How to survive awkward encounters

Avoiding awkwardness is about removing the power from the situation. | Ute Grabowsky/Getty Images Thanksgiving is the Super Bowl of awkwardness. You love these people (mostly), but the scripts are fuzzy. Do we hug? Do we talk politics? What do I say when someone hits me with the third “so, how’s work?” in an hour? We tend to treat that discomfort as a “me” problem, like we’re bad at socializing or broken in some way. Alexandra Plakias thinks that’s the wrong story. She’s a philosopher at Hamilton College and the author of Awkwardness: A Theory, and she argues that there are no awkwa