Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

Most people think of conversations as cooperative endeavors where two people are working together to exchange information. But Deborah Tannen has spent her career documenting how conversations are also performances — rituals laden with hidden rules about status, connection, and identity. When those hidden rules collide, we don't just miscommunicate; we wound each other without ever knowing why.

TED

How Bullying Spreads — and How Social Bravery Stops It | Amy Cuddy | TED

Bullying is not conflict. It's not a debate, it's not criticism, it's not humor that you're too sensitive to take well. It is a deliberately targeted, serial, escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people, and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation and their ability to contribute.

The New York Times

Watch Gloria Steinem's Never-Before-Seen 2008 Interview With The New York Times

The mark of being part of the 'wrong group,' a peripheral group rather than a central one, is that nothing you do is right. And what's so interesting about not being able to win, and by conforming, is that you learn to do whatever you [expletive] well please.

Hidden Brain

The Things We Don't Say

We're so focused on the content of our conversations that we forget that the way we communicate — whether we speak up or stay silent, whether we text or talk — shapes the quality of our lives and relationships.

Book of the Day

'This is Where the Serpent Lives' is a sprawling debut novel set in modern Pakistan

By stabbing himself, he's proven how brave he is and yet has uh not gone to the extreme of hurting somebody, which would have lead to trouble because he's the weakest member. He's the poor one. They are rich and if he had hurt them, there would have been severe repercussions. It's a very smart move.

It's Been a Minute

Feeling aggrieved? You're not alone. | It's Been a Minute

I think people just like to fight. Honestly, we love to bicker. We love a little um tension, you know, cuz what are we without it, right?

Book of the Day

'The Shampoo Effect,' 'The Revelation of Dionne Daphne' are marked by big surprises

I think that we've all come to understand that a baby is a bomb that goes off in the middle of a marriage, but what happens when there's no marriage? It's a bomb that goes off in a friend group, and it catches everybody in the shrapnel.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think about what we say to others. We think about whether our words might hurt or please them, whether we're saying the right things at the right time. But we rarely think about how we listen. We assume we're doing it fine, or well enough. Yet listening is one of the most powerful things we can do for another person.

Hidden Brain

Who Are You, Really?

You're not the same person with your friends as you are with your co-workers or your kids. So who are you, really?

It's Been a Minute

Why don't your neighbors pick up their dog’s poop?

If you see your neighborhood as an amenity rather than like as a place in which like many people live and have to live coexisting lives, including people who are very different from you, make different amounts of money, people who look differently than you, then like that is a political perspective that is, you know, projected onto the world, and the dog is just a lens at looking at it.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Musk v Altman: Much ado about nothing

In a courtroom full of untrustworthy, unreliable people all fighting with each other, did anyone even have a reputation left to lose?

Pivot

The Bezos Met Ball Takeover: All the Money, None of the Rizz | Pivot

The day of the IPO, they went into a conference room, this, you know, nice, fairly unattractive guy who had no sexual currency their whole life, and they come out and they're the sexiest man alive.

It's Been a Minute

Inside the Michael Jackson legacy industrial complex | It's Been a Minute

We are actively as a society trying to avoid friction at all costs. It's not just in our art, but it's also in the way we move about the world. It's about the way we interact with our loved ones. It's the way we avoid having tough conversations and calling things out as they are.

Fresh Air

Comic Jeff Ross on roasting, loss and his epic bar mitzvah

I would ride my moped on the turning lane of this highway 12 months a year to go to my family-owned catering hall where these lavish affairs would happen. So I saw human nature, people at their most nervous, brides, grooms, mother of the bride, father of the groom, like you saw people at their most intense.

The Origins Podcast

The Science Behind Drinking To Get Sober | Katie Herzog & Lawrence Krauss

Personally, it was more difficult. So, I lost a lot of friends, a lot of old friends, and that will never stop being painful to be abandoned by people who I'm sure that you have.

Book of the Day

Daisy Hernández argues 'Citizenship' has never been a fixed legal status

Citizenship was a private story, one women told in the dark where faces could not be seen

TED Radio Hour

Curious stories of coexistence

Every day we hear about nations, different groups of people struggling to get along. Humanity seems unable to overcome its differences. But what can we learn from more unusual examples of strange bedfellows?

TBPN

Tall Poppy Syndrome, Bytedance Gets Blackwell Chips, WSJ Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the the the big deer or whatever you're hunting the bacon. You don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even try because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society.