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Randy Cohen has taken up these moral dilemmas of university life,
along with many off-campus queries in his New York Times column,
"The Ethicist," syndicated in 38 papers across the US and Canada
as "Everyday Ethics." In his talk, "How to Be Good," he lays out
the approach he takes, and discusses those taken by other people,
in sorting through the ethical quandries of ordinary experience.
In addition, he recounts his unlikely history as an ethicist and
makes a case that his background as a writer for David Letterman
was excellent training for his current occupation. During the question
and answer period following his remarks, he's happy to field ethical
queries from the audience.
About
Randy
Randy
Cohen was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He attended graduate
school at the California Institute of the Arts as a music major
studying composition. He is unable to account for either of these
circumstances. His first professional work was writing humor pieces,
essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker,
Harpers, the Atlantic, Young Love Comics). A collection of these
pieces, Diary of a Flying Man, was published by Knopf. For
several years, he wrote "The News Quiz," a regular column of topical
comedy, for Slate, the online magazine.
His
first television work was writing for "Late Night With David Letterman,"
for which he won three Emmy awards. He fourth Emmy was for his work
on Michael MooreÓs "TV Nation." He received a fifth Emmy as a result
of a clerical error, and he kept it. He was the original head writer
on the "The Rosie O'Donnell Show."
Currently,
he writes "The Ethicist," a weekly column for the New York Times
Magazine that also appears in 38 papers in the U.S. and Canada.
The Good, the Bad and the Difference, a book based upon his
column, has recently been published by Doubleday.

(click
to open publisher's site in new browser)
Randy
Cohen's new book is a hilarious look at ethics in everyday life.
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