All right, I want to see a show of hands how many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food? And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don’t want to talk to them?好的，我想让大家举手示意一下，有多少人曾经在 Facebook 上拉黑过好友，因为他们发表过关于政治，宗教，儿童权益，或者食物等，不恰当的言论，有多少人至少有一个不想见的人，因为你就是不想和对方说话？You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”: Stick to the weather and your health. But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects—are not safe either. So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can’t speak to one another, and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it’s not normal. Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized; we are more divided than we ever have been in history.要知道，在过去想要一段礼貌的交谈我们只要遵循亨利﹒希金斯在《窈窕淑女》中的忠告，只谈论天气和你的健康状况就行了。但这些年随着气候变化——以及反对疫苗运动的开展这招不怎么管用了。因此，在我们生活的这个世界，这个每一次交谈，都有可能进展为争论的世界，政客无法彼此交谈，甚至为那些鸡毛蒜皮的事情。都有人群情绪激昂地赞成或者反对，这太不正常了。皮尤讨论中心对一万名美国成年人做了一次调查，发现此刻我们的偏激程度，我们立场鲜亮的程度，比历史上任何时期都要高。We are less likely to compromise, which means we’re not listening to each other. And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even...
