During this holiday season, we are re-releasing some of our most popular episodes about conflict in relationships from the archive. A Thanksgiving blowup in 1989 shattered one family and shaped a lifetime of how sociologist Heath Hoffman understands conflict. In this raw and candid conversation, Hoffman traces how antagonism, avoidance, and inherited communication habits echo into adulthood. He opens up about wrestling with his own “uncivil” tendencies, the shame that follows, and why silence can feel just as painful as shouting. This episode is a gripping look at how family fights become family legacies and what it takes to break the cycle.

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Nick Longo shares the origin story behind Providence College's “dialogue walls,” a creative public-art tool designed to spark conversations in polarized times. Longo, professor of Global Studies and co-director of the Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy Lab, recounts how speaker cancellations and national political controversies pushed him and his students to build proactive spaces where questions—not shouting matches—lead. Longo takes us inside the craft of asking genuinely invitational questions and the challenge of creating nuance in public spaces. Ultimately, he frames dialogue as the “narrow ridge” where curiosity, humility, and real problem-solving begin.

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Joseph Uscinski pushes back hard on the widespread claim that conspiracy theories are exploding in America—and brings decades of data to prove it. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, explains why journalists and the public confuse visibility with prevalence, why viral anecdotes mislead us, and how conspiratorial thinking has been a feature of American life long before the internet. Along the way, we discuss politicians’ use of conspiratorial rhetoric, nostalgia for a “rational past,” and why people’s beliefs—online or off—are far more complicated than we assume. The result is a myth-busting conversation that reframes challenges many ideas about misinformation, media, and our nostalgia for an era of uncontested "facts."

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