THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 59
Harari, “You’re not going to die on me.
We’ve discussed this—I’m going to die
first. I was smoking for years.”
Harari, whose work sometimes sounds
regretful about most of what has hap-
pened since the Paleolithic era—in “Sa-
piens,” he writes that “the forager econ-
omy provided most people with more
interesting lives than agriculture or in-
dustry do”—began the day by anticipat-
ing, happily, a glimpse of the world as it
would be if “humans destroyed them-
selves.” Walking across Pripyat’s soccer
field, where mature trees now grow, he
remarked on how quickly things had
gone “back to normal.”
The guide asked if anyone had heard
of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—the
video game, which includes a sequence
set in Pripyat.
“No,” Harari said.
“Just the most popular game in the
world,” the guide said.
At dusk, Harari and Yahav headed
back to Kyiv, in a black Mercedes. When
Yahav sneezed, Harari said, “It’s the ra-
diation starting.” As we drove through
flat, forested countryside, Harari talked
about his upbringing: his hatred of chess;
his nationalist and religious periods. He
said, “One thing I think about how hu-
mans work—the only thing that can re-
place one story is another story.”
We discussed the tall tales that occa-
sionally appear in his writing. In “Homo
Deus,” Harari writes that, in 2014, a Hong
Kong venture-capital firm “broke new
ground by appointing an algorithm
named VITAL to its board.” A footnote
provides a link to an online article, which
makes clear that, in fact, there had been
no such board appointment, and that the
press release announcing it was a lure for
“gullible” outlets. When I asked Harari
if he’d accidentally led readers into be-
lieving a fiction, he appeared untroubled,
arguing that the book’s larger point about
A.I. encroachment still held.
In “Sapiens,” Harari writes in detail
about a meeting in the desert between
Apollo 11 astronauts and a Native Amer-
ican who dictated a message for them to
take to the moon. The message, when
later translated, was “They have come to
steal your lands.” Harari’s text acknowl-
edges that the story might be a “legend.”
“I don’t know if it’s a true story,” Ha-
rari told me. “It doesn’t matter—it’s a
good story.” He rethought this. “It mat-
ters how you present it to the readers. I
think I took care to make sure that at
least intelligent readers will understand
that it maybe didn’t happen.” (The story
has been traced to a Johnny Carson
monologue.)
Harari went on to say how much he’d
liked writing an extended fictional pas-
sage, in “Homo Deus,” in which he imag-
ines the belief system of a twelfth-cen-
tury crusader. It begins, “Imagine a young
English nobleman named John ... ” H a-
rari had been encouraged in this exper-
iment, he said, by the example of clas-
sical historians, who were comfortable
fabricating dialogue, and by “The Hitch-
hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Doug-
las Adams, a book “packed with so much
good philosophy.” No twentieth-century
philosophical book besides “Sources of
the Self,” by Charles Taylor, had in-
fluenced him more.
We were now on a cobbled street in
Kyiv. Harari said, “Maybe the next book
will be a novel.”A
t a press conference in the city,
Harari was asked a question by
Hannah Hrabarska, a Ukrainian news
photographer. “I can’t stop smiling,” she
began. “I’ve watched all your lectures,
watched everything about you.” I spoke
to her later. She said that reading “Sa-
piens” had “completely changed” her life.
Hrabarska was born the week of the
Chernobyl disaster, in 1986. “When I
was a child, I dreamed of being an art-
ist,” she said. “But then politics capturedme.” When the Orange Revolution
began, in 2004, she was eighteen, and
“so idealistic.” She studied law and went
into journalism. In the winter of 2013-14,
she photographed the Euromaidan pro-
tests, in Kyiv, where more than a hun-
dred people were killed. “You always ex-
pect everything will change, will get
better,” she said. “And it doesn’t.”
Hrabarska read “Sapiens” three or
four years ago. She told me that she had
previously read widely in history and
philosophy, but none of that material
had ever “interested me on my core level.”
She found “Sapiens” overwhelming, par-
ticularly in its passages on prehistory,
and in its larger revelation that she was
“one of the billions and billions that
lived, and didn’t make any impact and
didn’t leave any trace.” Upon finishing
the book, Hrabarska said, “you kind of
relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore—
it’s O.K. to be insignificant.” For her,
the discovery of “Sapiens” is that “life is
big, but only for me.” This knowledge
“lets me own my life.”
Reading “Sapiens” had helped her be-
come “more compassionate” toward peo-
ple around her, although less invested in
their opinions. Hrabarska had also spent
more time on creative photography proj-
ects. She said, “This came from a feel-
ing of ‘O.K., it doesn’t matter that much,
I’m just a little human, no one cares.’”
Hrabarska has disengaged from pol-
itics. “I can choose to be involved, not
to be involved,” she said. “No one cares,
and I don’t care, too.”