Tag Archives: Tom O’Neill

Jared Diamond, The New Yorker and the awkwardness of anecdotes

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk, in which she described how stereotypes develop when one community has only a single narrative about another. The post also referenced National Geographic writer Tom O’Neill, who sometimes resists centering a narrative on a single subject when he is reporting from abroad.
Last week in Anthropology [...]

Narrative reporting and the danger of the single story

Current Nieman fellow Hopewell Rugoho-Chin’ono recently pointed out this striking TED talk from July, in which Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks on the danger of letting one narrative define other people or places.
Adichie describes her own middle-class family’s servant in Nigeria and how her mother consistently characterized his family by its poverty. She felt [...]