The art of conversation — taken apart, one real exchange at a time.
Something happens between two people when they talk. Most of us never look at what that something is. Open + Curious does — in weekly essays that examine real conversations and find the mechanics hiding inside them.
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What’s here
Field Notes are the weekly essays. Each one picks apart a single real conversation — not a hypothetical, an actual exchange between actual people — and traces what happened and why it mattered.
Field Guides go deeper. Where a Field Note follows one conversation, a Field Guide synthesizes several into a framework. They’re the longer, denser work. The first one is yours free when you subscribe.
Recent posts
The Asker’s Answer
In 2022, Matthew Jensen co-hosted a podcast with a friend, Mike, who was not a subject expert and took the asking role. Yet when Jensen described their best conversations, Mike’s questions did not come into it. A question shows what someone wants to know. It does not show what they think. Distance from a subject… More →
What I Might Choose
Linda McLachlan asked the guests on her life-story podcast roughly the same questions, and usually heard their stories before recording. She was often surprised by which moment a guest treated as the turn. Guests were not dodging the hard part; the moment that looked biggest from outside simply was not the one that turned them.… More →
Granting the 95 Percent
Sam Ardery, who mediates disputes, once spent a lunch listing everything Ardery’s wife was doing wrong. An account of a conflict is a request for a ruling, and agreeing or arguing both give one. The friend did neither. He granted the whole 95 percent as a premise, for one conversation, and agreed to none of… More →
Free Guide
How Connection Actually Works — 5,500 words across four conversations, building a map of what connection actually is. (Not what we’re told it is. What it actually is. They’re different.)
“The very thing that makes connection work — the absence of calculation — disappears the instant you start keeping a ledger.”
About
I’m Craig Constantine. I’ve published nearly 450 long-form conversations over the past decade, and Open + Curious is where I dig into what I keep noticing about how they work.