Welcome to another Tuesday with TED. Today we have literary critic Parul Sehgal who asks: what is jealousy? What drives it, and why do we secretly love it? No study has ever been able to capture its “loneliness, longevity, grim thrill” — that is, she says, except for fiction.

Sehgal is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She was previously the Books Editor at NPR.org and the Senior Editor at Publisher’s Weekly. In this eloquent meditation, she scours pages from literature to show us how envy and jealousy is not so different from a quest for knowledge.

Did this talk change how you viewed jealousy? Do you have any stories of envy that you have shared (or might share) in your creative work?

Until next time,
Cynthia Patton