Waluigi

A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back

Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.

I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?”

Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is _____” and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ________.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.

experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you,

I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you are asking a good question, you are adopting a posture of humility. You’re confessing that you don’t know and you want to learn. You’re also honoring a person. We all like to think we are so clever that we can imagine what’s going on in another’s mind. But the evidence shows that this

“The only thing you can be certain about every person is that nobody escapes high school. Whatever your high school fears were, they are still there.”

Anxiety is the enemy of empathy. Fear makes us egocentric; egocentric makes us blind. An amygdala/prefrontal-cortex two-step that narrows the search parameters of the pattern recognition system. Pretty soon, as anxiety climbs too high, we lose our ability to find one another.

Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”