting uncomfortable truths
10:27 The setting of The Human Scale
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About Lawrence Wright:

Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and screenwriter whose work focuses on politics, religion, and culture. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright is best known for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Beyond his landmark works on extremism, Wright has explored the complexities of Scientology in Going Clear, the global response to pandemics in The End of October, and the role of Texas as both a cultural crucible and a political bellwether in God Save Texas.

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