How Curiosity Will Save Us

For Mónica Guzmán, curiosity isn’t a muse that flits by when we wonder about something. It’s the most powerful tool we have to navigate our world, especially when our world is dangerously divided along political lines. “If you can’t be curious across divides in a polarized world,” she says, “you can’t see the world at all.”

Mónica shares examples of curiosity-driven conversations that make it possible for even the most opposed liberals and conservatives to see and hear one another, despite the misperceptions from their news feeds. With simple, powerful questions she herself has used in countless treks across the divide, Mónica shows us how having critical conversations with people—instead of about them—changes everything. And how taking the first steps toward understanding the views that most confound us isn’t just possible, it’s easier than you think. Mónica is Director of Digital Storytelling at Braver Angels, the nation’s largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization dedicated to bridging the political divide. She is a former fellow at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, studying political division, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, studying community engagement. Mónica is the co-founder of the Seattle newsletter The Evergrey and was a juror for the 2013 and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in journalism. In her 17-year journalism career, she’s written columns for The Seattle Times, GeekWire, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Daily Beast, and others. A Mexican immigrant, Latina, and dual US/Mexico citizen, she lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids and is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents. Her book, I Never Thought of It That Way, comes out in March 2022.