December 24, 2021

Holiday Best: Connecting Across the Divide

1 hour 47 minutes

This Christmas Eve, enjoy catching up with these recent conversations about connecting:

Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village and the author of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World (Harmony, 2021), offers a guide for getting past today's tribalism and competition to see that we are all in this together.

Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, lead author for the Second, Third, and Fourth US National Climate Assessment, host of the PBS digital series Global Weirding and the author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2021), talks about how to avoid letting political polarization derail actions, big and small, to address climate change.

As families gather to celebrate the holidays, many singles and unmarried couples might face questions from family members about their relationship status. Katherine Hertlein, relationship therapist and professor in the couple and family therapy program at Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at University of Nevada Las Vegas, offers advice for responding to their intrusive questions.

Before we gather with folks with different media diets, WNYC's The United States of Anxiety host Kai Wright and senior digital producer Kousha Navidar offer an experiment to get past the filter bubbles that define what information gets to us.

Anna Sale, host of the WNYC Studios podcast Death, Sex & Money and author of the book Let's Talk About Hard Things (Simon & Schuster, 2021), shares her tips for how to have conversations about tough subjects, and why she thinks it's beneficial to talk it out.

These interviews were lightly edited to fit the format; the original web versions are available here:

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis on Coming Together (Nov. 9, 2021)

Climate Science for All (Sept. 23, 2021)

How to Respond to Meddling Family Members (Dec. 6, 2021)

My Bubble, Your Bubble (Nov. 23, 2021)

Hard Conversations Can Be the Best Conversations (May 4, 2021)

...more