If holiday debates usually leave you drained, this guide offers practical, research-based tools to make your conversations calmer and more productive.

As humans, we’re talking to each other constantly. With all that practice, we must be pretty good at it—right? Not exactly. As a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Talk: The Science of ...

Disagreement isn’t the problem. How we talk is. Three simple practices can help restore productive conversation at work, at ...

As Rich has shown me, a good conversation can make you feel alive. It can stave off loneliness and brighten your mood in ways few other things can. You know what it feels like when you’ve reached this ...

In text, you want to find the balance between short and effusive. "Don't be too short (i.e. responding with one-word answers) ...

You can spend years building credibility at work and still feel unprepared for the moment you need to say something uncomfortable. That one difficult conversation you wish you could avoid often turns ...

We’ve all heard the phrase “money talks.” But when it comes to our actual lives, most of us aren’t talking about money at all — not with our partners, not with our parents, and sometimes not even with ...

How do you have meaningful conversations with people whom you deeply disagree with on a personal level? A recent Pew research study determined Americans are more divided today than at any point in our ...

Your 18-year-old daughter announces she’s in love, dropping out of college and moving to Argentina. Your yoga-teaching brother refuses to get vaccinated for COVID-19 and is confident that fresh air is ...

When Shira Hoffer arrived at Harvard in 2021, she was full of hope, not just about academics or independence, but about connection. As a graduate of a pluralistic Jewish day school, she had grown up ...

That powerful idea comes from Melody Wilding, a human behavior expert, executive coach, and the author of Managing Up: How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge (Crown Currency, 2025). The ...