The Ezra Klein Show · New York Times Opinion

George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin

February 10, 2026·1 hr 27 min·7 clips

In George Saunders's new novel, a murdered woman spontaneously inhabits the mind of her killer at the moment of her death — and understands him completely.

George Saunders comes in through two doors. The host starts with the fiction, including Lincoln and the Bardo, then turns to the public version of Saunders shaped by that viral speech on kindness. But the conversation does not let kindness stay soft. Again and again, the excerpt comes back to the awkward place between wanting to forgive someone and believing they may still need a hard push. Saunders talks about a book looking at a question, which feels like the right way to hear this. Jill, at least as the excerpt presents her, leans toward wide forgiveness and the idea that people are made by causes they did not choose. The Frenchman will not let that settle the matter. He argues that a living person can still be pushed, with care and skill, toward the truth. Boone is where the question stops being neat. Even when he cannot move, Saunders can still imagine salvation as a change in how the mind lines up with itself. Then free will enters the room. Saunders answers by changing the angle: the present feels open from inside it, even if a whole clock view makes causation look tighter. The host brings that back to parenthood. Seeing his children seem like themselves from the start has made him believe choice is real, but narrower than he used to think. That is what gives the conversation its weight. If freedom has limits, kindness and correction get much harder to separate. Saunders does not hand over a clean verdict. He says readers sometimes confuse Jill's view with his own, while the excerpt shows the book worrying the question instead of solving it. The closing turns back to form, with the host praising how slowly the work builds toward its final crescendo.

As heard by us

A patient, searching interview about kindness and free will, with a gentle caveat that it can drift into abstraction.

George Saunders comes into view first as a familiar literary figure, then as someone still willing to sit inside harder questions about free will, moral choice, and whether a mind can be nudged back toward truth.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want Saunders on the moral machinery behind kindness, not just the slogan.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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