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 awkward people, only awkward situations. Awkwardness, for her, is what happens when the unwritten scripts that guide our social life break down and we are suddenly improvising without a map.

I invited Plakias onto The Gray Area to talk about why awkwardness deserves philosophical attention and what it might l

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