The one thing that I did start doing that year (2020) was talk on the phone. I’ve never been a phone talker, but, of course, that’s all you had for a while. And I would have long conversations on the phone and those conversations felt really freeing in a way because you weren’t in an office place….But you realized in those conversations people were much more open than they were back in front of their laptop. And the dissonance between what people were saying outside of the ZOOM, outside of the feed, outside of the slack channel and what they were saying inside, was so vast that I began to feel like there’s a lot that not’s being said and a lot that’s not being written and if we are all talking about these things on our own, why isn’t anyone writing about them.
—Pamela Paul, New York Times columnist and former editor of the New York Times Book Review.
Listen to Paul’s conversation with Meghan Daum on “The Unspeakable” podcast. A lot of good stuff here on the legacy of 2020: Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, The New York Times, liberalism, open inquiry, the “laziness” of our current conversation about race in America, and our inability to see complexity.