The Emergent Self

Questioning what we're told it means to be human

Topic

Thinking & Disagreement

Critical thinking and the craft of disagreeing well. Every disagreement holds more than two paths.

A tall brick building glowing with lit windows on a snowy December evening, with a lone figure sitting on its front steps

The Season We Built: Why I’m Spending the Holidays Asking Who They’re For

The holidays feel like weather, something that simply arrives. They are a building, and buildings have owners, tenants, and people sleeping on the steps. For eight weeks I am walking through the building and asking who it was built for.

We Won. Now Comes the Harder Part.

Democrats won big on Tuesday, and I celebrated. Then I thought about my friends who voted the other way. What we do with this win will matter more than the win itself.
An open wooden garden gate in a stone wall with a bicycle, old novels, a rotary telephone and a tablet leaning beside it

First They Laugh: The Stigma That Greets Every New Technology

My friends laugh at me for talking to my computers. They laughed at the bicycle, the novel, the test tube, and the dating site too. The stigma that greets every new technology is never really about the tool.
A hand-drawn family tree on aged paper, with one faint, unfinished branch set apart from the rest

The Cousin We Were Afraid to Call: Racial Hatred in One Family Tree

For fifty years my family has traded records and old photos, but one branch we left alone: a third cousin who became a Klan leader. What a family tree can and cannot explain about racial hatred.
A suburban street seen through a lace curtain; a young couple, their toddler and a beagle on the lawn across the way

Dear America, Part 3: The Neighbors with the Beagle

Trust lost in both directions, and a country that now fears the young family next door.
A woven handbasket on a weathered pier, with the Statue of Liberty small and distant in the harbor fog

Dear America, Part 4: Because I Care

Old wounds, the myth of exceptionalism, and a wry question about Lady Liberty, all sent with love.
A coastal map on a wooden desk with a black marker line drawn across it, a marker beside it, and a calm ocean through the window

The Sharpie and the Ocean: Reading Donald Trump, and Ourselves, from Four Directions

A marker on a hurricane map, a plan to rename an ocean: what Donald Trump’s strangest moments reveal about him, about the culture that cheers, and about the rest of us.
Painting of a Black boy gazing through a window at a fenced public swimming pool on a summer afternoon

I’m White, and I Don’t Have to See Color

"I don't see color" is usually offered as a promise of fairness. For many White people, it may really be a description of privilege.
Why flatterers turn on you: an illustration of a conference table where employees hold smiling masks in front of wary faces as they turn toward the boss at the head of the table.

Why Flatterers Turn on You

The person who flatters you most may be the one most likely to turn on you. A meeting I came to dread, the research behind it, and why the truth people can’t tell you goes somewhere else.
A hiker stands alone on a misty hilltop at dawn while faint, ghostly figures along the path below help others climb, steady a ladder, open a gate, and point the way

Nobody Is Self-Made

The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” began as a joke. Why nobody is truly self-made, and what privilege and intersectionality reveal about success.