Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?

We think we can transform the stranger, without

We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore.

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.

Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.

the terrible false jollity that comes at you from every side, braying about goodwill and peace and family fun, makes loneliness and depression particularly hard to bear.