What's The Difference Between Rational and Irrational Fears?
Karen Thompson Walker: What's The Difference Between Rational and Irrational Fears?
More From This Episode
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 Walker describes 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.