"What’s preventing us from seeing each other and how do we get it out of our way? Curiosity. Our own built-in capacity to hunger for understanding, and the way that curiosity actually compels us to fill the gaps between what we know and what we want to know.
Two big enemies of curiosity to watch out for, that rears its ugly head all the time these days: one is certainty. If you think you know, you won’t think to ask…. The other enemy is fear. You can’t wonder about something that you think is out to get you. Fear is a survival strategy, it’s awesome. It brings up our adrenaline, it helps us with fight or flight. But you know what fear doesn’t help us do? Think."
"When you are dealing with something novel, that is actually a very hard thing to do…You start putting things in boxes that you understand. To be able to say, ‘I am going to make no assumptions about this virus and I'm just going to take the information in,’ is a challenging thing to do. You want to have experts. But expertise can get the way because if it's novel, there is no box to put it in. You’ve got to create a new box."
"I believe forgiveness is a superpower. I don’t believe in forgetting, though. I believe forgiveness is not for the other person. My mother’s killer never said ‘sorry.’ But I don’t need his ‘sorry’ when I’ve already forgiven him. I don’t forgive him for him and his family, I forgive him for me and my family. I do believe forgiveness is important if it’s healing for you. For me, I don’t have to think about all young white males being out for me and my family. That’s what forgiveness does for me. Forgiveness frees me from that."
"This is an age of enormous complexity, where it has become a giant business to make people stupid and angry. We live in an age where there are huge media companies where their business is making people stupid and angry. Marie Curie’s motto was, ‘Now is the time to understand more so we may fear less.’ My journalism is part of that project.
Democracy can heal democracy, but you have to be intentional about it."
Our third annual Asheville Ideas Fest will take place June 17-20, 2024.
© 2026 UNC Asheville
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