The Best Strangers In The World

When was the last time a stranger’s story changed what you believed about the world? In The Best Strangers in the World, Ari Shapiro argues that curiosity and connection are not luxuries in a polarized era—they’re survival tools. He contends that you learn to bridge divides not by winning arguments, but by listening well, translating generously, and sharing the mic so people can “be seen” by those who might never meet them. Journalism and music become twin vehicles: one to document reality with rigor; the other to invite people past their defenses through beauty and joy.

The book is a memoir of craft and calling, told through scenes that are accessible and unforgettable—from a secretive overnight flight to Afghanistan on Air Force One, to a Yazidi temple saved from ISIS siege, to a Turkish café owner who runs extension cords down the sidewalk so refugees can call home. It’s also a story of identity. Shapiro is the gay, Jewish kid who learned to move between worlds—synagogues in Fargo, thrift-store drag in Portland—and later realized that those very muscles could help him be a different kind of correspondent and performer. The result is a playbook for how you can meet people across fault lines with honesty and humility, without abandoning who you are.

The Claim: Curiosity Is A Skill You Can Train

Shapiro learned to see by staring into tidepools and listening for birds; he learned to hear by catching half-buried sounds in the field before he ever wore headphones in a studio. That curiosity later becomes a newsroom superpower. He’s not just filling a segment; he’s asking, “What’s the most human angle here?”—like stepping out of the press filing center during a presidential trip to cover a Pensacola oyster-shucker who jokes he can’t say on the radio what losing the oyster beds would mean for his livelihood. Curiosity is not passive—it’s active attention (similar to the ethos in Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief).

The Method: Translate Without Flattening

As a kid, he shuttled between a Reform temple and an Orthodox shul. Later, he shuttled between White House pool sprays and shisha-scented open-air cafés in the Middle East. The skill is translation without condescension. When disinformation claims in Ukraine alleged local Jews had to “register” with separatists, he didn’t amplify the panic; he went to the synagogue, listened to Rabbi Pinchas Vyshetsky, and showed why the claim contradicted the separatists’ own propaganda. The fact-check itself became a bridge—between fearful diaspora readers and the actual people affected on the ground.

The Theme: Make Space For Joy Alongside Grief

Immersion in conflict and crisis coexists with singing on the world’s biggest stages. Shapiro tours with Pink Martini, performing in Arabic in Texas and Greek in Istanbul—“musical diplomacy,” as he calls it. In one Middle Eastern country, a royal protocol forbids audience members from obstructing Her Excellency’s view; minutes later, invited dancers unknowingly twirl right in front of her, and she rises—clapping along. That’s the sneaky power of joy (echoing Rebecca Solnit’s argument that hope is a discipline). It softens the ground where argument alone cannot penetrate.

What You’ll Learn In This Summary

You’ll see how Shapiro’s childhood “nature boy” training turned into a journalism toolkit, why authenticity is not a liability in reporting, and how to “pop the bubble” of pack coverage to find stories nobody else is telling. You’ll walk through war zones where “war people in war places” resolve into named, complicated neighbors: a Yazidi commander, Qasim Shesho, holding a temple against ISIS with a single bullet per man; a Syrian teacher, Monzer Omar, voice-memoing his way to Germany across six borders and a half-deflated raft. Then you’ll shift stages: from newsroom to nightclub, where art and cabaret—often with Alan Cumming—carry the same mission as journalism: to make strangers feel less strange.

Why It Matters Now

Algorithms reward outrage; institutions ask journalists to perform a “view from nowhere.” Shapiro proposes a counter-practice: own your perspective, report facts with humility, and elevate lived experience. He shows how the same posture heals at home, too—from responding to bigotry with a dry “Thank you for listening,” to watching a grieving mother in East Jerusalem accept coffee from a group of Israeli women she’d first refused. In a world where disconnection feels easier than connection, Shapiro insists you can keep choosing the harder, better thing. That’s how, in his phrase, “the best strangers in the world” become the people you can’t forget—and how you become someone they can trust.

Shapiro argues that you don’t find great stories by having the right opinions—you find them by training your attention. He traces his method to childhood in Oregon: squatting over tidepools until nudibranchs appear, flipping logs for salamanders, memorizing the fee-bee of chickadees. That slow seeing becomes the foundation for slow listening: the patience to hear a sentence’s subtext, to notice the detail that makes a story breathe. Before he ever strapped on headphones, he’d learned to translate invisible worlds for others—first in first-grade Hanukkah demos for Fargo classmates; later on national radio.

From Tidepools To Tape

As an unpaid intern with Nina Totenberg, he absorbs a tough, clear ethic (“Grow a pair!”) and a newsroom habit: keep practicing. He buys a cheap minidisc recorder and taps out local features after his Morning Edition shift. Early corrections sting (asking Marian Seldes to speak about a very alive Hume Cronyn in past tense), but teach him craft humility. That humility pays off after a catastrophic mistake: he accidentally formats the disc with all of day one’s reporting on grandparents raising grandkids. He wants to disappear, opts instead to rebuild the story in a few frantic hours, and makes air. Volume becomes his confidence. (NPR’s Susan Stamberg later leaves him a napkin note: “Best in show!”)

Purpose In A Crisis

On 9/11, as TV hosts narrate live chaos, he’s on the phones connecting shop clerks and bodega owners to the air. In the aftermath, he writes 60-second oral memorials—one of Ron Gamboa, Dan Bradhorst, and their three-year-old son David on Flight 175. The choice to call them a family—true and obvious today—was subversive in 2001. It’s also a clue to his approach: everyday language that quietly expands the circle of who belongs. Bob Edwards tells the staff, “We know what our job is”—not to grandstand, but to help people feel less alone. That sentence becomes a north star when the world pauses again for a pandemic.

Listening As Fieldwork

Shapiro keeps one mantra for every assignment: clear two bars. The lower bar is “good enough to air.” The higher bar is “vivid, surprising, transporting, true.” You move toward bar two by popping the bubble everyone else is sitting in. During Obama’s Gulf oil spill tour, while the press corps files from a riser, Shapiro watches the president’s Pensacola speech on TV at Peg Leg Pete’s oyster bar—then profiles a shucker in a chain-mail glove whose line you can’t say on the radio. That color is the point: you aren’t here to stenograph power; you’re here to let people hear themselves in the story.

What You Can Steal

Practice deliberately. Ship work often. Let curiosity, not prestige, dictate your next pitch. Learn from elders (Totenberg, Stamberg), but befriend embarrassment—it means you’re stretching. Ask simple questions others overlook, like “What’s the Wi‑Fi for?” in Izmir, which led to Ali Demir’s café tables covered in power strips so Syrian families could call home. And keep a low and high bar for your own projects. Your best pieces won’t happen by accident; they happen because you showed up in a kitchen that smelled like frying oysters and pressed record.

(Context: This echoes the “anthropology of attention” in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and the iterative craft mindset in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.)

Shapiro doesn’t pretend to be a blank slate. He’s the gay Jewish kid who wore Tom of Finland postcards on his locker and drag on Halloween; the teenager who carried Mace to calculus after coming out during Oregon’s ferocious Measure 9 fight. Those years taught him to weather slurs with a raised eyebrow (“Thank you for listening”), to turn whisper campaigns into bullhorns, and—importantly—to never split his life in two. When he later gets the postcard that reads, “Dear Ari, Please butch up,” he frames it. Authenticity is not a brand flourish—it’s a guardrail against disappearing yourself.

Marriage As A Beat—and A Boundary

His 2004 San Francisco wedding to Mike Gottlieb becomes involuntary B‑roll for years—popping up in NBC packages about same-sex marriage. He tries to keep a low profile, but also refuses to erase love for professional optics. He recuses from reporting on marriage cases, keeps interviewing attorneys general, and carries two wedding rings (one backup for the journalist who loses things). Later, he and Mike celebrate a religious ceremony in Napa, their civil status in flux. Shapiro knows the Supreme Court can reverse rights; he serves LGBTQ youth at SMYAL and keeps his vows in the meantime. The lesson: stay visible without letting your identity be monetized by others.

The “View From Somewhere”

Covering Israel-Palestine, the third rail of journalism, he confronts pressure from activists on both sides and the profession’s “view from nowhere.” The NPR ombudsman notes a listener complaint that “your only correspondent was Jewish.” Shapiro’s counter: there’s no such thing as an absent identity. He refuses to pretend he doesn’t know Hatikvah, just as he refuses to let identity cloud fact: when rocks hit in Jerusalem’s Old City, he doubts and then confirms the attacker was an ultra-Orthodox Jew. It’s the two-step you must master: hold biography and evidence in the same frame, neither erasing nor enthroning either.

Thank You For Listening (Seriously)

“Thank you for listening” becomes his shalom: hello, goodbye, ceasefire. It neutralizes hate mail, absorbs anxiety, and recenters humility. You can adopt it, too. It doesn’t mean passivity; it means you refuse to match contempt with contempt. When he stands in a Pulse-era bar and a man leans in to say, “Why would you want them here? They throw people like you off buildings,” Shapiro neither explodes nor ingratiates. He replies simply that many Muslim friends need safety, too. Subject meets subject. You won’t change every mind. But you keep the mic open so the next voice can reach the air.

(Comparison: Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View from Somewhere makes a similar case that marginalized journalists’ identities can be assets to truth-telling, not obstacles.)

The White House beat can turn you into a stenographer to power. Shapiro admits he feared that trap—then accepted the job and learned to dodge it. He stumbles into the Oval Office on day one (thinking he’s following the press to the driveway), gets caught with spaghetti when Obama unexpectedly walks back to the press cabin on Air Force One, and learns from competitors who save his audio when marinara and a boom mic collide. The beat’s choreography—motorcades, hanger departures, back-gate arrivals—can lull you into writing Mad Libs. Popping the bubble means committing to “color and consequence over choreography.”

Two Lessons From The Big Plane

First: humility. On the secret Afghanistan trip, even the press can’t be told the plan over the phone. Reporters are briefed face-to-face; shades stay down as twin planes roll out of hangars; you don’t even stand to watch Marine One’s salute. After Bagram, he cuts tracks in the plane’s bathroom to beat the Wi‑Fi cutoff in Ramstein; the upload completes as the nose lifts. “It’s only radio,” he reminds himself. “Nobody’s life is on the line.” Second: solidarity. The TV sound guy winks and swings a boom down the aisle so radio has audio. Your rivals can still be your rescue.

Find The Story Nobody Else Files

On Obama’s Gulf spill tour, he chooses an oyster bar over the riser; on a Midwest swing, he finds Barack the Barbarian comics in a Des Moines shop, a small delight that says something true about politics-as-spectacle. In the bubble, everything is scripted. Your job is to walk two blocks west of the script and listen. He calls this chasing the second bar: not just “on-air acceptable,” but “distinctive, transporting, human.” It’s a mindset you can use outside politics, too—ask the question nobody else asked, step into the room everyone else overlooked.

Beware The “Great Story, Ruined By The Facts” Trap

Shapiro’s “spyware thumb drive” fantasy is a cautionary tale. The Israeli Government Press Office hands him a USB stick with maps and bios; he imagines malware and a perfect exposé about surveillance of foreign reporters. A British forensics lab finds…documents, nothing more. The narrative dissolves. It’s the discipline you owe your audience: kill your darlings when evidence won’t support them. The good news? Reality has plenty of texture if you look for it—like a mother in East Jerusalem who first resists Israeli women entering her mourning tent, then says through tears, “I want them here.” The surprise lives beyond your prewritten ending.

(Note: This bar-two ethos rhymes with Katherine Boo’s and Atul Gawande’s practice—turn left where others go right; report until the outcome surprises even you.)

Shapiro confesses he once thought of conflicts as happening to “war people in war places.” Reporting in Iraq, Ukraine, and Europe burns that abstraction away. In northern Iraq, he follows checkpoints manned by Kurdish peshmerga to the Yazidi town of Snuny and up to the 800-year-old shrine of Sharfadin, where commander Qasim Shesho and 18 fighters held off ISIS for months with so little food that four men shared one round of flatbread a day. The temple stands. A mortar sits unspent in the dirt—an unexploded metaphor you can’t step on without changing how you see.

Sorrow With Names, Faces, And Phones

At a mass grave in Harman, Naif Brahem Khadir shows him a white headscarf with a bullet hole and guards bones so stray dogs won’t drag them away. In an IDP clinic, a father whose seven-year-old was killed says, “I was 90 percent pain last year. Now I’m 50 percent.” Shapiro ends not on a cliché (inshallah) but on the father bent over his phone, scrolling through photos of his child—an amulet against the unspeakable. The detail is the difference. Suffering becomes particular, not performative.

Eastern Ukraine: From “Amateur Hour” To Organized Men With Guns

He lands in Donetsk to find masked youths with metal pipes, old women making sausage sandwiches, Adele covers in the park. It feels silly—until, over a weekend, coordinated fighters seize buildings across towns at once. Clues of Russia’s hand multiply: unfamiliar accents, militants who can’t navigate local streets, a Russian officer captured on YouTube—then “vanished” through a fence. Shapiro maps a core insight Americans would need in 2016: adversaries don’t always plant ideas; they amplify existing divides (gun rights, race, LGBTQ equality) and pit citizens against one another. He debunks a viral “Jews must register” leaflet that ricocheted around the diaspora by standing in the synagogue and showing why it was obvious propaganda.

Follow One Person Across Borders

Instead of narrating the refugee crisis in aggregate, Shapiro and colleagues follow one Syrian teacher, Monzer Omar, from Izmir to Bodrum to Lesbos to Germany. You hear the engine fail in the Aegean, the bottle-scooped seawater, the rumor of trains, the knife fight at a bus, and, finally, “I am on the border of Hungary and Austria!” Then, months later in Dortmund, you hear laughter and plates clink when his wife Walaa and their daughters arrive after a ten-hour nocturnal walk to Turkey. Millions become a family of five, reunited—because the story stayed with them long enough.

(Parallel: Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns also replace abstractions with named neighbors you can’t unknow.)

Shapiro’s second life onstage isn’t a detour; it’s the same mission by other means. With Pink Martini, he records in half a dozen languages he doesn’t speak and sings a Jordanian-Egyptian Arabic lyric by Iyad Qasem—“Finnissma Di,” about a refugee longing for a homeland—while facing the Statue of Liberty from Pier 17. In Beirut, a festival organizer says it was “unnecessary” to mention that the singer is Jewish; the audience stands anyway. That’s the subtle politics of repertoire: in Texas, a Farsi song; in Athens, a Turkish tune; at Carnegie Hall, a conga line with strangers’ hands on strangers’ waists. Music enters the psyche “without permission,” as Andra Day told him on air.

Becoming A Singer By Accident (And Practice)

A kitchen-sink DC party leads to a late-night sing-along; bandleader Thomas Lauderdale hears Shapiro and invites him to record “But Now I’m Back,” a Schubert-by-way-of-Cuba answer song. Debut venue? The Hollywood Bowl. The last number? “Brasil.” He shakes a tambourine like a hailstorm on a tin roof and is immediately banned from that instrument forever. Later, when lead singer China Forbes needs emergency surgery, Storm Large jumps in to sing in nine languages; for the French classic “Sympathique,” Storm can’t nail the lyrics, so Shapiro turns the crowd into a French lesson. The show must go on—and connection can be improvised.

Cabaret And The Courage To Be Specific

Alan Cumming recognizes Shapiro’s radio voice in a Broadway dressing room; five years later they co-create a two-man cabaret, Och & Oy, that blends banter with ballads. Their first run in Provincetown ends in a Fire Island performance where Chita Rivera emerges mid-song to sing “Nowadays,” and the room becomes a secular revival. Cabaret, as scholar Ben Walters argues, isn’t a string of songs—it’s a pact with the room to change one another by the end. That’s also good interviewing. You’re not filling time; you’re holding open a space for something unrepeatable to happen.

Radical Faeries, Radical Acceptance

Annual camping trips with the radical faeries sharpen a principle he carries back to D.C.: create the world you want to live in rather than only critique the one you’ve inherited. In a dark cedar sauna, anonymous voices order imaginary burgers; by morning, he has a new way to hold seriousness and silliness together. The movement’s queer ancestor Harry Hay called it “subject–subject” relating—no one made into an object of use. That shows up later everywhere: in an East Jerusalem grape arbor where women weep together; in Toledo roommates who take in Mohammed al‑Refai, a Syrian butcher who becomes “Moh,” then a green-card holder, then a citizen. The music and the mic keep doing the same job.

(Contrast: Where “culture war” frames art as ornament, Shapiro and Cumming align with Václav Havel’s belief that culture does political work long before politics admits it.)

Late in the book, Shapiro turns to fiction to explain why his best journalism often starts with “I don’t know.” Novelists, he argues, make us try on other people’s skins. Nathan Englander says literature is subversive because it “crosses time and space”; Salman Rushdie reminds him that “human nature is the great constant.” Etgar Keret prefers metaphors to manifestos—they disarm tribal reflexes. Ari applies that to the news: when Colombia’s roads are crowded with Venezuelan migrants, he also interviews novelist Karina Sainz Borgo, who says nonfiction offers answers while novels offer better questions. The shift is subtle and practical: if you chase questions, people open up; if you perform answers, they shut down.

Hector Black And The Discipline Of Love

At a May Day gathering in Tennessee, a nonagenarian gay farmer tells Shapiro how he forgave—then befriended by letter—the man who murdered his daughter. Hector reads his courtroom statement: “I wish…that we might find God’s peace. And I wish that also for you.” Later he writes the killer: “I forgive you for what you did to our beloved daughter.” That forgiveness is not a hot take; it’s a life’s discipline. When he quotes Mother Teresa—“Lord, break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in”—you hear Shapiro’s title ring. The best strangers in the world fall into your broken-open life because you keep asking who they are, not only what they did.

Pulse: Joy As Rebellion

Reporting from Orlando after the Pulse nightclub massacre, he meets two young men who quote a drag queen: “Happiness is the ultimate rebellion.” Drag legend Ms. Darcel Stevens keeps the 10 p.m. show, then later tells Shapiro she didn’t rehearse—she prayed for words. Another man, Eddie Melzer, who translated for the FBI that night, says, “You can’t kill me. I’m an idea. I’m timeless.” The reporting doesn’t resolve cleanly; no sermon wraps the pain. But it animates a practice you can use when your own community is hurting: sit in the place built for joy, and keep singing as an act of defiance.

Questions You Can Carry

• What would this look like if I followed one person all the way through?
• Who here can contradict my prewritten ending with facts?
• Where could beauty sneak past defensiveness (song, food, humor)?
• How can I answer hate without becoming it? (“Thank you for listening.”)

When you’re tempted to deliver answers, try one of those questions instead. That’s how strangers become neighbors—and sometimes, family.

(Context: This aligns with Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise and Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, both of which elevate curious, generous presence over performative certainty.)