My job at Vox is to talk to interesting people. And in 2020, I got to talk to a lot of really, really interesting people.
Nine conversations in particular stick out to me. They were the ones that challenged me the most, got me thinking in a new way about a difficult problem, or simply explained what the hell was happening in this disorienting year.
There’s no unifying thread tying all these conversations together, but each of them, in its own way, left a strong impression on me. One of my favorites was with Rabbi David Wolpe, who talked about how to find meaning in the middle of all this suffering and why our culture struggles with questions of deep existential significance.