What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs.

The book describes the theoretical framework and empirical measurements of misunderstandings—written by an economist, but in simple words and using interdisciplinary concepts.

The production of cheap talk relies everywhere on the depoliticisation of communication. Cheap talk displaces a shared traversal of difference with a technocratic exchange of messages. […] This is a thoroughly sterile ecology of communication: minds making speech to transfer information to other minds. […] It is not [stuttering] but fluency that ensnares life with a type of deathly repetition.

This book explains how information capitalism commodifies and dehumanizes speech through the contrasting examples of speech pathology and television punditry. Written before the explosion in generative AI, the book is helpful for explaining the market logics underlying LLMs and for understanding what such “cheap talk” does to people and society.

There are political and existential questions at stake here that are difficult even to articulate within a surge of cheap talk: What might a dysfluent event become if not immediately managed? How might we relate differently? What might we become?

Correlational analyses showed that emotional intelligence was positively related to emoji use

it’s damaging the planet, it’s poisoning our bodies and, worst of all, we kind of have to participate in it because not participating in it is even worse.

When a mendicant has faith, approaches, pays homage, asks questions, actively listens to the teachings, remembers the teachings, reflects on the meaning, and practices accordingly, the Realized One feels inspired to teach [them].

How we should approach the Dhamma and Dhamma teachers.

Objectives of state redaction as set forth by Muriel Rukeyser’s redacted file:

1. Render information illegible to make the reader aware of her/his position as one who will never access a truth that does, by state accounts, exist
2. Isolate text in time and instance
3. …

frozen by design
our calling becomes all calling.

Here, take this palmful of raspberries…

Look at you two, he said. And we did.

A poem about finding dignity and connection in illness and dying.

To strike the right balance of a benign enough violation without offending your audience requires some brains. Funny people are indeed smart

Over three repeated interviews, participants developed false memories of the suggested events under minimally suggestive conditions (27%) and even more so using massive suggestion (56%). We then used two techniques to reduce false memory endorsement, source sensitization and false memory sensitization. This reversed the false memory build-up over the first three interviews, returning false memory rates in both suggestion conditions to the baseline levels of the first interview.

Merely informing people about the possibility of having false memories implanted was enough to get them to second guess their false memories.

Across groups of different sizes and interaction constraints, describers produced increasingly efficient utterances and matchers made increasingly accurate selections. Critically, however, we found that smaller groups and groups with less-constrained interaction structures (“thick channels”) showed stronger convergence to group-specific conventions than large groups with constrained interaction structures (“thin channels”), which struggled with convention formation.

heart rate synchrony predicted the probability of groups reaching the correct consensus decision with >70% cross-validation accuracy–significantly higher than that predicted by the duration of discussions, subjective assessment of team function or baseline heart rates alone.

We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between information per syllable and speech rate properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually.

Wood duck
I feel for you
You never had hands to stroke
Your own wings

A collection of poems originally written in Braille, ASL, and Protactile by a deafblind poet.

… policy with intentional marketing titles.
Assimilation; Relocation; Termination…

I like a private life, it’s true…

I raise a finger to a point in the night…

How much our minds live (and live on) in the people around us.

Experiencing autonomy—being allowed to make those choices that constitute an autonomous life—as a learner is a better way of learning to be autonomous than being told what to do.

Education of whatever type cannot be sustained without some notion of imparting a belief system.

A rigorous philosophical analysis of how humans acquire mental categories which argues that human values are always already present in any act of teaching or learning, thus solving some of Wittgenstein’s problems and encouraging us to ask radical questions about what our education system currently values, and what it might be designed to value instead.

There isn’t “knowledge” as we’re used to thinking about it: figuring out, given observations and experiences in the world, what is “true” and once you come to “knowledge” you get to keep it for life. I now appreciate that everything is beliefs, is just a best guess.

How all reasoning is Bayesian.

Sixteen patients underwent functional MRI while reacting to negative self-beliefs and while regulating negative emotions using 2 types of attention deployment emotion regulation: breath-focused attention (MBSR) and distraction-focused attention (counting backwards).

Compared with baseline, MBSR completers showed improvement in anxiety and depression symptoms and self-esteem. During the breath-focused attention task (but not the distraction-focused attention task), they also showed (a) decreased negative emotion experience, (b) reduced amygdala activity, and (c) increased activity in brain regions implicated in attentional deployment. MBSR training in patients with SAD may reduce emotional reactivity while enhancing emotion regulation.

First, whereas Westerners represent each of the six basic emotions with a distinct set of facial movements common to the group, Easterners do not. Second, Easterners represent emotional intensity with distinctive dynamic eye activity. By refuting the long-standing universality hypothesis, our data highlight the powerful influence of culture on shaping basic behaviors once considered biologically hardwired.

The results establish that individual use of gender-neutral pronouns reduces the mental salience of males. This shift is associated with people expressing less bias in favor of traditional gender roles and categories, as manifested in more positive attitudes toward women and LGBT individuals in public affairs.

The language we use matters.

It is vital that all signs be read easily and understood quickly. This demands the consistent use of a distinctive typeface throughout the entire system.

Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate.

Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker-listener coupling, the greater the understanding.

Bombu refers to a foolish being such as myself.

When I could finally admit this to myself, I saw that the license plate had to go …

So, you’re not impressed you say
With a beat up Chevrolet
But that driver man Jose
Knows his way around

The hard part of having a secret doesn’t seem [to be] those moments when we’re in conversation. That turns out to be the easy part. It’s having to live with the secret alone, and being unsure whether you’re doing the right thing.

The listener seeks cues about what is important to the other, sorts these cues to conclude which are the most important, and expresses the essence of the communication back to the speaker. In other words, the listener checks out his or her understanding of what the other person is trying to say.

The first problem with feedback is that humans are unreliable raters of other humans.

Why “feedback” is rarely positive, and what to do instead.

The precariousness of intimate speech adds to its power and the power of the reader, through whose agency the voice is encouraged in its urgent plea or confidence.

Poet Louise Glück graciously accepts the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature in a master class of rhetoric and humility.

You can also watch Glück rereading her speech for the Nobel YouTube channel just months before she passed away from cancer in 2023.

Western Buddhist communities must acquire an entirely different system of communicating – one in which silence occupies a central position.

We contend that even in situations of apparent procedural equality, deliberation’s legitimating potential is limited by its potential to increase normatively focal power asymmetries. We conclude by describing how deliberative contexts can be modified to reduce certain types of power asymmetries, such as those often associated with gender, race, or class.

Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted something a bit outside his lane as a sports guy but fundamentally banal in the context of American public opinion: “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” […] But Morey turns out to have stepped onto a much bigger landmine — Chinese politics.

The irony is how wrong we are about the perception of being wrong. Fetterman’s research shows admitting wrongness actually improves our reputation.

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when.

Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns.

Experimental reports rich in circumstantial detail were designed to enable readers of the text to create a mental image of an experimental scene they did not directly witness. I call this ‘virtual witnessing’, and its importance was as a means of enlarging the witnessing public. The notion of a ‘public’ for experimental science is, I argue, essential to our understanding of how facts are generated and validated. In these episodes, circumstantial reporting was a technique for creating a public and thus constituting authentic knowledge.

On how Robert Boyle’s 1660 letter New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall created modern science.

Even when the conversation doesn’t “matter” in a traditional sense, perhaps that’s part of the joy: a small escape from the serious, a reprieve from the heavier matters …

A defense of polite “nothings.”

Symbolic gestures, such as pantomimes that signify actions (e.g., threading a needle) or emblems that facilitate social transactions (e.g., finger to lips indicating “be quiet”), play an important role in human communication. They are autonomous, can fully take the place of words, and function as complete utterances in their own right. The relationship between these gestures and spoken language remains unclear. We used fMRI to investigate whether these two forms of communication are processed by the same system in the human brain.

We suggest that these anterior and posterior perisylvian areas, identified since the mid-19th century as the core of the brain’s language system, are not in fact committed to language processing, but may function as a modality-independent semiotic system that plays a broader role in human communication, linking meaning with symbols whether these are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects.

What happens—biologically, cognitively, and socially—when we communicate?

A short introduction to the science of human communication.

It’s well-established that providing trans teens gender-affirming health care lowers their rates of depression, suicide, and hopelessness, among countless other benefits. That didn’t stop the New York Times from opining that there could be a “cost” to allowing trans teens to access [hormone treatment]. The cost, we learn, is a reduction in bone density over time—the same side effect found in common acne treatments for teens, like Accutane.

How “just asking questions” masks ideology.

Don’t be afraid to walk away.

I know there are different worlds…

An analysis of this airy, Anishinaabemowin song about the space between us.

For an interview with this poet, listen to the bonus episode.

It’s not about proving something, it’s about casting doubt.

A brief interview on the rise and function of post-modern propaganda.

Political opponents respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts.

Everyone can appreciate that avoiding harm is rational, even in people who hold different beliefs.

These results provide a concrete demonstration of how to bridge moral divides while also revealing how our intuitions can lead us astray.

We find that eye contact is positively correlated with synchrony as well as ratings of engagement by conversation partners. However, rather than elicit synchrony, eye contact commences as synchrony peaks and predicts its immediate and subsequent decline until eye contact breaks.

On the importance of making—and breaking—eye contact during conversations.

“This is how societies end,” said the tweet, as if people’s annoyance that some random lady [thought her] TikTok was more important than their safe commute was akin to the sacking of Rome. “No no,” I thought, “this, in fact, is how societies end.”

An impassioned plea for us to avoid stupid “discourse bait” online.

Consistent with the idea that analytical meditation helps to train concentration, we observed that over the course of the debate, mid-frontal theta oscillations—a correlate of absorption—increased significantly. This increase was stronger for more experienced monks as compared to monks at the beginning of their education. In addition, we found evidence for increases in synchrony in frontal alpha oscillations between paired debaters during moments of agreement as compared to disagreement on a set of premises.

There is a tribe of people known as the Ethno-graphic Filmmakers who believe they are invisible. They enter a room where a feast is being celebrated, or the sick cured, or the dead mourned, and, though weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed.

I am only kind to my father
in poems he will never read.

Hours before the TV, my mouth
agape, repeating after every American cartoon…

While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys in the parking lot…

…a gripping account of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s unlikely, ill-fated advocacy on behalf of a death-row prisoner with literary ambitions.

If you’re curious, warm, and earnest, you can make a new friend—and leave your awkward adult persona behind.

… you can build the knowledge and practice the skills necessary to become a more competent and ethical communicator.

A standard, first-year college textbook introducing Communication Studies, with a particular focus on public speaking.

PBS taught us English…

I think I will do nothing now
but listen. Listen and rest

At two a.m., without enough spirits
spilling into my liver to know
to keep my mouth shut, my youngest
learned of years I spent inside a box

We soak rice until
the water clouds. On the television, a fiesta…

My grandfather would spell certain words so that the dog couldn’t comprehend…

Note: The poem’s epigraph mentions this photograph.

It used to embarrass me when my father talked back to the TV.

May the dead    be ever-evidenced
        May their clandestine names
bellow from the mouth…

For most of the shift, it was more about not looking
bored or wanting to seem invisible behind the ER desk
while nothing much happened at all…

you spoke of dancing. And the Baltic
Sea you placed in tiny glasses
what you knew of Kosovo
and how our students marched…

a field mouse
racing
across fallen leaves…

Though it wasn’t the only time that I went home and cried during that week.

[Three] stories where people are like, ‘oh, I’m going to be the one to fix that.’ And only later did they really discover, to their surprise, what that can really entail. Even when you think you see things coming, you’ve got it under control, that’s who you are, you do not see things coming.

The first set of emojis was designed for a Japanese cell phone company by Shigetaka Kurita in 1998. Texting was still really new. There were only 176 of them and they were 12-by-12 pixels each.

In fact, a bigger problem than panic is its opposite: people don’t grasp how serious a situation is; too calm, they don’t react in time.

… what is the essential part of our voices, and what isn’t?

An audiophile explains why we seem to hate phone calls these days.

In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous preacher in America.

… stories of humans encountering non-human intelligences

When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient, that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery

Here’s John Cleese…

It’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.

People think “Sesame Street” teaches children to love learning, but what it teaches them is to love television.

my blood moves like tectonic plates

Chatbots fool us more often than we think… especially when they replicate our very worst habits.

Changing the work and how we work is the unpleasant task of dealing with what we’ve been denying. It is probably the biggest test in the creative process demanding not only an admission that you’ve made a mistake, but that you know how to fix it.

The story of Twyla Tharp’s Billy Joel musical and the unlikely bicycle-powered airplane.

… five drawbacks for a person who talks a lot

And the benefits to being reserved.

Truth, indeed, is deathless speech

A short sutta on Right Speech, equivalent to SN 8.5.

… digital technology often seems to make it harder for us to respond in the right way when someone is suffering and needs our help

Remember the earth whose skin you are

We begin with a howling, f-ing lie.

A look at how a moral panic is constructed through a careful reading of a particular New York Times editorial.

You never begin by saying, “I’m going to be a tyrannist dictator, and I’m going to ruin your life.” You don’t start out that way. You start out by saying, “I’m going to make things so much better. And you want that, don’t you, Ezra?”

Anthropological methods and insights can be transformative, making possible the kinds of empathy and dialogue necessary to solve our global problems. The goal of this textbook is to guide you in this process of transformation as you learn about the cultural lives of the various peoples with whom you share this planet.

The fact that some intersections are still using incandescent bulbs is a little odd.

Musings on the nature of technological progress in a democracy.

Even the most bizarre propaganda claims [about Tibet] are accepted by Hans [without] any apparent qualms about them. But on the part of Tibetans, the messages are completely counter-productive. The more the propaganda is imposed on them, the more resolute they become in their rejection of that propaganda.

Ben and Andrew trace how the song “Time to Pretend” was made, from its dorm room origins, to its first recording, to re-envisioning it with Grammy-winning producer Dave Fridmann.

Even if a house is of inferior quality, if decorated with flowers, it will appear to be a bower. It will become the source of a ‘clear mind’

💐

… the evidence found in early printed liturgical booklets that promote Buddha-vandanā points to a different kind of modernization. This article reveals how Buddhist activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made use of the capabilities presented in the colonial context, including print technology, to promote this devotional ritual practice as a principal marker of a newly constructed Buddhist identity.

異なる声の元が
喉元までとどく
そこまで見えたものが
消されてしまう前に

… but someone was about to arrive in Texas to stick up for these bats

After you listen, be sure to check out the book they discuss at the end, All Yesterdays and its sequel, All Your Yesterdays.

How does one say “what if” without reproach?

A kaleidoscopic meditation on race, identity, culture, and deep listening.

Do the reading

After years of hosting one of Podcasts’ most-listened-to interview shows, Ezra Klein says goodbye to the company he founded and shares a few things he learned hosting the show.

If we have learned one thing from the #MeToo campaign, apart from just how pervasive sexual violence is, it is that we as a society do not have a clear, uncontested idea of what sexual consent looks like, and that we do not all universally and equally value it.

A lucid treatment of an important and difficult subject, this book should be considered required reading for anyone who wishes to navigate their sexual relations more skillfully or who wishes to understand the contemporary discourse about sex.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

A foundational classic in the field of product design, you will never look at any thing the same way again.

And if you loved this book, which I know you will, I also highly recommend its sequel: Emotional Design published by Basic in 2003.

The text jumps inside me to help me out.
…
So, when you’re studying Buddhism, what are you studying?
I know the answer. I’m studying me.
I’m studying me.