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 [...]

We use three words as if they were one. Patriotism, politics, and partisanship get folded together until it's hard to tell which we mean. Someone who argues fiercely for their side calls it patriotism. Someone worn out by the arguing calls the whole thing politics and decides to sit it out. The blurring feels harmless, [...]

Memorial Day is for the names. It is sometimes confused with Veterans Day, which honors the living. Memorial Day is for the dead: the men and women whose service ended in service. The day exists because a country that asks people to risk their lives for an aspiration needs a moment, set apart, to acknowledge [...]

How economic interdependence builds the peace that politics cannot. There is a principle hiding in plain sight: countries that trade with each other rarely go to war with each other. A new essay from HumanProgress.org by Walker Wright walks through the evidence, and the underlying scholarship is more consistent than most public conversation about war [...]

Part 3 of 3 The first piece in this series described what has happened to public conversation: the shared room has fragmented, the incentives that govern public talk have shifted away from good reasoning, and the architecture of online discourse reliably sorts people into rooms where they encounter only weak versions of what other people [...]

Part 2 of 3 The previous piece argued that public conversation has gotten harder for structural reasons — fragmented information, attention-driven incentives, algorithms that sort us into rooms with people who already agree. That diagnosis sets up a question. What is genuine public conversation actually for? And what conditions does it need to work? Plenty [...]

Part 1 of 3 There used to be a room. Not literally, but functionally — a shared space where people who disagreed about important things could still talk to each other and be talked back to. A claim made in public was a claim that other people, reading the same paper or watching the same [...]