On Risk

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His most recent works are Singular Creatures: Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism (2022), The Ethics of Architecture (2021), On Risk (2020), and Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (2019), which won the Erving Goffman Prize in media ecology. His columns and essays appear in the New York Times, Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, the Literary Review of Canada, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Harper’s, among others.

Praise for On Risk"Kingwell offers a slender, thoughtful, sometimes meandering disquisition on risk that “is inflected (or infected) by the virus, but not precisely about the virus—except as it grants new urgency to old questions of risk and politics. A host of cultural allusions—from Shakespeare to the Simpsons, Isaiah Berlin to Irving Berlin, Voltaire, Pascal, and Derrida—along with salient academic studies inspire Kingwell to examine the many contradictory ways that humans handle risk ... An entertaining gloss on an enduring conundrum."—Kirkus ReviewsPraise for Mark Kingwell“Kingwell is dauntingly well-read … a gifted noticer … a lively writer [who] cites The Simpsons as often as Immanuel Kant. [Readers] are rewarded with neat, unexpected insights.” —Globe & Mail“[Kingwell] has grown into a pretty clever jack-of-almost-everything.”—National Post“Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher … His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world.”—Naomi Klein