Feel curious again

And: Join my special evening event this Wednesday

Yesterday I noticed a major new article by Nikole Hannah-Jones. It was a searing personal essay confronting the costs and consequences of sending her daughter to a particular public school in keeping with Hannah-Jones’ deeply held values but at the expense of giving her daughter the best education the mother could have arranged.

Just as quickly as the article dropped, I watched people began to process it on social media. And I was startled by what should no longer surprise me: So many seem to be losing the ability to process information through any other filter besides “Do I agree with this?” If yes, post the essay with fire emojis. If no, eviscerate it. There are no other options for so many people today.

I say this as though it’s only happened to other people. But in recent years, I felt it happening to me, too. You probably felt it also. There is so much to be righteous about these days that the faculty we’re quickest to go to is judging. Do I deem this new information to be right or wrong?

But there are so many more interesting questions with which to face the world. What does this new information tell me that I didn’t know? How have I lived some variant of what I’m reading, in my own way? What must it have been like to be that person? These are not the questions people have on social media. These are the kinds of questions you have when you’re a reader.

As I’ve shared before, I wrote MAN IN THE MIRROR partly because I wanted, thanks to a friend’s intervention, to jolt myself out of the certitude I felt closing in. I wanted to feel curious again.

And now that I am a day and a week away from sharing the book with you, I want to say that my highest hope for this book is that it might help you in some of the same ways. If you feel that judging reflex swallowing your mind, if you feel that instinct to either agree or disagree and not take things in, if the certitude virus has come for you, too, I want to invite you to join me on this journey.

Let’s read this book together over the next few months. My promise to you, since I know what’s in it better than almost anyone, is that it will help you reclaim that part of your mind that was able to switch into other people’s ways of looking, to feel what it is like to be someone else, to hold in one’s mind a thought one doesn’t agree with but just hold it there for a moment, because citizenship demands this faculty of all of us.

So today, a last call from me to preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR, so that you will be among the very first to get it.

I say last call because today is the deadline for letting us know you’re in this reading circle from the start — and getting to be part of a special event with me this Wednesday, September 23, at 8 p.m. ET.

That’s when my friend Sam Dolnick, who made said intervention and assigned me the idea for this book, will join me for an intimate conversation about our friendship, the origins of this book, and more. This will be open to anyone who preorders by today and submits their proof right here.

Oh, and when you do, this crew who is here with me from the beginning will also get a behind-the-scenes archive just for you:

— Photos, videos, notes, and scraps from three years of reporting — some revealing, some strange, some funny, most never intended for publication.

— The music of the book: a playlist drawn from the people, places, moods, and worlds I entered while reporting it. Music became such a major character in this story that it felt wrong not to give you the soundtrack.

— And, after an unreasonable amount of lawyerly negotiation, a deleted scene I still love but couldn’t keep in the finished book. They won’t appear anywhere else.

I woke up this morning almost vibrating with energy to begin sharing this work with the world. I’m so honored to have you with me.

Thank you for being the community you are.