Profile of Tyler Cowen

A short but interesting profile of my favorite contemporary thinker, Tyler Cowen, in The Washington Post. A snippet:

Cowen, based on his reading of thousands of books, thinks stories trick readers because they are filtered: Writers "take a lot of information and they leave some of it out," he says. His answer to the existence question meandered across philosophy and the reasons one might commit suicide, but in this profile, that response will be filtered out and replaced with a simpler set of facts about Cowen's own existence. As Cowen noted about the media in a recent book, "The tendency is to fit all facts into the format of a story, usually with a memorable protagonist, even when the reality is more complex."

(HT: Marginal Revolution)