These may be confusing and difficult times in America, but I consider myself pretty lucky. Most weekends, I get to hang out with an extraordinary group of people from around the country and see things their way. These folks are complicated, wise, and funny—and they’ve all been through a lot.

There is Sammy from rural Missouri via Chicago, a former teen gangbanger turned social worker, who helps troubled young men exit from hate groups. He learned in prison about “showing people empathy when they least deserve it,” after a therapist pulled him from the brink in solitary confinement. “A lot of folks mistake listening for conceding,” Sammy told me, “But when you stop listening, that’s conceding—’cause then there’s no pathway for them to walk out of the place they’re in.”

There is Braden, a twenty-something forestry worker from Colorado, who wanted to pry his blue-collar work buddies away from the lies of far-right talk radio. Political arguments and his efforts to blend in with a “big-ass truck and getting all dieseled out at the gym” didn’t work. What convinced them, he found, was just being his jokester self and enduring long work days with them: “I’m a Christian, a Socialist, a Zoomer with a Jesus Piece earring and a Zebra T-shirt on. They’re still like, ‘you’re a kook.’ But I’m a kook they trust.”

There is Margaret, a septuagenarian South Carolinian who discovered her ancestors were some of the biggest slave-traders in Charleston’s history—and who decided that was worth publicizing to........

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