You know that thing where you’re at a bar and there are a lot of people around, and some of them are probably pretty interesting, and you’re drinking, but you’re alone, and you don’t know any of those people, so instead of talking to them you just ignore them and bury yourself in your phone? Me too. Why do we do that?

So glad you asked.

Today I’ve got an interview with Joe Keohane, author of the new book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. Joe is actually an old editor of mine; we worked together on some features at Thrillist and then again when he was editing at Medium. Joe and I spoke at length about The Power of Strangers. It’s a fantastic book, one that combines thorough research with narrative first-person reporting to answer a deceptively simple question: if scientists know that talking to strangers is good for us—and they do, neurologically and physiologically speaking—then why don’t we do it more often? 

Having read the book this summer, I t…