The Power of Strangers

In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane discovers the surprising benefits that come from talking to strangers, examining how even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness, and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. Warm, witty, erudite, and profound, this deeply researched book will make you reconsider how you perceive and approach strangers, showing you how talking to strangers isn’t just not a way to live, it’s a way to survive. In our cities, we barely acknowledge one another on public transport, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we carefully curate who we interact with. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of many of our problems, were actually the solution?