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What's The Difference Between Rational and Irrational Fears?

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode What We Fear.

About Karen Thompson Walker's TEDTalk

Through the story of the whale ship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walkerdescribes how our most vivid fears are often not the most realistic.

About Karen Thompson Walker

In Karen Thompson Walker's 2012 novel The Age of Miracles, a young girl and her family awake one morning to discover that the rotation of the Earth has suddenly begun to slow, stretching the length of the 24-hour day and throwing the natural world into disarray.

Walker worked on the novel for three years while she was a book editor for Simon & Schuster — writing for an hour every morning before work. Since its release, the bestselling novel has been translated into 29 languages.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

NPR/TED Staff
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