In early September, on an unseasonably warm afternoon in Utah, a young man on an outdoor stage at a college campus was engaging with an audience member about gun violence when a single bullet sliced the air and punctured his throat, killing him.
One minute later and one state away, a teenage boy trained a handgun on classmates at his Colorado high school and started shooting. He stalked students through the building, firing and reloading, firing and reloading, firing and reloading, according to a representative of the county sheriff’s department there. He couldn’t breach locked classroom doors behind which most of the kids had congregated, according to their training. He wounded two students, then killed himself.
Earlier that same day, three TV hosts bantered about homelessness. Clustered comfortably on a bright white sofa, they wondered what could be done to protect people from those without homes, like the man with a history of psychiatric illness who had recently stabbed a Ukrainian refugee to death on a train. One host suggested the unhoused accept help or be jailed. His colleague, a man named Brian Kilmeade, cut in with another idea.
“Involuntary lethal injection or something,” Kilmeade said, tossing the thought into the conversation like a pressure grenade. “Just kill them,” he clarified, as though clarification was needed.
On that day, September 10th, 2025, an assassin, a school shooter, and a mainstream media influencer suggesting a solution to a social problem that would have been unthinkable just a year ago, showed us all what can happen when empathy is absent.
And yet there is a small crowd of people clamoring for even less of it.
To try to understand what's happening here, Bonnie Petrie talked with an expert in the science of empathy. Where does it come from? Why do we experience it? How do we experience it? Is it a weakness, a strength, neither, or both?
Guest: Dr. Helen Riess is the Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, founder of Empathetics, Inc., and author of a book called The Empathy Effect.
