good arguments book review

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Review of ‘Good Arguments’ by Bo Seo ‘17 HLS ‘24

“Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard” is the debut book from two-time world champion debater Bo H. Seo ‘17 HLS ‘24. Seo’s entrance into the literary world is an ambitious and engaging read that is part memoir, part compendium on competitive debate, and part call to action. Seo spends the book’s nine chapters tactfully weaving these elements together into a one-of-a-kind nonfiction work that leaves the reader with fascinating insight into his own worldview and personal development, the high-powered world of debating, and subjects as vast as Ancient Greek pedagogy, the emergence of Lincoln–Douglas debate, and Balinese macaques.

The book is divided into two parts: The first is a presentation of the five components of competitive debate and the skills needed for each. The second applies debate to four core areas of life — bad disagreements, relationships, education, and technology — to show how good arguments can improve both society and the reader’s private life. The aim of the book is not to shy away from disagreements but rather to run towards effective ones, as Seo writes that good arguments can lead to good, helpful disagreements.

One of the book’s many highlights is Seo’s commitment to this central goal. Every personal experience and political or cultural event that he includes informs the substance of the many printed charts, mnemonic devices, and other teaching tools found in the book’s pages. These tools are meant to be handy guides to strengthen the reader’s argumentative acumen, focused on delivering actionable and digestible advice rooted in Seo’s experience and logic.

Seo’s life is the novel’s enchanting backdrop, narrating his transformation from a shy and agreeable elementary schooler to collegiate competitive debater and eventual college graduate and retired debater. Seo reminisces on various playground disputes at his elementary school in Seoul, where he saw the value in argument, and the linguistic and cultural misunderstandings that led to further interpersonal conflict upon his family’s move to Australia when he was eight — experiences that made arguments with peers or teachers seem like more trouble than they were worth, as they often led to hostility and isolation. These childhood years that had conditioned Seo not to engage in argument were not at all indicative of what would soon unfold, as he unassumingly began debating and quickly realized that he quite liked it.

As Seo’s debating career progresses and he wins both the World Schools Debating Championships and the World Universities Debating Championships, he continues to present his life as one spent constantly running towards good arguments. His own personal toolkit thrives and expands as he picks up and effectively deploys various written and oral strategies for crafting better arguments, all of which he is eager to share with the reader, demonstrating how he’s applied them in his own life to help us see how we can do so in ours.

While the desire to engage in better arguments may be the main drive to pick up the novel — and Seo certainly delivers — his own words and stories will likely stay with the reader much longer than any one strategy or tool to recall in times of conflict. And that’s not a bad thing; Seo’s own experiences are very much the lifeblood of the novel, telling a powerful story about immigrating to a new country as a small child, remaining calm under pressure at high-level debate tournaments, finding one’s way socially and academically in college and beyond, and coming to terms with the losses and the inevitable conflicts that are incurred throughout.

By lending so much of his own voice to his novel, rather than simply publishing a how-to guide on formulating good arguments, Seo competently leads by example, proving to the reader time and again how the simple choice of intending to engage in a good argument can lead to more productive and courteous disagreement and debate. If a particular strategy of Seo’s sticks with the reader, that’s all the better. But what is more likely is that focusing on one’s intentions and making the active choice to approach future interpersonal and social conflict from an optimistic, “good arguer” vantage point will do wonders in and of itself. That weighty, humanizing impression will likely sustain itself in the hearts and minds of readers long after precise debate tactics are relegated to the subconscious.

The book should be of particular interest to Harvard students and alumni. Seo has a knack for vivid, grounded thick description that prefers accurate and full portrayals of his undergraduate days to overstated glorification. Even better, his propensity for name-dropping adds a layer of unanticipated relatability to his tales, with the likes of Grendel’s Den, the “twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Massachusetts Avenue,” and the now-defunct Border Café cited as the settings of many of his — and our own — quotidian yet formative collegiate experiences.

Seo’s unwavering commitment to doing the best with what he had throughout his debate career is — to paraphrase anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff — no small potatoes when looking back at one’s life’s work. This message alone makes Seo’s memoir an illuminating read for people of all ages hoping to find some lessons and inspiration within his wonderfully introspective biography. The prospect of learning how to have better arguments in the process? That — to paraphrase Seo — is just pure gravy.

—Staff writer Carmine J. Passarella can be reached at [email protected]

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GOOD ARGUMENTS

How debate teaches us to listen and be heard.

by Bo Seo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2022

A useful reflection on how to disagree, especially important in toxic times.

A shy, conflict-averse student finds his voice in debate.

Seo, who was born in Korea and moved with his family to Australia when he was 8, makes an engaging book debut with a combination memoir and debating guide. A two-time world champion debater, the author has also coached two winning teams: the Australian Schools Debating Team and the Harvard College Debating Union. Drawing on his experiences, he offers his book as a tool kit for having productive arguments. “We should disagree,” he believes, “in such a way that the outcome of having the disagreement is better than not having it at all.” Seo presents his key components of competitive debate: identifying the topic, mounting an argument, fashioning a rebuttal, and using rhetoric and silence to underscore one’s points. In addition, he looks at ways that debate principles apply to real-life situations: relationships with family and friends, bad disagreements, education, and technology. Some topics that Seo debated in classes and competitions have included the moral justification of ecotage, the media’s right to intrude into the private lives of public figures, and the admission of Turkey into the European Union. Analyzing the debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump led him to consider the debate styles of bullies: the dodger, the twister, the wrangler, the liar, and the brawler. He realized that a debate, “hijacked” by a bully and difficult to deflect, “could be a harmful force in the world.” As a journalist in Sydney, Seo covered the encounter between a champion debater and Project Debater, an artificial intelligence system with “a superhuman ability to marshal evidence.” Evidence, he saw, was not the only factor in convincing an audience. The author advocates teaching debate principles as part of a well-founded civic education: “Good arguments generate new ideas and strengthen relationships. An education in debate makes people more immune to the slick manipulations of political opportunists.”

Pub Date: June 7, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-29951-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022

EDUCATION | PSYCHOLOGY | BUSINESS | SELF-HELP | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | GENERAL BUSINESS

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by Bo Seo ; illustrated by Sung-hwa Kwak

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GREENLIGHTS

by Matthew McConaughey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2020

A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.

All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.

“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright —of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused , to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | SELF-HELP | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Matthew McConaughey illustrated by Renée Kurilla

CALL ME ANNE

by Anne Heche ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2023

A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.

The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.

Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.

Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023

ISBN: 9781627783316

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Viva Editions

Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP

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Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard

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Book Review: Good Arguments is an educational look into the art of debating well

• December 18, 2022
• Good Arguments
• Scribner Australia

If anyone knows how to argue with finesse it is Bo Seo. The journalist and author is a two-time winner of the Debating World Championships and a former debate coach. In his debut book, Good Arguments , he distills many of the lessons he learnt over the years so that we may know how to debate with more panache.

Good Arguments  straddles the lines between several genres. On the one hand, readers receive a how-to guide to debating and listening. On the other, we get Seo’s memoir. Readers will likely gravitate to one side more than the other.

Seo’s story is an interesting one. He was born in South Korea, with his parents uprooting him and the family to migrate to Australia when he was eight. Initially he was very quiet and content to avoid conflict at all costs. But, once he started school debating, he was hooked and came to appreciate the true form of this art.

The lessons that are detailed in this book seem more prescient the ever in our world of fake news and spin. Seo’s writing as he recounts his years of competitions is entertaining and relatable. Also included in the book is some commentary and analysis, including a deconstruction of the presidential campaign debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This chapter, in particular, is an insightful examination of the tactics employed by bullies and how they can derail proceedings.

In this book, Seo also examines other points from history, such as Malcolm X’s story and work as an orator. The rise of technology and Artificial Intelligence’s growing capabilities to argue well are also examined. Seo packs a lot into this book, not least some useful tools for having good arguments.

Good Arguments is a book that could have made for dry reading. But, instead Seo injects the proceedings with the right amount of colour and insights to really engage readers. This book is one that should be studied at schools as our increasingly virtual lives have made discourse a very one-sided affair. As we know, there is often so much more to the story and Good Arguments embodies this by making a case and doing it well.

THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)

Bo Seo’s Good Arguments is available now from Scribner Australia. Grab yourself a copy from Booktopia HERE .

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Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard

Two-time world champion debater and   former   coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion

When Bo Seo was 8 years old, he and his family migrated from Korea to Australia. At the time, he did not speak English, and, unsurprisingly, struggled at school. But, then, in fifth grade, something happened to change his life: he discovered competitive debate. Immediately, he was hooked. It turned out, perhaps counterintuitively, that debating was the perfect activity for someone shy and unsure of himself. It became a way for Bo not only to find his voice, but to excel socially and academically. And he’s not the only one. Far from it: presidents, Supreme Court justices, and CEOs are all disproportionally debaters. This is hardly a coincidence. By tracing his own journey from immigrant kid to world champion, Seo shows how the skills of debating—information gathering, truth finding, lucidity, organization, and persuasion—are often the cornerstone of successful careers and happy lives. Drawing insights from its strategies, structure, and history, Seo teaches readers the skills of competitive debate, and in doing so shows how they can improve their communication with friends, family, and colleagues alike. He takes readers on a thrilling intellectual adventure into the eccentric and brilliant subculture of competitive debate, touching on everything from the radical politics of Malcom X to Artificial Intelligence. Seo proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, far from being a source of conflict, good-faith debate can enrich our daily lives. Indeed, these good arguments are essential to a flourishing democracy, and are more important than ever at time when bad faith is all around, and our democracy seems so imperiled.

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Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard Hardcover – June 7 2022

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Press
• Publication date June 7 2022
• Dimensions 15.88 x 2.97 x 23.6 cm
• ISBN-10 0593299515
• ISBN-13 978-0593299517
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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

How to find the debate

On a Monday morning in January 2007, a couple of months after my graduation from elementary school, the green gates at the entrance to Barker College served as a portal to a new world. For me and the other twelve-year-olds on the first day of middle school, the contrast between where we had been and where we were now felt stark. My former classmates had galumphed around the playground in loose interpretations of the school uniform, but the students on this campus, in their starched white shirts, seemed to be facsimiles of the children on the admissions brochures. Whereas the grounds at the Bush School had sprawled and tangled, the manicured campus of this all-boys middle school intimated an order of things-one I had good reason to learn, and fast.

By lunchtime, I had realized this would be no easy feat. In a school with a couple thousand kids, it made less sense to speak of one order than of multiple. The classroom conformed to one set of expectations-students referred to teachers as "sir" and "miss" and politely raised their hands to speak-while outside, on the playground, jungle rules prevailed. One carried on a certain way in the light-filled atrium of the music building and another way in the mildewy locker rooms next to the gymnasium. The place was a kaleidoscope of expectations.

Over my three and a half years in Australia, I had grown into a fine code-switcher. I had learned to toggle between the intimate language of home and the cheerful, shallow vernacular that school seemed to reward. However, the problem at Barker was that its rules and codes were illegible to me. What jokes were appropriate and when? How much should one reveal about oneself and to whom? I gleaned answers to these questions only by tripping over them.

In these first weeks of school, I never regressed to silence, but I found my comforts where I could. I fell in with a group of laconic, easygoing Aussie kids named-for neat alliterative effect-Jim, Jon, and Jake. Whereas the most ambitious kids in our class shook and fizzed and used every conversation to prove their virtues, the Js seemed to take things in their stride. In the afternoons, we shared a box of hot chips from the kebab shop-a staple of Australian takeout food-and not more than a handful of words.

What I never told them was that I had come to the school with a goal of my own: to join the debate team. Since my first competitive round in the fifth grade, I'd had only fleeting opportunities to revisit the activity. But I knew that the culture of debate was well-entrenched in Sydney's middle and high schools, most of whom maintained a team that competed, weekly, in a league. Debate occupied an odd place in the life of these schools. Like chess or Quiz Bowl, it provided a competitive outlet for unathletic kids but, unlike these other indoor activities, enjoyed a certain credibility on account of the reputation that its alums went on to do big things.

At Barker, anyone could attend debate training on Wednesday afternoons, but only one team of four students in each year group could represent the school at our local league on Friday evenings. To join the team, one had to audition. Ahead of trials in the first week of February, I sussed out the competition-"So this debate thing . . . ?"-but few people seemed interested. Perhaps this was going to be a piece of cake, I thought. Thank goodness for sports and other distractions.

But I was mistaken: the first round of trials, set to begin at four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, attracted more than thirty kids. The white-paneled room on the top floor of the English building felt like the inside of a refrigerator; as the students arrived, alone or in pairs, dressed for the outside heat, they shuddered. Presiding over the auditions was the year coordinator, Miss Tillman, a history teacher with a stoic air.

Miss Tillman explained that we would not do a full debate for the audition. Instead, each student would be given a topic, a side (affirmative or negative), and thirty minutes in which to write a speech that covered two arguments for their position. In elementary school, we had prepared our cases over the span of weeks, often with the aid of teachers and the internet, but now we had to go solo against a strict time limit. "This audition format won't show me and the other judges everything," Miss Tillman said, "but it should reveal your . . . responsiveness."

In the waiting room, I stumbled on another discovery: some trialists seemed confident about their chances. The students who had attended Barker since the third grade made it known in the subtle way of twelve-year-olds that they had been successful debaters on the junior circuit and that they expected to continue their run. "We were successful on the junior circuit and expect to continue our run," one of the trialists said, before scanning the room for signs of comprehension.

Out of nowhere, I heard Miss Tillman call my name. I wondered whether she would give me some additional instructions or words of encouragement. Instead, she handed me a white envelope that contained a scrap of paper with a few handwritten words: "That we should have compulsory military service. Affirmative."

After I read that last word, things began to move fast. Everything before the envelope had been potential energy-a mind in search of an object, tension in need of release-but now the setting, a windowless nook next to the main waiting room, crackled with consequence. I found the experience of prep to be oddly liberating. The topic transported me to a new environment and assigned me a new identity. I went from being a twelve-year-old, uncertain of his beliefs and others' expectations of him, to an advocate in some chamber of deliberation.

The fact that I had no say in what I had to argue added, paradoxically, to this sense of freedom. I felt at ease to flirt with ideas, unencumbered by expectations of consistency or deep conviction (I didn't choose the side), and to explore every dark corner of contentious issues (I didn't choose the topic). In debate, the other word for topic was motion and, for these thirty minutes, that was exactly what I experienced.

Then, as Miss Tillman knocked on the door, I fell down to earth. In the audition room, a panel of three teachers sat behind a long desk. One of them, a rotund biology teacher whom I had met during orientation, managed a sympathetic look, but the others looked ashen-faced, worn down by the waves of children.

I found my place at the center of the room and focused my gaze in the gap between two panelists' faces-an ersatz form of eye contact that I hoped would pass for engagement. Then I began: "Everyone has a duty to ensure a country's safety. When we fulfill that duty through national service, we get more united societies, better armies, and happier lives." The combination of nerves and an eagerness to get noticed increased, with each word, my pitch and volume. I reached a near shout and spent the next minute adjusting down.

My speech had two points: that every citizen had a responsibility to serve and that this would result in a safer nation. In truth, the material resembled less a proper debate speech (whatever that was) than a rambling and passionate plea. "Look in your hearts and ask what you owe your fellow citizens," I implored in one of the more cringeworthy moments. However, I felt that some of my points on the effect of mandatory military service on national security had landed with the judges. As I spoke about the importance of giving political leaders a more direct stake in the fate of military operations, one of the exhausted judges seemed to briefly rouse from her stupor. The other speakers in my time slot were good but not unimaginably so. I felt I had a shot.

The next day at school, shortly after the start of recess, a notice appeared on the bulletin board near the canteen: debating team-year seven. Mine was the last name on the list, above the instruction to attend the first training session with the coach at four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon. Like the topic itself, the notice felt like a ticket made out to someplace new.

That the seventh-grade coach, a lanky college student named Simon, had been one of the most successful debaters of his year group at Barker seemed an improbable fact about him. Standing at the front of the room, Simon was the shade of pomegranate seeds-wine-dark and uneven. The edges of his voice crackled with self-doubt.

It was 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, nearly one week after the trials, and around a dozen students had gathered in the same air-conditioned room where auditions had been held. The four of us who had been selected for the team-Stuart, Max, Nathan, and I-sat near one another but exchanged little more than pleasantries. Of the group, I gravitated toward Nathan, a sensitive kid who put me in the mind of a naturalist. None of us acknowledged the chilling fact that only two weeks remained until the start of the league.

Then the session began and I witnessed a transformation. As Simon stood at the whiteboard and spoke about debate, he seemed to become a different person. Some internal force filled out his posture and rounded out his words. The color remained in his face but now took on a more vital, reddish hue. He uncapped a marker, then, turning to the board, wrote one word: topic.

"Cast your mind back to the last argument you had," Simon said. "Recall as much as you possibly can about the encounter: the setting at the particular time of day, the specific arguments, claims, and even insults.

"Now answer this question: What was the disagreement about?"

I thought about a series of tiffs with an old friend from the Bush School who now attended a middle school in a distant part of the city. The conversations were vivid in my mind, but I found Simon's question hard to answer. For some arguments, I could not remember the instigating dispute at all. As with bad dreams, the contents disappeared even as their effects lingered. For others, I could remember too much. These disagreements began with some trivial dispute and accumulated more mass-other disputes, perceived slights, past baggage-any one of which could be described as what the arguments were about.

"This is a problem. If you don't know the subject of the argument, how can you decide what or what not to say, which points to pursue or let go, and whether you want to have the argument at all?"

Simon referred to research from sociologists and linguists that posited that people are better at "talking topically" than actually staying on topic. That is, we give the impression of being relevant-often through a series of verbal cues such as "on that point"-while subtly changing the subject. Since most of us enjoy breezy, free-flowing conversation, we rarely take the time to consciously reflect on what we are talking about. "So we tend to drift, covering lots of ground but moving further from resolution," Simon said.

"However, debaters do the opposite. Every round begins with a topic. That's the first thing we debaters write-on our legal pads, on the whiteboard in the prep room. Consider it an act of naming: we name our disagreement and, with it, the purpose for our gathering."

Over the next two hours, Simon taught us more about topics than I had imagined possible-or healthy.

According to Simon, the topic is a statement of the main point on which two or more people disagree:

That Jane is an unreliable friend.

That the government should not bail out the big banks.

An easy test for whether a proposition is an appropriate topic is to write it in the negative form:

Both sides of the disagreement should be able to say that the statements fairly describe what they and their opponents believe.

The defining characteristic of a debate topic was that it allowed for two sides. So a general subject area such as "the economy" or "health care" could not be one because it did not identify the particular debate in question. Nor could a topic be a purely subjective opinion, such as "I am cold," since the other person could not argue that "no, you are not cold."

Broadly speaking, people disagreed about three sorts of things-facts, judgments, prescriptions-and each one gave rise to its own type of debate.

Factual disagreements center on claims about the way things are. They take the form "X is Y," where both X and Y are empirically observable features of the world.

Lagos is a megacity.

The crime rate in Paris was lower in 2014 than in 2016.

Normative disagreements concern our subjective judgments about the world-the way things are or ought to be, in our view. They take the form "A should be considered B" or "We have good reason to believe that A is B."

Lying is (should be considered) immoral.

(We have reason to believe that) tomorrow will be better.

Prescriptive disagreements relate to what we should do. These usually take the form "C should D," where C is the actor and D is an action.

Our family should get a gym membership.

The government should not impose limits on freedom of speech.

I found all this plenty interesting, but as the training session drew to a close, I also felt pangs of disappointment. Instead of secret strategies and killer moves, we had been given taxonomies; rather than sharpening our skills, we had taken a bunch of notes. I wondered whether competitive debate, like other high-skill games such as chess, tended toward esoterica until it could no longer sustain an analogy to real life.

However, later that same night, I stumbled on a reason to revisit my concern.

For the first couple of years of our life in Australia, my parents had seldom argued with each other or with me. Disagreements of opinion abounded, but Mum and Dad took the view that fighting about them was an indulgence we could not afford, not while so much work lay ahead of us. Though we had started to argue more openly in the past year or so, we still tended to elide points of conflict. This worked fine most of the time, but when one of us snapped, the resulting arguments were tangled and endless.

At this time, in the spring of 2007, almost four years after our arrival in Sydney, our family had begun to consider naturalizing as Australian citizens. In some respects, this was a bureaucratic decision that came down to such secular concerns as taxation. However, for my dad, the choice took on symbolic magnitude. Dad had been the consistent voice in our family for the importance of maintaining our cultural roots and, for him, the word citizenship carried real weight.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (June 7 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593299515
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593299517
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 kg
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 2.97 x 23.6 cm
• #88 in Educator Biographies (Books)
• #399 in Presentation Skills (Books)
• #789 in Business Communications (Books)

About the author

Bo Seo is a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the Australian national debating team and the Harvard College Debating Union. One of the most recognized figures in the global debate community, he has won both the World Schools Debating Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship. Bo has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, and many other publications. He has worked as a national reporter for the Australian Financial Review and has been a regular panelist on the prime time Australian debate program, The Drum. Bo graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University and received a master’s degree in public policy from Tsinghua University. He is currently a student at Harvard Law School.

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The Books That Taught a Debate Champion How to Argue

Through reading, I learned that disagreement can be a source of good, not ill, even in our polarized age.

Less than a year after I read my first book in English, The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl, I joined my elementary school’s debate team. I was a fifth grader and a recent immigrant to Australia, and the two milestones were closely related. As the language and culture of my new home became legible to me, I began to desire more than comprehension. I wanted to talk back and, in turn, be heard.

I soon learned that reading served an urgent purpose in debate. Because the aim of the activity was to out-argue the other side, debaters had to stockpile information. My strategic Wikipedia searches grew, over time, into a homemade index of The Economist and reading lists of academic texts. The success that followed fixed the association in my mind: In debate, one read to win.

For 15 years, I debated. I won two world championships and coached the Australian and Harvard teams. In that time, I almost always carried a book, taking from it new ideas and inflections of voice, anything to give me an edge.

Nowadays, disagreement is out of fashion. It is seen as the root of our personal and political troubles. Debate, in making a sport out of argument, seems at once a trivial pursuit and a serious impediment to the kinds of conversation we want to cultivate. But in my first book, Good Arguments , I propose that the opposite is true. Students may train to win every disagreement, but they soon learn that this is impossible. Even the best lose most of the competitions they attend. What one can do is disagree better—be more convincing and tenacious, and argue in a manner that keeps others willing to come back for another round. In the end, the prize for all that training and effort is a good conversation.

Thinking back on reading in preparation for competitions, I don’t focus on individual titles; instead, I recall the small library they form in my brain. There, books jostle against one another for prominence. Some are strident takedowns of the others. The chattering is cacophonous, but the internal dissent enlarges the collection rather than reduces it. All of the books fit on the same shelf.

I believe that arguments can be a source of good, and not ill, in our polarized age . Here are the books that show me why—and how.

Thinking in an Emergency , by Elaine Scarry

Scarry, one of my English professors at Harvard, is the rare scholar who can change how you move through the world. She has made a career of bringing language to the ineffable ends of human experience: pain and beauty. In Thinking in an Emergency , she places deliberation at the core of a democratic response to emergencies including natural disasters and nuclear war. Scarry argues that debate, both real-time and prospective, need not hinder action and can instead secure the resolve and coordination needed for rapid response. She warns against leaders who invoke catastrophes to demand that their populations stop thinking. In this era of calamities, natural and man-made, Scarry’s wisdom is essential: “Whatever happens, keep talking.”

The Topeka School , by Ben Lerner

Every debater learns to spot what some refer to as “must-hit” arguments that, left unaddressed, can sink his or her case. The poet and novelist Ben Lerner’s treatment of the sport in this moody bildungsroman is a must-hit. Lerner, a former debate champion, portrays its participants as hostile, bullying, mendacious, glib, annoying, and practiced in a dark art. He turns the spread—a quirk of some American debate formats, where speakers speed through roughly 350 to 500 words a minute—into a potent symbol for speech intended to overwhelm, “disclosure … designed to conceal.” The book forms the centerpiece of the anti-debate canon, along with Sally Rooney’s wry 2015 reflection on the activity as “ritualized, abstract interpersonal aggression” in the Dublin Review . This canon is crucial, as it reminds us that the art derives its potency from mercurial elements—among them contest and performance—that must be carefully managed. As with any incisive critique, I found myself nodding along even as I prepared my rebuttal.

Tell I t to the World: An Indigenous Memoir , by Stan Grant

Grant, an Australian journalist, argues that progress lies in dialectic: One point of view clashes against another, giving rise to a third way that combines elements of both rather than defaulting to either one. In his memoir, Grant makes the point with grace, weaving in his personal history as an Indigenous man who also has European ancestors. His struggle for self-definition mirrors the journey of a nation to chart a course between the denial of history and the surrender to it. Grant’s voice is wounded and fatigued, but it carries the spirit of conversation: “I love more easily than I can forgive. So we must learn who we are, and see ourselves as if for the first time.” The original title in Australia, Talking to My Country , better captures that sense.

Read: The famous Baldwin-Buckley debate still matters today

The Autobiography of Malcolm X , by Malcolm X and Alex Haley

Malcolm X learned to debate as a 20-something in what was then called Norfolk Prison Colony, a state prison founded on reformist ideals that fielded debate teams against local colleges such as Boston University. In his memoir, X describes the experience of finding one’s voice and communing with an audience as a revelation: “I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been … once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” For most people, debate is a pastime of school and university years. This memoir shows that one can make a career and a life from its lessons in fierce, courageous, and resolute disagreement.

Crowds and Power , by Elias Canetti

This strange study from 1960 comprises field notes on the appearance, characteristics, and behaviors of crowds. It mines the psychology of such groups—“one of the striking traits of the inner life of a crowd is the feeling of being persecuted”—and documents their behaviors: “The crowd needs a direction. It is in movement and it moves towards a goal.” For Canetti, a Jewish intellectual displaced by the rise of Nazi Germany two decades prior to the text’s publication, the interest in crowds is more than aesthetic—it’s a survival tactic. Debate can negate groupthink by restoring the primacy of reason and fostering individual encounters between two people. For it to succeed, we have to understand the allure of crowds. I do not know a more vital resource for understanding “pack mentality” and its susceptibility to authoritarian rule.

Read: Five features of better arguments

A Small Place , by Jamaica Kincaid

When I read, as a freshman in college, Kincaid’s second-person address to a visitor to the island of Antigua—“you are on your holiday; you are a tourist”—I knew I had been transformed. This slim book on the legacies of colonialism has been described variously as a jeremiad and a mock travel guide. For me, it is a masterpiece of rhetoric—one that grips the audience’s attention through sheer craft. The author’s language is biblical in its depth and passion. She demands nothing less than the expansion of the public conversation to accommodate the language, experience, and thought of a population repressed through violence. The best debate speeches tend to do the same: They pronounce a truth and ask us, the listeners, to catch up.

When Should Law Forgive ? , by Martha Minow

One question I struggle with in Good Arguments is when we should stop debating. Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School, provides here a model of humane consideration on the limits of the adversarial ethic. Hers is an argument for accommodating forgiveness—the “letting go of justified grievances”—in the legal system. She builds the book as one would a spacious house, each area of the law—juvenile justice, debt, amnesties and pardons—a separate chapter in which readers are invited to stay and reflect awhile. Martha Nussbaum is illuminating on related topics in her critique of anger in Anger and Forgiveness , which elicited rebuttal from Myisha Cherry in The Case for Rage , an argument for the emotion’s usefulness in conditions of resistance. The need to balance dispute and conciliation, accountability and grace, cannot be transcended, only better managed.

Think Again: The Power o f Knowing What You Don’t Know , by Adam Grant

I had originally intended my book to be a short manual written for competitive debaters, but reading Grant, the Wharton professor and author, changed my ambition. In his latest work, dedicated to the power of rethinking one’s beliefs to arrive closer to the truth, he analyzes the arguments between Harish Natarajan, a champion debater, and IBM’s artificial-intelligence system Project Debater. He draws from the matchup and from other professionals a series of lessons for arguing more persuasively in everyday situations. One piece of advice comes from Natarajan: Rebut the strongest, and not the weakest, version of an opposing argument; steel man, don’t straw man. The lessons—whether pressure-testing ideas or asking better questions—are taut and memorable, and demand that readers reconsider their priors.

Read: Changing your mind can make you less anxious

From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia , by Pankaj Mishra

Mishra tells a rich and erudite story that highlights the contributions of three intellectuals—Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao, and Rabindranath Tagore—to the rise of modern Asia. Each of them responded to the same basic challenge—Western imperialism—but their thinking refracted through the vagaries of personal temperament and circumstance. (The cosmopolitan Bengali poet, Tagore, also stars in Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian , a history of pluralism in Indian politics and culture that reads as an ode to its “long tradition of public arguments.”) In their resulting array of arguments, written and spoken, Mishra identifies the development of ideas that continue to shape the world, among them pan-Islamism and Chinese nationalism. Any given conflict lasts only a short while, but it can echo through the generations.

Checkout 19 , by Claire-Louise Bennett

For years, I have been on the lookout for a book that captures the moment when a person finds his or her voice for the first time. Bennett’s novel is that title. In it, a working-class girl explores the ever-shifting boundaries of her mind, often in conversation with what she’s reading. Her voice is incantatory, obsessive: “Just one book. Yes. And in fact as far as we were concerned nobody else had this book apart from us. Nobody. Nobody. Not a single soul,” she thinks. The narrator puts forward ideas, then revises them; each iterative step lays the path for new discoveries and disclosures. A person’s journey toward self-knowledge, and the ability to share that knowledge, is a common interest of authors and debaters. It enables the conversation to continue, enriched at each turn by the inclusion of another voice.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Good Arguments – Review

An argument is the process of giving a systematic account of reasons in support of a claim or belief.

That type of argument would seem to be quite useful.

Good Arguments is a book on logic. That might seem boring to many, but this book is far from boring. I have read a number of books on logic and this is one of the best. The authors explain logic in a way that is both clear and interesting.

Why is this book important?

Although the internet has made things easier in terms of communication, much of it is filled with bad arguments. People assert opinions as facts, and even if they provide evidence, the evidence is often less than adequate.

If someone has something good to say, they must be careful in communicating that idea in a convincing way. That is where this book comes in. Whether we are communicating through writing or public speaking, we need to be able to assemble and express a good argument.

I’m active in the area of apologetics. While this book is not focused on apologetics, many of the principles presented in this book are applicable to the area of apologetics. This is a book that I expect to read a number of times.

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Summary: Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard by Bo Seo

By: Author Nina Norman

Posted on Last updated: October 5, 2023

Home » Summary: Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard by Bo Seo

Good Arguments (2022) is one part memoir, one part guide to the art of speaking. It introduces us to the thrilling and eccentric subculture of competitive debate and distills its secrets into timeless principles for effective communication. If we can only learn to disagree better, it argues, we can improve our relationships and revitalize our democracies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: get over your fear of conflict and learn how to disagree productively, bo seo’s journey, how to find the disagreement, how to make an argument, how to refute a point, how to sound persuasive, about the author.

The spirit of free and open debate in Western democracies today is under threat. It’s not that we lack things to disagree about. It’s just that we seem to be forgetting how to disagree well.

Perhaps the reason for this is that the values that make good-faith debate possible – like mutual trust and respect – are at an all-time low. They’ve been steadily eroded by a toxic mix of polarized politics, conflicting ideologies, and misinformation.

And, as a result, the quality of public discourse has taken a nosedive. Whether it’s an argument with a stranger on Twitter or a heated discussion with a relative at dinner, the exchange is often so bitter and hostile that it resembles more of a shouting contest than an actual conversation. On top of that, many people avoid participating altogether out of fear of getting caught in the crossfire.

But avoiding conflict out of fear isn’t going to heal social division. What we need to learn is how to approach our disagreements in a more constructive way. According to author and debate champion Bo Seo, the key lies in competitive debate.

He argues that if we only approach our disagreements with the same skill and respect that competitive debaters do, disagreement can actually be a force for social connection rather than a wedge driving us apart.

This summary to Bo Seo’s Good Arguments translates the wisdom of competitive debate so you can learn to disagree more productively. You’ll discover some of the core principles of debate – as well as which exercises professional debaters use to improve the way they think and speak.

Before we begin, we have to introduce the star of the show.

Bo Seo was born in South Korea. But when Seo was just eight years old, his parents made the risky decision to uproot their lives; in search of greener pastures, they moved the family to Australia.

At this point Seo spoke no English – and, as one might expect, he struggled to find his place in his new home. At school, unable to communicate with his peers, or even understand his homework, Seo receded into himself and eventually gave up speaking altogether. He learned that to get by in this world, it was easier just to keep quiet and do as he was told.

For several lonely years, Seo was your typical wallflower. He was never loud; he never asserted himself. He just kept his head down and studied, slowly getting a grip on the nasal Aussie English. But when he was in fifth grade, something happened that would change his life forever: his teacher invited him to take part in a debate competition.

Competitive debate is like a formal game in which two rival teams participate in a verbal battle in order to persuade judges to join their side on some issue. It’s a sport that thrives in schools and universities around the globe, and a surprising number of presidents, CEOs, and civil rights leaders have competed.

The rules are pretty simple. The opposing teams are assigned a motion – the topic of the debate – 15 minutes to one hour beforehand so they have time to prepare. After that, the debate begins. Each team takes turns speaking in front of the judges for about five minutes. Once the debate is over, the team that’s spoken most convincingly is declared the winner.

This is the world Seo had stumbled into. In his first-ever debate, he was asked to defend the motion, “All zoos should be banned.” On that stage, between the fearful walk up to the podium and the thrill of unbroken applause at the end, something happened to Seo – he found his voice.

Over the course of the next decade, Seo entered one competition after another, gradually honing his skill and rising in the rankings. He didn’t just excel at debating either. It turns out that the skills he was learning in debate – logical thinking, composition, public speaking – all helped him to excel in his social and academic life as well.

Eventually, his passion for debate carried him to places he never dreamed possible. First, he won the World High School Championship, and then he went on to study at Harvard, where he led the team to yet another victory at the World University Championship.

Needless to say, competitive debate transformed Seo’s life for the better. Not only did it expose Seo to a mind-boggling range of ideas in everything from science and history to politics and philosophy; more importantly, it gave him a reason to care about learning.

For Seo, debate was a powerful tool in his continued education – and it can be for you too. So, let’s shift gear and turn to the principles of good debate.

The first thing any budding debater has to learn is how to spot the disagreement in an argument. After all, how are you supposed to know what to say if you don’t even know what the subject of the argument is?

Yet you’d be surprised by how many people run into arguments headfirst without thinking about this question. It’s no wonder so many conflicts are unproductive.

Try it yourself. Think back to the last argument you had. It doesn’t matter who it was with – just try to recall what was said and what sparked it. Then answer this question: What was the disagreement? There’s an important distinction here. You’re not asking what the argument was about. What did you actually disagree on?

If you can’t put your finger on the disagreement, it’s possible there may not have been one to begin with. Like bad dreams, petty arguments are forgotten just as quickly as they come.

So that’s the first thing a debater does. Armed with a pen and paper, debaters write down the disagreement. And they don’t bother arguing unless there’s really something to argue about!

Now, broadly speaking, there are three types of things that people disagree about – facts, judgments, and prescriptions. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Facts are claims about the way things are. For example, it’s a fact that Jakarta is a megacity. And it’s also a fact that the boiling point of water is 100°C, or 212°F. On the face of it, facts may seem impeachable. But given that humans are always working with limited knowledge and evidence, there’s typically room to argue that your opponent has got their facts wrong.

Judgments are a little different from facts in that they involve subjective opinion. Statements like “Berlin is dangerous” and “lying is wrong” are examples of judgments. Disputing judgments usually involves disputing the facts or assumptions on which they’re based.

Finally, there are prescriptions. These are judgments about how we ought to act. Think about those “should” statements – like “you should go to the gym” or “the government shouldn’t limit free speech.” Disagreements about prescriptions usually center on the likely consequences of the action.

So, those are the three types of disagreements. Unfortunately, as you’ve probably noticed, life is rarely neat and tidy. In real-world arguments, we usually disagree about all of these things at the same time. And, to make matters worse, we’re often forced to untangle the different threads of a disagreement mid-argument.

To make our job a little easier, we can repurpose a technique from competitive debate called topic analysis. Debaters use this technique to draw out the different layers of disagreement in a topic. For example, the topic could be “parents should not send their children to private school.”

First, you would write the topic down, and then you’d draw a circle around all the contentious words in the sentence – everything you could have a disagreement about.

At first glance, the disagreement here may seem straightforward. This is clearly a prescriptive disagreement about whether one should or should not send their children to private school. So the word you would circle is “send.”

But take a closer look, and it turns out there are other parts of the sentence you can disagree about too. If you’d like, pause and have a think.

You could, for example, circle the words “private school” because you might have factual disagreements about the quality of private schools – or even what counts as a private school. You might circle the word “should” because you disagree about the value of private schools or the obligations of parents toward them. You might even circle “children” because you can disagree about what children’s needs and wishes are.

So what appeared at first to be a purely prescriptive statement about what parents should do turned out to contain a bundle of assumptions about facts and judgments as well. The failure to recognize the plural nature of arguments often causes people to talk past each other as they argue over different things.

You can utilize topic analysis in your personal and professional disputes. It’ll help you identify the most important disagreements in any argument, thereby making it more focused and manageable.

Once you’ve identified the disagreement, the next step is to argue your case.

In the world of competitive debate, argument reigns supreme. You simply can’t win without it. This makes competitive debate rather exceptional in our culture. In most other areas of life, arguments tend to decline in value. Ours is a culture of images, not arguments.

Maybe you’re not convinced. Let’s take the world of commerce, for example. Pictures of abs and cleavage can persuade us of a lot – anything from buying sodas to signing up for a gym membership. And even in politics, the traditional home of debate, politicians try their best to avoid making arguments; they prefer the power of the photo op.

Now consider this. In the workplace, we’re expected to follow instructions and not argue or question them. It’s no wonder many people have never learned – or have forgotten – how to construct a proper argument.

Let’s start with what an argument isn’t. An argument is not a slogan or a pep talk, nor is it a list of facts or an assertion of your feelings. It’s not a description or an explanation. And it’s definitely not raising your voice louder. So, what is it then?

An argument is a conclusion that you’ve arrived at logically from a set of premises, supported by evidence.

OK, to unpack this jargon a little, there are basically two things that every argument has to prove: First, that the claims it makes are true. And second, that they support the conclusion. Let’s look at an example.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a vegetarian who wants to convince a meat-eater to give up eating meat. “You should give up meat” is essentially the conclusion you’re trying to sell.

So, to construct an argument, write the conclusion, add the word “because” next to it, and then fill in the blank. What you write after this “because” is the main claim of the argument that you’ll have to prove.

For instance, you might write, “We should give up meat because modern industrial farming causes great suffering to animals.”

Next, you’ll need to establish the truth of your main claim by supplying evidence, such as further facts and information.

You might point to the conditions in which animals on factory farms live; you could say they live in extreme confinement and unhygienic squalor. Or you might point to their behavior, such as signs of abnormal aggression and distress. Evidence takes many forms, so there are a lot of possibilities here.

Once you’ve sufficiently justified the truth of your main claim, is your job done? Not quite. You still need to explain why the main claim supports your conclusion that people should stop eating meat.

This last part of an argument is the one that’s most often forgotten. In the rush to pile on reasons and evidence for the main claim, people often forget to explain why it all matters. A meat-eater might accept everything you’ve said about the conditions of animals on factory farms, and yet still shrug their shoulders. And they have a point – so far it isn’t clear why anyone should stop eating meat, as opposed to, say, eating meat less often or being a bit more selective about the meat we buy.

So you need to make the connection explicit. For example, you could argue that not eating meat is the strongest action you can do as a consumer to pressure the meat industry to change its ways. And then you can support this claim with further evidence.

And that’s an argument! It’s not as simple as it first sounded, is it? It requires careful structuring and logical progression. And it helps to have a good memory for facts and details. Try writing arguments down. The more you practice putting arguments together on paper, the easier it’ll be to make them when you’re speaking.

Now, unless you’re having an argument with yourself – which is fine – you’re not going to be the only person making arguments in a debate. Your opponent might also be making some good points. That means the next skill you need to get good at is rebuttal.

As we’ve just discovered, every argument has to prove two things: that the claims it makes are true, and that they support the conclusion. To refute an argument, then, you simply need to do the opposite. You need to either show that the claims your opponent is making are not true – or, that even if they are true, they don’t support their conclusion.

Let’s look at another example. This one’s a little less serious. Say your partner is trying to convince you to buy a new car because “the old hatchback you’re driving just isn’t fashionable anymore!” You, on the other hand, are quite fond of your old clunker, and you don’t feel like forking over the money for a new one. You need to rebut her point – so, what do you say?

First, you could target the truth of her claim, in which case you have several options. You could either argue straight up that her claim is factually incorrect: “No, people are buying more hatchbacks today than ever before, and I can prove it!”

Alternatively, you could argue that her view lacks evidence. You could say, “You haven’t given me any reason to believe that fashions are changing.” Or, if she does have evidence, you could argue that it’s inconclusive: “It’s true that fewer people in our neighborhood drive hatchbacks, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect a national trend.”

Your other option is to accept that your partner’s claim is true – but to argue that it doesn’t support the conclusion that you should buy a new car. Here you have two more options. You can either argue that it’s not important at all: “Yes, I know it’s not fashionable, but I don’t care what other people think.” Or you could argue that the argument is outweighed by other factors: “Yes, I would prefer to drive a fashionable car, but I also have to think about the money.”

Hopefully, this exercise has given you a sense of just how many directions you can go in for pushing back against another person’s arguments. Of course, not all arguments are going to be so easy to refute.

You can avoid a lot of hemming and hawing if you show up to an argument prepared. The real world doesn’t always afford us time to prepare. But if you do know you have an argument coming up, try a debate prep technique called Side Switch.

Side Switch involves stepping into your opponent’s shoes to try and guess what they’re going to say. For five minutes, really try to set your own convictions aside and consider the debate from their perspective. Then brainstorm as many arguments as you can in favor of their view. When that’s done, all that’s left is to come up with a rebuttal for each one of these arguments. That way, you’ll know exactly what to say if they raise this point in real life.

The purpose of Side Switch is to help us preempt our opponent’s lines of attack. But the effect of this imaginative exercise is often that we see our opponent’s side more clearly. Our own convictions become unsettled, and we usually end up approaching the argument with more seriousness, openness, and respect.

So far, we’ve covered the content of what you should say in an argument. But what you say isn’t everything. You also need to think about how you say it. That’s where rhetoric comes in.

Rhetoric is the study of how to speak persuasively. It’s a broad subject that includes everything from the words and structure of your speech to the tone of your voice to the body language you use to express yourself. All of these affect how people perceive you.

Just think, who are you more likely to believe: someone who speaks confidently and fluidly, or someone who appears nervous and breaks into umming every few seconds?

Admittedly, rhetoric has a bad reputation these days. It’s often synonymous with the kind of hollow and misleading speech that politicians use to obscure the truth and manipulate the public. And there’s definitely something to this criticism.

But there’s also another side to rhetoric that’s decidedly more positive. When used in the right way, rhetoric can be truth’s greatest ally, helping to spread ideas further and inspiring people to act on what they hear.

The fact is, people have a very high “butt-off-the-couch” threshold. In other words, it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to move people to act in this world. You can’t just rely on facts alone to move people. Only people can do that. So we shouldn’t give up on rhetoric just yet.

Thankfully, Bo Seo has come up with a few handy rules of thumb for more persuasive speaking. Let’s take a look at them.

The first rule is pretty straightforward: clarity is key. You won’t convince anyone if they don’t know what you’re talking about. So avoid using abstract words, and ditch the confusing metaphors. What’s more, be specific; use concrete examples to explain your points.

The second rule? Cut the excess. Delete anything from your speech that doesn’t contribute to the arguments you’re making. That means stick to the point. Don’t ramble. Avoid unnecessary repetition and excessive qualification. Don’t bother with long-winded introductions. Just get to the point before you lose the listener’s attention.

And here’s the third rule: make it personal. If you can strike an emotional chord with your audience, they’ll be more engaged and more sympathetic to your cause. So speak to the listener’s needs and experiences directly. Sprinkle in stories from your own life. And relate your arguments back to what they mean for real people.

Finally, you also need to pay attention to the manner of your speech. You’ll appear far more persuasive if you can speak fluidly without stops and starts.

Speaking fluidly is perhaps the most difficult thing to master, but you can get there through practice. Competitive debaters do speaking drills to improve their flow and weed out distracting quirks in their speech.

Consider this drill, for example. Give a one-minute speech to a friend. Every time you trip up or say “um,” your friend throws a paper ball at you. Repeat the speech until you can get through it without being hit.

And here’s another one. Try making an argument while inserting the word for a random fruit between every word. Like this: Tax banana havens banana should banana be banana banned banana!

Doing speaking drills over and over again can be tedious. But it comes with the promise of a great reward – an elegant form of speech that’s sure to make people stop and listen.

You’ve just been introduced to the principles of debate – what to say and how to say it. You can begin putting them into practice by trying out the exercises outlined in this summary. Of course, the easiest way to harness the power of debate is just to, well, debate!

If the idea of staging a formal debate with teams and judges seems a bit awkward to squeeze into your daily routine, don’t worry about it. You can reap all the benefits of formal debate just by debating with your friends and colleagues in a more natural way. The important thing to remember before you start is that all parties must be willing to have an argument, treat each other with respect, and try their best not to take anything personally.

When it comes to society at large, many leaders are beginning to appreciate the power of debate to enhance learning and solve problems. Movements are already underway all over the world to incorporate debate into school curriculums and workplace procedures. Warren Buffett, for instance, recently floated the idea of hiring two advisors before making any big acquisition – one to argue in favor of the move, the other against.

These are exciting developments. Still, debate has the potential to be so much more than a decision-making tool. Debate holds the key to solving some of today’s most pressing problems. If democratic governments committed to educating their citizens in debate and established forums for doing it, such as citizen assemblies, debate could be a powerful force in repairing social divisions and invigorating democratic participation.

As citizens, we have a responsibility to learn how to debate well – to deliberate with our neighbors on matters that affect everyone, to settle our disputes with reasoned argument rather than violence, to listen to one another’s concerns and make compromises. Debate is the very soul of civic participation; to give up on it would be to give up on the social project altogether.

Speech, Communication Skills, Biography, Memoir, Professionals and Academics, Psychology, Leadership, Language, Sociology, Business, Adult, Science, Autobiography, Social Skills

Bo Seo is a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the Australian national debating team and the Harvard College Debating Union. One of the most recognized figures in the global debate community, he has won both the World Schools Debating Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship. Bo has written for The New York Times , The Atlantic , CNN , and many other publications. He has worked as a national reporter for the Australian Financial Review and has been a regular panelist on the prime time Australian debate program, The Drum . Bo graduated from Harvard University and received a master’s degree in public policy from Tsinghua University. He is currently a Juris Doctor candidate at Harvard Law School.

Introduction 1. Topic: How to find the debate 2. Argument: How to make a point 3. Rebuttal: How to push back 4. Rhetoric: How to move people 5. Quiet: How to know when to disagree 6. Self-Defense: How to defeat a bully 7. Education: How to raise citizens 8. Relationships: How to fight and stay together 9. Technology: How to debate in the future Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Good Arguments

What the art of debating can teach us about listening better and disagreeing well.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Bo Seo is a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the Australian national debating team and the Harvard College Debating Union. One of the most recognized figures in the global debate community, he has won both the World Schools Debating Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship. Bo has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, and many other publications. He has worked as a national reporter for the Australian Financial Review and has been a regular panelist on The Drum. Bo is a graduate of Harvard University and has a master’s degree in public policy from Tsinghua University. He is currently a juris doctor candidate at Harvard Law School.

Product Details

• Publisher: Scribner Australia (June 1, 2022)
• Length: 352 pages
• ISBN13: 9781761104480

Raves and Reviews

‘From two-time world champion debater Bo Seo, a thoughtful, instructive and eloquent meditation on the art of debate and why its central pillars - fact-finding, reason, persuasion and listening to opponents - are so valuable in today’s alarming ecosystem of misinformation and extreme emotion. When Bo Seo’s family immigrated from South Korea to Australia, he was a shy, conflict-averse eight year old who worried about being an outsider, and in “Good Arguments,” he recounts how debate not only helped him to cross language lines, but also gave him confidence and a voice of his own’

– Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic for The New York Times

‘In a world increasingly rent by division within and between nations, Bo Seo’s lucid and humane search for “better ways to disagree” could not be more timely or valuable.’

– Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia and author of The Case for Courage

'This is not just the electrifying tale of how Bo Seo won two world debate championships. It’s also a user manual for our polarised world. I can’t think of a more vital resource for learning to sharpen your critical thinking, accelerate your rethinking, and hone your ability to open other people’s minds. Good Arguments is the rare book that has the potential to make you smarter—and everyone around you wiser.'

– Adam Grant, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast WorkLife

'Good Arguments is a book so timely and needed in this fraction-ing world we are living in. It assumes that a quarrel is something you first have with yourself, get it out of the way and start to respect and listen to the person across the room from you. Seo has written a book that forces us to think and then speak as the philosopher he knows is right on the tip of every tongue. This book is brilliant and a pleasure to read; in the end, he instructs us not to win but to convince and unexpectedly, it teaches how to persuade for words are deployed as weapons of love.'

– Jamaica Kincaid, author of See Now Then, Mr. Potter, and The Autobiography of My Mother

'I adore this beautiful story of a young person's journey from fear of conflict and altercation to embrace of wonderful disagreement and argument. In this touching memoir, debate is not a mere activity but a way of life that offers hope of a cure for a diseased society. Good Arguments is essential reading!'

– Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of A Light Inside

'I had lots of conversations about political and social issues with Bo Seo when he was a student at Harvard, and I never felt even, for a second, that he was being disputatious or even argumentative. On the contrary, they were delightfully agreeable. Now I understand why: it was because Bo Seo is a debater, in fact, one of the best debaters in the world. If you want to learn how debating can help you become a more engaging conversationalist, a more broad-minded thinker, or even, maybe, just a better human being, you must read Good Arguments .'

– Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club and The Free World

'Today, more than ever, we see the importance of navigating disagreements constructively. In his new book, Good Arguments , Bo Seo offers some tips we can all use in doing so, drawing on his deep experience as a champion debater.'

– Stephen A. Schwarzman, New York Times-bestselling author of What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

' Good Arguments is an antidote to spin, fake news, "political correctness" and plain muddled thinking. Bo Seo teaches us how to listen and to be heard in both a healthy democracy and around the kitchen table'

– Gillian Triggs, former President of the Australian Human Rights Commission

'This excellent book begins with the challenge faced by a schoolboy whose family moved from South Korea to Australia. From school debating to university dialogue and on to witnessing global political conflict, Bo Seo identifies how debate and argument are essential to human understanding. Out of good arguments comes a synthesis. It has been so from the time of Socrates, to the world of Khrushchev and Mandela, and of Putin and Zelinsky. He argues that debate is central to human freedom even as our world faces dramatic challenges for human survival. Distinguishing ‘good arguments’ from unconvincing rubbish, has never been more central to human survival and to achieving love for one another .'

– Michael Kirby, AC CMG

' Good Arguments is an important book that is full of powerful insights. It should be required reading for all leaders and anyone who aspires to leadership. Bo Seo is obviously brilliant but more importantly, his writing reveals a wisdom far beyond his years. He will surely become an important voice for our time.'

– Dr Jim Yong Kim, former president of the World Bank

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NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

An essay from an editor at the broadcaster has generated a firestorm of criticism about the network on social media, especially among conservatives.

By Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson

NPR is facing both internal tumult and a fusillade of attacks by prominent conservatives this week after a senior editor publicly claimed the broadcaster had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published Tuesday by The Free Press, a popular Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, castigated NPR for what he said was a litany of journalistic missteps around coverage of several major news events, including the origins of Covid-19 and the war in Gaza. He also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

Mr. Berliner’s essay has ignited a firestorm of criticism of NPR on social media, especially among conservatives who have long accused the network of political bias in its reporting. Former President Donald J. Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to argue that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded, an argument he has made in the past.

NPR has forcefully pushed back on Mr. Berliner’s accusations and the criticism.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” Edith Chapin, the organization’s editor in chief, said in an email to staff on Tuesday. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.” Some other NPR journalists also criticized the essay publicly, including Eric Deggans, its TV critic, who faulted Mr. Berliner for not giving NPR an opportunity to comment on the piece.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay, saying he loved NPR and hoped to make it better by airing criticisms that have gone unheeded by leaders for years. He called NPR a “national trust” that people rely on for fair reporting and superb storytelling.

“I decided to go out and publish it in hopes that something would change, and that we get a broader conversation going about how the news is covered,” Mr. Berliner said.

He said he had not been disciplined by managers, though he said he had received a note from his supervisor reminding him that NPR requires employees to clear speaking appearances and media requests with standards and media relations. He said he didn’t run his remarks to The New York Times by network spokespeople.

When the hosts of NPR’s biggest shows, including “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” convened on Wednesday afternoon for a long-scheduled meet-and-greet with the network’s new chief executive, Katherine Maher , conversation soon turned to Mr. Berliner’s essay, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. During the lunch, Ms. Chapin told the hosts that she didn’t want Mr. Berliner to become a “martyr,” the people said.

Mr. Berliner’s essay also sent critical Slack messages whizzing through some of the same employee affinity groups focused on racial and sexual identity that he cited in his essay. In one group, several staff members disputed Mr. Berliner’s points about a lack of ideological diversity and said efforts to recruit more people of color would make NPR’s journalism better.

On Wednesday, staff members from “Morning Edition” convened to discuss the fallout from Mr. Berliner’s essay. During the meeting, an NPR producer took issue with Mr. Berliner’s argument for why NPR’s listenership has fallen off, describing a variety of factors that have contributed to the change.

Mr. Berliner’s remarks prompted vehement pushback from several news executives. Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, said in an interview that he rejected all of Mr. Berliner’s claims of unfairness, adding that his remarks would probably make it harder for NPR journalists to do their jobs.

“The next time one of our people calls up a Republican congressman or something and tries to get an answer from them, they may well say, ‘Oh, I read these stories, you guys aren’t fair, so I’m not going to talk to you,’” Mr. Cavin said.

Some journalists have defended Mr. Berliner’s essay. Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, NPR’s former ombudsman, said Mr. Berliner was “not wrong” on social media. Chuck Holmes, a former managing editor at NPR, called Mr. Berliner’s essay “brave” on Facebook.

Mr. Berliner’s criticism was the latest salvo within NPR, which is no stranger to internal division. In October, Mr. Berliner took part in a lengthy debate over whether NPR should defer to language proposed by the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association while covering the conflict in Gaza.

“We don’t need to rely on an advocacy group’s guidance,” Mr. Berliner wrote, according to a copy of the email exchange viewed by The Times. “Our job is to seek out the facts and report them.” The debate didn’t change NPR’s language guidance, which is made by editors who weren’t part of the discussion. And in a statement on Thursday, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association said it is a professional association for journalists, not a political advocacy group.

Mr. Berliner’s public criticism has highlighted broader concerns within NPR about the public broadcaster’s mission amid continued financial struggles. Last year, NPR cut 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts, including the popular “Invisibilia,” as it tried to make up for a $30 million budget shortfall. Listeners have drifted away from traditional radio to podcasts, and the advertising market has been unsteady.

In his essay, Mr. Berliner laid some of the blame at the feet of NPR’s former chief executive, John Lansing, who said he was retiring at the end of last year after four years in the role. He was replaced by Ms. Maher, who started on March 25.

During a meeting with employees in her first week, Ms. Maher was asked what she thought about decisions to give a platform to political figures like Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican Party chair whose position as a political analyst at NBC News became untenable after an on-air revolt from hosts who criticized her efforts to undermine the 2020 election.

“I think that this conversation has been one that does not have an easy answer,” Ms. Maher responded.

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin

Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email:  [email protected]   More about Katie Robertson

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Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court Majority: You’re Doing It Wrong

By Louis Menand

One day in 1993, Stephen Breyer , then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which sits in Boston, was riding his bicycle in Harvard Square when he was hit by a car. He was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. While he was recovering, he was visited by three White House officials. They had flown up to interview him for a possible nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

The vetting went well enough, and Breyer was invited to Washington to meet the President, Bill Clinton . Breyer’s doctors advised against flying, so he took the train, in some discomfort. The meeting with Clinton did not go well. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s “ The Nine ,” a book about the Supreme Court, Clinton found Breyer “heartless.” “I don’t see enough humanity,” he complained. “I want a judge with soul.” Breyer was told to go home. They would call.

He knew that things had gone poorly. “There’s only two people who aren’t convinced I’m going to be on the Supreme Court,” he told a fellow-judge. “One is me and the other is Clinton.” He was right. The phone never rang. The seat went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg .

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Ginsburg was a cool customer, too, but she knew which buttons to push. In her interview with Clinton, she talked about the death of her mother and about helping her husband get through law school after he was stricken with testicular cancer. Clinton loved catch-in-the-throat stories like that. Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate 96–3.

A year went by, there was another Supreme Court vacancy, and Breyer was again in the mix. His candidacy was pushed by Ted Kennedy, with whom he had worked as the chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Kennedy was its chair. Clinton really wanted to nominate his Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, but Babbitt faced opposition from senators in Western states, and Breyer seemed politically hypoallergenic.

So Breyer was chosen. Still, the White House did not do him any favors. Clinton’s indecisiveness was an ongoing story in the press—it had taken him eighty-six days to pick Ginsburg—and the news coverage made it plain that Breyer was not his first or even his second choice. The White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, told reporters that, of the candidates being considered, Breyer was “the one with the fewest problems.”

Clinton announced the selection without even waiting for Breyer to come down from Boston. When Breyer did show up, a few days later, he said, “I’m glad I didn’t bring my bicycle down.” Famous last words. In 2011, he broke his collarbone in another biking accident near his home in Cambridge, and in 2013 he fractured his right shoulder and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery after crashing his bicycle near the Korean War Veterans Memorial, on the National Mall. He was seventy-four. You have to give him credit. He gets right back on the horse.

Since his appointment to the Court, Breyer has published several books on his jurisprudential views. His latest is “ Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism ” (Simon & Schuster). It sums up his frustration with the court that he just stepped down from.

Clinton was not the only person who read Breyer as a technocrat. People felt he lacked a quality that Clinton could apparently summon at will—empathy. “He’s always been smarter than most of those around him,” the Yale constitutional-law professor Akhil Amar explained to a reporter, “so he’s had to learn how to get along with other people.”

That was his reputation at Harvard Law School, too, where he taught administrative law for many years before becoming a judge. “Breyer’s basic social instincts are conservative,” a Harvard colleague, Morton Horwitz, told the Times . “His legal culture is more liberal, and his very flexible pragmatism will enable him to give things a gentle spin in a liberal direction. But he’s a person without deep roots of any kind. He won’t develop a vision. . . . The words ‘social justice’ would somewhat embarrass him.”

It’s true that Breyer has a professorial presentation. He is cosmopolitan and erudite. He travels to other countries and is interested in their legal systems; reporters like to drop the fact that he has read “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” in French, twice. He is also, for a judge, relatively wealthy. His wife, Joanna Hare, a clinical psychologist at Dana-Farber, is the daughter of an English viscount.

Before joining the Court, Breyer showed few signs of being a social-justice warrior. He has, like the President who appointed him, neoliberal inclinations. He was instrumental in creating sentencing guidelines for federal judges that he later conceded were too rigid. He wrote a book on regulatory reform. And one of his proudest legislative achievements was working with Kennedy to deregulate the airline industry.

But he has an admirable temperament. Toobin called him “the sunniest individual to serve on the Supreme Court in a great many years.” Seated on a bench next to a lot of intellectual loners— Antonin Scalia , Clarence Thomas , David Souter , Ginsburg herself—Breyer became a consensus seeker, if not always a consensus builder. He believed in reasoned discourse.

He had also learned, from watching Kennedy do business in the Senate, that compromise is how you get things done in government, and he understood that on an ideologically divided court the power is in the middle. Being a split-the-difference centrist, like his predecessor Lewis Powell, and like the Justice he was closest to, Sandra Day O’Connor , suited his personality, too.

Breyer loved the job and was reluctant to announce his retirement, throwing liberals who feared another R.B.G. fiasco into a panic. He stepped down at the end of the 2021-22 term, in time for President Joe Biden to put one of Breyer’s former clerks, Ketanji Brown Jackson , on the Court. Breyer is now back where he started, as a professor of administrative law at Harvard. Happily for the law school, there are now many dedicated bike lanes in Cambridge.

Horwitz was not entirely right about what George H. W. Bush called “the vision thing.” Beneath Breyer’s pragmatic, let-us-reason-together persona is the soul of a Warren Court liberal. The Warren Court is where Breyer’s judicial career began. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1964, he clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg. It was, he said, “a court with a mission.” The mission was to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown is Breyer’s touchstone. He calls the decision “an affirmation of justice itself.” Brown was decided in 1954, and it governs only segregation in public schools. This is because the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws,” the right under which Brown was decided, is a right that can be exercised only against states and their agencies. But Breyer understands Brown in a broader sense. He believes that the reasoning in Brown leads to the condemnation of any and all discrimination that is within the reach of government to eliminate.

Extending the spirit of Brown is what the 1964 Civil Rights Act was designed to do. The act was signed into law in July, just as Breyer was beginning his clerkship, and it did something that Congress had tried once before, in 1875: make it unlawful for public accommodations like hotels, theatres, and restaurants to discriminate on the basis of race. In 1883, in a blockbuster decision, the Supreme Court had thrown out that earlier act as unconstitutional. It ruled that the government cannot tell private parties whom they must serve.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act once again prohibited discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. But how are privately owned businesses like restaurants within the reach of the state? In October, 1964, three months after the act was signed into law, that question came before the Court in two challenges to the constitutionality of Title II: Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., concerning a motel in Georgia that refused to serve Black travellers, and Katzenbach v. McClung, concerning a restaurant in Birmingham, Ollie’s Barbecue, that refused to seat Black customers. (They could use a takeout window.)

The Court ruled that Congress gets its power to ban discrimination in public accommodations from the commerce clause in Article I of the Constitution. (“Congress shall have power . . . to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”) This holding required the Court to find that the Heart of Atlanta Motel and Ollie’s Barbecue were, in fact, part of interstate commerce. And the Court so found.

Since the motel was patronized by people travelling from one state to another, and since the ingredients for some of the food served at Ollie’s came from outside Alabama, the Court held that the motel and the restaurant were part of commerce “among the several states” and therefore within the power of Congress to regulate. The Court declared the 1883 ruling “inapposite and without precedential value,” and the decision in both cases was unanimous. Breyer thinks that they were the most important rulings of his clerkship.

There was another case with far-reaching effects that was decided during Breyer’s clerkship: Griswold v. Connecticut. The plaintiffs, Estelle Griswold and C. Lee Buxton, opened a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven and were arrested for counselling married couples about birth-control devices, which were illegal under the state’s anti-contraception law. Griswold and Buxton argued that, since the law was unconstitutional, they could not be prosecuted for advising women to break it. In a 7–2 decision, the Court agreed. What constitutional provision did the Connecticut law violate? The right to privacy.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion of the Court, and it is a classic of judicial inventiveness. Nowhere does the Constitution mention a right to privacy, but Douglas proposed that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” By this jurisprudential alchemy, the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments could be interpreted as defining a “zone of privacy” whose penumbra would extend to the marital bedroom.

Douglas concluded his opinion with an encomium to marriage. He got quite worked up about it. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” he wrote. “It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.” Douglas was sixty-six. A year after Griswold, he divorced his twenty-six-year-old third wife, Joan Martin, to marry Cathleen Heffernan, who was twenty-two.

Griswold became a key precedent in two landmark cases: Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex-marriage case, decided in 2015. “The right of privacy,” Harry Blackmun wrote for the Court in Roe, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” In Obergefell, Anthony Kennedy, also writing for the Court, quoted Douglas’s reflections on marriage in their entirety and added some emanations of his own. In addition to a privacy right, he declared, constitutional liberties extend “to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.” (In a dissent, Scalia said that he would “hide my head in a bag” before putting his name to some of Kennedy’s prose.)

The shape of Breyer’s Supreme Court career therefore has an emblematic significance, because it was bookended by two decisions that undid much of what the Warren Court achieved in Heart of Atlanta and Griswold. Breyer’s first major dissent came in 1995, in U.S. v. Lopez, a commerce-clause case; his last was in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade .

Lopez turned on the constitutionality of the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which made it a federal crime to possess a firearm in a school zone. In a 5–4 decision, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the act was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power under the commerce clause. It was the first time since 1936 that the Court had struck down a federal law for exceeding the commerce-clause power.

Much of the New Deal was made possible by the commerce clause. In his dissent, Breyer noted that more than a hundred federal laws include the phrase “affecting commerce.” How many was the Court bent on invalidating? Some, anyway. Five years later, in U.S. v. Morrison, the Court threw out provisions of the Violence Against Women Act on the ground of commerce-clause overreach.

Breyer’s dissent in Dobbs, in 2022, was joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor . The privacy right in Roe “does not stand alone,” they wrote. “The Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. . . . They are all part of the same constitutional fabric.” They wondered, again, how much the Court was prepared to unravel. In his concurrence, Thomas suggested that the Court might want to reconsider Griswold and Obergefell.

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What happened? Breyer has an explanation, and he lays it out in the new book. He thinks it’s all a matter of interpretation.

As Breyer points out, a majority of the Court now subscribes to the interpretive methods known as textualism and originalism. Textualism and originalism tend to be run together as types of what used to be called “strict construction” (a term that seems to have fallen out of use). But there is a difference. Textualism is primarily a way of interpreting statutes, and originalism is a way of interpreting the Constitution.

Textualists ask what the words of a statute literally mean. Information like legislative history or social-science data is largely irrelevant. Textualists don’t ask, “What would Congress have us do?” They just say, “What is the rule here?” and try to follow it.

Originalists, on the other hand, ask what the Framers would have them do. Originalists can consult the records of the Constitutional Convention (which are hardly comprehensive) and documents like the Federalist Papers (which is a collection of op-eds). But they claim to stick to the “original public understanding” of constitutional language—that is, what the words meant to the average voter in the eighteenth century. They do not invent rights that the Framers would not have recognized, as originalists think Douglas did in Griswold.

More recently, originalists have looked to something called “history and tradition,” highly malleable terms—whose history? which tradition?—by which they tend to mean things as they were prior to circa 1964. Writing for the Court in Dobbs, Samuel Alito explained that the decision turned on “whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition.” The constitutional right to abortion was then fifty years old. For women likely to rely on it, the right had existed for their entire lifetimes. But what mattered to the originalists was whether women could rely on it in the nineteenth century.

The use of race as a plus factor in college and university admissions is even older. The practice dates from the late nineteen-sixties, and has been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court three times: in 1978, in 2003, and in 2016. But the majority had little trouble wiping it out last term, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard . It is a bit brazen to be shouldering aside precedents under the banner of “tradition.”

Breyer sums up textualism and originalism as attempts to make judicial reasoning a science and to make law a list of rules. In our system of government, the Constitution is the big trump card. But it doesn’t come with a user manual. The document is basically a list of clauses—the commerce clause (sixteen words), the equal-protection clause (fourteen words), and so on. And the Constitution gives the reason for a clause only twice: in the patent-and-copyright clause in Article I and in the right-to-bear-arms clause in the Second Amendment. (We could add the preamble, the “We the People” clause, which gives the rationale for having a written constitution in the first place, a novel idea in 1787.)

Some constitutional clauses, like the requirement that the President be native-born, are rules, but many, like the equal-protection clause (the only reference to equality in the entire document), are principles. They do not mark out bright lines separating the constitutionally permitted from the constitutionally forbidden.

Courts, however, are obliged to draw those lines. Judges cannot conclude that the law is a gray area. Textualists and originalists believe that their approach draws the line at the right place. Breyer thinks that the idea that there is a single right place, good for all time, is a delusion, and that his approach, which he calls “pragmatism,” is the one best suited to the design of the American legal system. Pragmatism makes the system “workable” (a word Breyer uses many times) because it does not box us into rigid doctrines and anachronistic meanings.

Pragmatist judges therefore look to the law’s purposes, consequences, and values. They ask, “Why did the lawmakers write this? What are the real-world consequences for the way the Court interprets it? And what are the values that subtend the system of government that courts are a part of?” These are questions that literal readings can’t answer.

An originalist like Scalia, for example, thinks that the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment makes unconstitutional only punishments that would have been considered cruel and unusual in 1791, the year the amendment was ratified. In 1791, people were sentenced to death for theft. If we said that seems cruel and unusual today, Scalia would say, “Fine. Pass a law against it. But the Constitution does not forbid it.” When he was asked what punishment the Framers would have considered cruel and unusual, Scalia said, “Thumbscrews.”

To this, a pragmatist judge would say, “Then what is the point of having a constitution?” The words “cruel and unusual” were chosen by the Framers (in this case, James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights) because their meanings are not fixed. And that goes to the purpose of the clause. The Constitution does not prohibit cruel and unusual punishment because cruelty is bad and we’re against it. It prohibits punishment that most people would find excessive in order to preserve the public’s faith in the criminal-justice system. If we started executing people for stealing a loaf of bread today, the system would lose its legitimacy. Surely an originalist would agree that the Framers were big on legitimacy.

The same is true of many other clauses—for example, the free-speech clause in the First Amendment. Free speech is protected not because it’s a God-given right. It’s protected because, in a democracy, if you do not allow the losers to have their say, you cannot expect them to submit to the will of the winners. Free speech legitimizes majoritarian rule.

Breyer’s book is organized as a series of analyses of some twenty Supreme Court cases, most of which Breyer took part in during his time on the Court. Some are major cases, like District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the originalists found a right to possess a gun for self-defense in the Second Amendment, which says nothing about self-defense. (“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the eighteenth century are protected by the Second Amendment,” Scalia wrote in the Court’s opinion. Hmm. What happened to the Thumbscrews Doctrine?)

Other cases are perhaps less than major, like Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service, which answered the question of whether the federal government is a “person” capable of petitioning the Patent Trial and Appeal Board under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. (It is not.) Breyer explains how originalists and textualists decided each case and how he, as a pragmatist, decided them. His book is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical. It is addressed to non-lawyers.

It also seems weirdly naïve. Or maybe purposefully naïve. In most of the cases Breyer discusses, where there was disagreement on the Court it resulted not from differences in interpretive methods but from differences in politics. In almost every case, the originalists and textualists came down on the conservative side, restricting the powers of the federal government and expanding the powers of the states, and the pragmatists and “living constitutionalists” (another term that’s now largely avoided) came down on the liberal side.

What is naïve is to believe that the conservative Justices—which means, on the current Court, the six Justices appointed by Republican Presidents, though they are not always on the same page—would decide cases differently if they switched to another method of interpretation. Judicial reasoning doesn’t work that way. Judges pretty much know where they want to come out, and then they figure out a juridically respectable way of getting there.

Why would Breyer want to ignore, or seriously understate, the part that political ideology plays in Supreme Court decisions? The answer lies in an earlier book, “ The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics ,” based on a lecture he delivered at Harvard in 2021. It’s all about legitimacy.

Legitimacy is why the Warren Court was on a mission in 1964. The Supreme Court’s reputation—you could say its mystique—is all that it has. It cannot tax or spend. Only Congress can do those things, and only the President can send in the Army. When Southern school districts ignored Brown and refused to integrate, the Court was in danger of being exposed as a paper tiger. It was crucial, therefore, that everyone believe that the Justices were not making law, only finding it. The Constitution made them do it. That was the Court’s claim to legitimacy.

Breyer thinks that the Court still operates this way. All Justices, he says in “The Authority of the Court,” “studiously try to avoid deciding a case on the basis of ideology rather than law.” The reason that “different political groups so strongly support some persons for appointment to the Court and so strongly oppose others” is that people “confuse perceived personal ideology (inferred from party affiliation or that of the nominating executive) and professed judicial philosophy.”

But Presidents and Senate majorities certainly think they are appointing Justices who share their political beliefs, even when they profess to be simply looking for the most qualified jurist. Sometimes Presidents are wrong. Earl Warren, appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, no enthusiast of race-mixing, is a famous example. But that is not because Warren was apolitical. Warren was a Republican politician. He had been elected governor of California three times and had run for Vice-President on the ticket with Thomas E. Dewey, in 1948. For Warren, the political constituency that mattered when he became Chief Justice was not the President or Congress. It was the public.

He could see that, in the postwar era, public opinion was likely to favor expanded liberties—the United States was presenting itself, after all, as the leader of the free world—and although his court may sometimes have got a few paces ahead of public opinion, it was largely in step with the times. It was a liberal era. We are not living in a liberal era anymore, and the Court reflects this.

Politics is the art of governance. The Supreme Court is a branch of government, and is therefore a political body. Its decisions affect public life. If by “political” we mean “partisan,” we are still talking about governance, because partisanship is loyalty to a political ideology, normally instantiated in a political party. Politics, therefore, cannot not be partisan. Partisanship is how politics works. Even when politicians say, “This is no time for politics,” they are saying it for partisan reasons. They are saying it because it is good for their side to say it.

What makes the Court different from other political actors is stare decisis, the tradition of respecting its earlier decisions, something Congress does not have to worry about. There is no rule against overturning a precedent, though. So why has the Court been traditionally reluctant to do so? Why does Thomas’s suggestion that it might be time to overrule Griswold and Obergefell seem so radical? It’s because the Court’s legitimacy is intimately tied to the perception that, in making its rulings, it looks only to what the Constitution says and what the Court has previously decided. When the Court overturns a case, it has to make it appear as though the decision was wrong as a matter of law.

This is why Breyer insists that it’s all a matter of legal forensics, of what interpretive lenses the Justices use. He wants to preserve the authority of the Court. He wants to prevent the Justices from being seen as the puppets of politicians.

His toughest moment on the Court, for this reason, must have been Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, decided in 2007. In that case, the Court struck down a Seattle policy of using race as a factor in assigning students to high schools with the aim of attaining rough racial balance.

It was the kind of policy that the Court had approved a number of times since Brown. Now, in an opinion by John Roberts, the Court declared that it had had enough. Roberts ended with a memorable line, no doubt saved up for the right occasion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

After Roberts announced the Court’s opinion, on the last day of the term, Breyer delivered a speech from the bench. “Bristling with barely concealed anger,” according to an account by the legal scholar Lani Guinier, he accused the Court’s Republican appointees of voting their policy preferences. “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” he said.

In 2019, Breyer’s speech from the bench was published as a pamphlet by Brookings. The title he gave it was “Breaking the Promise of Brown.” ♦

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NPR suspends senior editor Uri Berliner after essay accusing outlet of liberal bias

Npr suspended senior editor uri berliner a week after he authored an online essay accusing the outlet of allowing liberal bias in its coverage..

NPR has suspended a senior editor who authored an essay published last week on an online news site in which he argued that the network had "lost America's trust" because of a liberal bias in its coverage, the outlet reported.

Uri Berliner was suspended Friday for five days without pay, NPR reported Tuesday . The revelation came exactly a week after Berliner publicly claimed in an essay for The Free Press, an online news publication, that NPR had allowed a "liberal bent" to influence its coverage, causing the outlet to steadily lose credibility with audiences.

The essay reignited the criticism that many prominent conservatives have long leveled against NPR and prompted newsroom leadership to implement monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, NPR reported. Berliner's essay also angered many of his colleagues and exposed NPR's new chief executive Katherine Maher to a string of attacks from conservatives over her past social media posts.

In a statement Monday to NPR, Maher refuted Berliner's claims by underscoring NPR's commitment to objective coverage of national issues.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," Maher said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

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Berliner rails against NPR's coverage of COVID-19, diversity efforts

Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, argued in the Free Press essay that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

While he claimed that NPR has always had a "liberal bent" ever since he was hired at the outlet, he wrote that it has since lost its "open-minded spirit," and, hence, "an audience that reflects America."

The Peabody Award-winning journalist highlighted what he viewed as examples of the network's partisan coverage of several major news events, including the origins of COVID-19 and the war in Gaza . Berliner also lambasted NPR's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies – as reflected both within its newsroom and in its coverage – as making race and identity "paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

"All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth," he wrote.

Uri Berliner's essay fuels conservative attacks on NPR

In response to the essay, many prominent conservatives and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, launched renewed attacks at NPR for what they perceive as partisan coverage.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo in particular targeted Maher for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network – her  first at a news organization . Among the posts singled out were  a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist .

Trump reiterated on his social media platform, Truth Social, his longstanding argument that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded.

NPR issues formal rebuke to Berliner

Berliner provided an NPR reporter with a copy of the formal rebuke for review in which the organization told the editor he had not been approved to write for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.

NPR also said he publicly released confidential proprietary information about audience demographics, the outlet reported.

Leadership said the letter was a "final warning" for Berliner, who would be fired for future violations of NPR's policies, according to NPR's reporting. Berliner, who is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union, told the NPR reporter that he is not appealing the punishment.

A spokeswoman for NPR said the outlet declined to comment on Berliner's essay or the news of his suspension when reached Tuesday by USA TODAY.

"NPR does not comment on individual personnel matters, including discipline," according to the statement. "We expect all of our employees to comply with NPR policies and procedures, which for our editorial staff includes the NPR Ethics Handbook ."

NPR staffer express dismay; leadership puts coverage reviews in place

According to the NPR article, Berliner's essay also invoked the ire of many of his colleagues and the reporters whose stories he would be responsible for editing.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben said in a post last week on social media site X, though he didn't mention Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and [expletive] on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Amid the fallout, NPR reported that NPR's chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom late Monday afternoon that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay in an interview with NPR, adding that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]

In Jane Smiley’s rock ’n’ roll novel, does good sense make good fiction?

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Book Review

By Jane Smiley Knopf: 384 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Toward the end of Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Lucky,” its narrator takes a moment to flip through her mother’s record collection. It’s got a lot of ’60s folk-rock, including, she notes, “the four J’s.” Presumably she means artists like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Janis Ian. But maybe one of the J’s is the narrator herself — Jodie Rattler, a moderately famous singer with a knack for writing melancholy love songs.

“Lucky” is framed as a rock ’n’ roll novel, but it’s a tricky and surprising one. Smiley seems determined to upend the conventions of the genre. Rather than a tale of outsize fame and fortune — or vice-induced failure — the Jodie Rattler story is about how she … does OK, rising from backup singer to ’60s and ’70s solo act who enjoyed modest success. She rode the folk-rock boom to hit the lower range of the Billboard charts at a time when that still meant decent money. (She logs her singles’ earnings down to the penny: One got her $65,857.52.)

And rather than play coy about lyrics, as many rock-novelists do, Smiley takes a crack at writing a bunch of them, which have a few groaners but are more often creditable faux-Joni: “I’m done with men, or so I say / Women say that every day / But we want something / Something fine. And you are It, / Though you’re not mine.”

But the biggest distinction between “Lucky” and other such novels is that music doesn’t define its hero. “Lucky” is as much a story about Jodie’s experience racking up lovers (23, she counts) and dedicating time to her family back in her hometown of St. Louis. Music gives her a measure of fame, but she can take it or leave it.

The same goes for men: Though she falls for a kind-hearted Englishman named Martin (pointedly, the name of a bespoke guitar brand), she’s comfortable abandoning him. Visiting his parents at their tony manor, she sees married domesticity as something cold and alien. Becoming a person in full, for her, means avoiding conventional attachments: “I still sometimes felt a longing for his grace and the comfort of his embraces, but I didn’t feel guilty for setting out on my own,” she muses.

Jodie’s sensibility is, well, sensible. Throughout her life she’s determined to preserve the good luck that provides the book with its title. But Jodie’s story opens up the question of whether good sense makes for a good novel.

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Domestic fiction tends to thrive on strife and fireworks — something Smiley knows well herself, having won the Pulitzer for 1991’s “A Thousand Acres,” a Midwestern farm saga modeled after “King Lear.” There’s some of that conflict in “Lucky,” as Jodie returns home to find her mother sinking into alcoholism. (“At what point do you say to your mother that she looks like a war orphan?”) But Smiley eschews the screamfests and betrayals.

What emerges instead in “Lucky” is a simple yet provocative idea — what if a woman protagonist were allowed to live independently on her own terms, not tied down by typically novelistic men or the bad blood that infects family life? (Whatever the opposite of a Joyce Carol Oates novel is, this is it.) A Jodie lyric gets at the idea: “Nobody told me the pleasures of fading, / That success requires evading.” The novel’s title, upbeat on the surface, is darkened by the notion of how rare such a character is. And the novel’s tension isn’t about Jodie seeking freedom so much as figuring out how to live as a person who’s always had it. Late in life she writes a “regrets song…about spending my whole life being careful. What had I missed?”

To that end, Jodie writes about her process of trying not to miss things, to be alert to myriad ways she’s connected to music and the world, albeit cautiously. (She seeks out her absent father and stands next to him in a New York deli line, just because.) She strives to be a good observer of both life and herself, and to put it into words. There’s a name for that: songwriter. There’s another name for that: novelist.

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The cleverest trick in “Lucky” is that it introduces a fifth J: Jane Smiley, who we first meet as an unnamed high-school classmate of Jodie’s, a “gawky girl” who grew up to write acclaimed novels. Smiley isn’t Jodie, exactly, but Smiley is chasing the autofictional vibe of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, trying to capture the grit of everyday life, just like a songwriter might.

“Lucky,” much like Smiley’s epic the Last Hundred Years trilogy, operates at a deliberately low boil. Life and death flow in and out, and Smiley observes it clearly but empathetically. (Not for nothing is Dickens among her favorite writers.) And “Lucky,” like those books, shows how the business of just being yourself can be a source of struggle and effort. She is, Jodie writes, a “thoughtful young woman with ideas and determination,” and impressively that is enough to carry the novel.

There’s no signal that “Lucky” is Smiley’s final book, but if it were, it would make for an admirable summing up — the story of a well-traveled, keen-eyed writer who’s spent decades making sense of the world in words, and taking pleasure in it for its own sake. A lucky way to make a living.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

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Libraries are full of books about great cats. This one is special.

Caleb carr’s memoir, ‘my beloved monster,’ is a heart-rending tale of human-feline connection.

Over the years, my wife and I have been blessed with 15 cats, three rescued from the streets of Brooklyn, three from barns near our home in Vermont, one from a Canadian resort and the others from the nearby shelter, where my wife has volunteered as a “cat whisperer” for the most emotionally scarred of its feline inhabitants for years. Twelve of our beloved pets have died (usually in our arms), and we could lose any of our current three cats — whose combined age is roughly 52 — any day now. So, I am either the best person to offer an opinion on Caleb Carr’s memoir, “ My Beloved Monster ,” or the worst.

For the many who have read Carr’s 1994 novel, “The Alienist,” an atmospheric crime story set in 19th-century New York, or watched the Netflix series it inspired, Carr’s new book might come as something of a surprise. “My Beloved Monster” is a warm, wrenching love story about Carr and his cat, a half-wild rescue named Masha who, according to the subtitle of his book, in fact rescued Carr. The author is, by his own admission, a curmudgeon, scarred by childhood abuse, living alone and watching his health and his career go the way of all flesh.

What makes the book so moving is that it is not merely the saga of a great cat. Libraries are filled with books like that, some better than others. It’s the 17-year chronicle of Carr and Masha aging together, and the bond they forged in decline. (As Philip Roth observed, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”) He chronicles their lives, beginning with the moment the animal shelter begs Carr to bring the young lioness home because the creature is so ferocious she unnerves the staff — “You have to take that cat!” one implores.

Interspersed throughout Carr’s account of his years with Masha are his recollections of all the other cats he has had in his life, going back to his youth in Manhattan. And there are a lot. Cats often provided him comfort after yet another torment his father, the writer Lucien Carr , and stepfather visited upon him. Moreover, Carr identifies so deeply with the species that as a small child he drew a self-portrait of a boy with a cat’s head. He knows a great deal about cats and is eager to share his knowledge, for instance about the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouths that helps them decide if another creature is predator or prey. His observations are always astute: “Dogs tend to trust blindly, unless and until abuse teaches them discretion. … Cats, conversely, trust conditionally from the start.”

Carr, now 68, was a much younger man when he adopted Masha. Soon, however, they were joined at the hip. As the two of them bonded, the writer found himself marveling at what he believed were their shared childhood traumas, which move between horrifying and, in Carr’s hands, morbidly hilarious: “I began to accept my father’s behavior in the spirit with which he intended it … he was trying to kill me.” Man and cat shared the same physical ailments, including arthritis and neuropathy, possibly caused by physical violence in both cases. Carr allowed Masha, a Siberian forest cat, to go outside, a decision many cat owners may decry, but he defends it: “Masha was an entirely different kind of feline,” and keeping her inside “would have killed her just as certainly as any bear or dog.” Indeed, Masha took on fishers and bears (yes, bears!) on Carr’s wooded property in Upstate New York.

But bears and dogs are humdrum fare compared with cancer and old age, which come for both the novelist and his cat. Carr’s diagnosis came first, and his first concern was whether he would outlive Masha. (The existence of the book gives us the answer he didn’t have at the time.) Illness adds new intensity to the human-feline connection: “Coming back from a hospital or a medical facility to Masha was always particularly heartening,” Carr writes, “not just because she’d been worried and was glad to see me, but because she seemed to know exactly what had been going on … and also because she was so anxious to show that she hadn’t been scared, that she’d held the fort bravely.”

Sometimes, perhaps, Carr anthropomorphizes too much and exaggerates Masha’s language comprehension, or gives her more human emotion than she had. But maybe not. Heaven knows, I see a lot behind my own cats’ eyes. Moreover, it’s hard to argue with a passage as beautiful as this: “In each other’s company, nothing seemed insurmountable. We were left with outward scars. … But the only wounds that really mattered to either of us were the psychic wounds caused by the occasional possibility of losing each other; and those did heal, always, blending and dissolving back into joy.”

Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.

Chris Bohjalian is the best-selling author of 24 books. His most recent novel, “The Princess of Las Vegas,” was published last month.

My Beloved Monster

Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me

By Caleb Carr

Little, Brown. 435 pp. $29

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