I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty; The Guardian, June 1, 2025

Anand Pandian, The Guardian; I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty

"I recount those travels and their lessons in my new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. In it I argue that, in the US, we are at crossroads, poised between a politics of suspicion and retreat, and another founded on more expansive relationships of mutual aid and collective solidarity...

All of us have much to lose in the erosion of neighborly concern, the impetus to look out for others we don’t know that well. Neighborliness is a powerful image of collective belonging, especially in a world where relationships span the globe and the consequences of how we live extend to many distant and unseen places.

In saying this, I don’t mean to idealize American neighbors and neighborhoods. Contemporary patterns of isolation draw on deep histories of racial segregation and systemic neglect in the United States, lines that have long been drawn between lives that matter and lives that don’t. At the same time, neighborliness has also long been practiced as a more expansive form of conviviality, equipping people to live with the reality of social difference and disagreement...

It may be daunting, the idea of making a common life – in public space, in the pursuit of wellbeing on an imperiled earth, even in the unpredictable span of a conversation – with others unlike ourselves. But we need to find our way back to the communion we may share with those beyond our bounds.

We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again."