Across the Divide, In Conversation

Frank Bruni opened the evening with a joke at Bret Stephens’s expense and, in doing so, made the night’s central point almost immediately.

Stephens, Bruni told the audience, had arrived at his home after Duke’s NCAA tournament loss and asked whether he should wear a UConn sweatshirt to the event.

“And I said, ‘Yeah, Bret, that’s really going to endear you to people,’” Bruni said.

The room laughed. So did Stephens.

That easy banter set the tone for a March 30 conversation in Penn Pavilion that doubled as something more than a public discussion. It offered a clear example of how friendship, curiosity and mutual regard can shape meaningful disagreement. Their onstage rapport reflects an ongoing exchange in 2026 as co-authors of The New York Times’ “The Conversation” column.

Part of Bruni’s Independent Thinkers series through Duke’s Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry and Belonging, the fireside chat explored politics, media and higher education. But the most memorable through line was the relationship between the two men themselves. Bruni, a Duke professor and longtime New York Times writer, and Stephens, a Times columnist and former (Pulitzer Prize-winning) Wall Street Journal editor, clearly disagree on plenty. They also clearly like each other.

That mattered. Again and again, their exchange returned to the same idea: people think better and argue more productively when they approach one another as human beings first.

A friendship grounded in generosity

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Early in the conversation, Bruni asked Stephens about moving from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times and what it meant to become an ideological outlier in a new newsroom. Stephens described the shift as personally and professionally jarring.

The experience was not seamless. Stephens recalled backlash from readers and tension inside the paper. But when Bruni asked who had welcomed him, Stephens paused to name several colleagues, then singled Bruni out.

“Frank, I just have to pay you this compliment,” Stephens said. “Frank was like the captain of the squash team. He was cool, and I was uncool. And so he was the cool kid who actually made the effort to befriend the uncool one.”

He continued, “I think it’s one of the reasons for our friendship, this sense of gratitude that you were just genuinely nice and human to me when a lot of people were not.” That answer gave the evening one of its clearest themes. Bruni and Stephens were not performing civility. They were drawing on a relationship shaped by disagreement and reinforced by ordinary kindness.

Bruni later pressed Stephens on what separates people who can engage those with different views from those who cannot. Stephens’s answer was simple.

“I think ideology, generally speaking, even if it has its uses, tends to make you see ideas before you see persons,” he said.

Seeing people before positions

For Stephens, the danger of ideological certainty is not only intellectual. It is relational.

“When you are accustomed to thinking that you are in a particular ideology, that ideology is right,” he said, “and if you don’t agree with it, it means only that you’re either stupid or malevolent.” He offered a different starting point. “I think the most important lesson you can learn in life is that most of the people with whom you disagree want pretty much the same ends: a more decent, reasonable, humane, prosperous life for as many people as possible,” he said. “Where the disagreement happens is in the means.”

That conviction shaped the conversation itself. Bruni challenged Stephens, sometimes sharply, but always with warmth and humor. Stephens responded with seriousness and, at times, appreciation for the exchange. The result was a model of disagreement that felt increasingly rare. It was probing without being performative and lively without becoming cruel.

“When I encounter an opposite point of view,” Stephens said, “if that point of view is well expressed, well thought through, it will serve to sharpen my own arguments.”

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The limits of digital life

If curiosity and friendship were the evening’s positive examples, social media was its negative one.

“I think social media needs to be rechristened anti-social media because it makes people jerks,” Stephens said. He returned to the value of physical presence. “There’s no answer to that other than to find ways to relentlessly socialize people face to face,” he said. “There’s something about that that makes us more humane.”

That emphasis gave the event added resonance. The evening reflected the kind of encounter Stephens described: direct, embodied, imperfect, and human.

Later, speaking about universities, Stephens praised free expression but said it is not enough on its own.

“The word I keep coming back to is engagement,” he said, “the sense of creating settings in which different points of view have an opportunity to interact.”

Humility and changing your mind

Bruni also steered the conversation toward humility, asking Stephens to reflect on moments when he had publicly changed his mind.

“First of all, I’m wrong much of the time,” Stephens said, eliciting audience laughter. “I just admit to it on occasion.”

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He described how his thinking on climate risk evolved after seeing environmental changes firsthand and reconsidering how he understood risk.

He also reflected on past writing that he now regrets. A specific column-opening line that harshly generalized voters who didn’t choose his preferred candidate. 

“I really regret that line,” he said. “First of all, the condescension, the snideness, the kind of moral superiority.” He continued, “It was incumbent on me… to actually listen and try to find the signal amidst the noise. And I failed to do that.”

That willingness to revisit his own judgments reinforced one of the conversation’s strongest lessons. Engagement requires not only confidence, but openness to revision.

A different way of arguing

As the event moved into audience questions, the conversation widened to include journalism, higher education and public trust. Yet even as topics shifted, the central dynamic remained intact: challenge grounded in mutual respect.

Near the end of the night, Bruni asked a question from an audience member struggling to separate political anger from personal relationships. Stephens did not offer a simple answer. Instead, he urged compassion.

“Let’s look with a bit of humanity and a bit of compassion and a bit of imagination at the lives and choices made by others,” he said. Then he brought the point back to everyday life, crystallizing what a conversation like this can offer. “The only thing you can do is think for yourself and try to act decently with the people who are right in front of your face,” he said. “If you can get through your days doing that, you’re halfway there.”