There's a young guy in my house running a cable line, and I'm doing the thing I'm terrible at, which is trying to talk to him while he works. Small talk and I have never gotten along; I feel about it the way other people feel about public speaking. But he's easy — twenty-four, maybe, [...]

For several months I had a performance coach named Lori, and about halfway through an ordinary video call, she dismantled a story I had been telling for twenty years... in one sentence. I want to set the scene, because I came into that call armed. I was complaining about my husband's career, and I complained [...]

I'm at a party on a rooftop terrace in Bogotá, Colombia, and someone asks how many times we've moved. I've got this one. I've told it a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. I'm good at it. The number lands, and there's a little intake of breath I'd come to expect... and then the [...]

Part 3 of 3 A Celebration of Canada, America, and the Friendships That Outlast Everything Every year on July 1st, I raise a glass to Canada — not as a courtesy or a diplomatic gesture, but because North Bay, Ontario is one of the places in the world where my family's story lives, and because [...]

Part 2 of 3 What Jefferson Got Right — and What We Keep Getting Wrong — About Happiness This article is part of a series published by Human Flourishing in celebration of America's 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Each piece takes one idea from that founding document and asks what it means [...]

Part 1 of 3 Thomas Jefferson, the Founders, and a Better Way to Judge Across Time The Man Who Wrote Freedom Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three years old when he drafted the Declaration of Independence. He worked in a rented room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, writing and revising in the heat, producing [...]

The disagreement usually arrives at the table. A grown child comes home carrying a conviction the father doesn't share — about God, or money, or the country, or how a person ought to live — and says it out loud, and the room changes temperature before anyone has decided anything. Everyone feels it. The father [...]

Dale Carnegie wrote the manual on human influence in 1936. Three of his ideas still have something to teach us, and something to offer a divided world. Part 3 of 3 The previous two issues explored respect — why disrespect is the surest way to shut a conversation down, how respect is earned through consistent [...]

On the smartest person in the room — and the rarest skill in any room Part 2 of 3 In the last issue I wrote about respect as the hottest of all hot buttons — the pressure point that, once pressed, shuts down real conversation faster than anything else. The responses I got, and the [...]

Why respect decides whether a conversation opens or shuts down Part 1 of 3 Scroll through almost any comment thread on a contested topic and you can watch one of the oldest patterns in human behavior play out in fast motion. Someone states a position. Someone else challenges it — not the idea, but the person holding it. A third voice joins in. Within [...]