Ada Palmer: preference

Transcript context

…Whose biography will you write? I’m thinking of doing a choose-your-own-adventure biography of Machiavelli, in which you get to different moments in his life when he made an important decision, and then I speculate what would’ve happened if he’d done something different to show how wildly improbable it was that we got The Prince and how different humanity might have ended up if we hadn’t. That one would be fun. I’ve also thought about a choose-your-own-adventure biography of Voltaire because there’s that amazing moment when he’s barely in his early 20s, and his father almost decides to arrange him to be banished to South America. Imagine the world where, instead of Voltaire being in France, Voltaire is in South America — both how different France would be and how different South America would be. I love bringing people to think about those contingent moments when a tiny decision, made by somebody often unfamous — and Voltaire’s father is not famous the way Voltaire is — nonetheless shapes enormous amounts of what comes after. Those moments are what remind us that we are also powerful, and that every single one of us shapes history, not just the people whose names are in newspaper headlines. How do we know what old Norse music was like?…

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