Explain Yourself! corners the worst tech in our lives and demands to know: WTF?! This week: the XP1000 – Krups’s absolute bottom-of-the-line espresso machine, which, we discovered, is dealing with ...

Karl Barth famously attacked apologetics—the attempt to offer a persuasive account of Christian belief on mutually agreed-upon grounds of reason—as a misguided task, part of the failure of theological ...

Explain Yourself! corners the worst tech in our lives and demands to know: WTF?! This week: Snapchat, the “real-time picture chatting” app that promises to delete your pictures a set amount of time ...

In touchy situations, people resort to calm, rational explanations, thinking that they are the essence of good communication. All too often, though, this can get them just the opposite of what they ...

Source: Christina Morillo / Pexels Have you ever walked away from a conversation with that sinking feeling that you said too much? Not because you were impolite or inconsiderate—but because you tried ...

Have you ever caught yourself giving a long explanation for a decision that needed no defense? Whether it’s saying no to an outing, choosing a career path your family doesn’t understand, or setting a ...

In this—the first edition of the “Explain Yourself” video series, in which New Yorker writers, artists, and cartoonists reveal the inspiration or thought process behind their work—the cartoonist Liam ...

In his incisive 2006 book Why? Charles Tilly explains how we explain ourselves. According to Tilly, reasons fall into four overlapping categories: conventions, stories, codes, and technical accounts.