I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit once a year for a refresher. Murphy is a reporter and listening is her job, and for this project she found people who are better at it than she is. A CIA agent. A bartender. A focus group moderator. A priest. An air traffic controller. The top furniture salesman in the country. The most useful thing I learned is what she calls the shift response versus the support response. Somebody tells you something and you either shift it toward yourself — same thing happened to me, here’s what you should do — or you support them and ask them to keep going. Most of us shift to ourselves constantly and don’t ever notice. Murphy backs it all with neuroscience and sociology, spends a chapter on how phones changed things, and ultimately makes the convincing case that listening is the active position in a conversation, not the passive one. Can you hear me now?