Say you’re a student at Hogwarts, and you want to help your uncle reject Voldemort. You might start like this:You: I’d love to better understand your feelings about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.Uncle: Well, he’s the most powerful wizard alive. Also, his followers promised me a fancy title.You: Interesting. Is there anything you dislike about him?Uncle: Hmm. I’m not crazy about all the murdering.You: Well, nobody’s perfect. What’s stopped you from abandoning him?Uncle: I’m afraid he might direct the murdering toward me.You: That’s a reasonable fear — I’ve felt it too. Are there any principles that matter so deeply to you that you’d be willing to take that risk?

Several decades ago, when treating substance abuse problems, psychologists developed a technique called motivational interviewing. The central premise: Instead of trying to force other people to change, you’re better off helping them find their own intrinsic motivation to change. You do that by interviewing them — asking open-ended questions and listening carefully — and holding up a mirror so they can see their own thoughts more clearly. If they express a desire to change, you guide them toward a plan.

When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.

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Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric or phases of developing a persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

(/ˈrɛtərɪk/)[note 1] is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic – see Martianus Capella), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations.[5] Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies; he calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics".[6]

I was having some trouble articulating it, but Saunders was right there, leaning in and encouraging. He has a bushy blond mustache and goatee going gray, and sometimes, when he’s listening intently, he can look a little stern, as if he just stepped out of a tent at Antietam. But then he starts talking and the eyebrows go up and it’s all Chicago vowels and twinkly Doug Henning eyes, and if you didn’t know that he was more or less universally regarded as a genius, you might peg him as the superfriendly host of a woodworking show on daytime public access.

Sometime during the night of Sept. 4, 2018, Billie Eilish took her own life — in a dream. “I jumped off a building,” she recalled recently. What was most alarming about it, as she looked back, was how little it alarmed her. “I was in a really bad place mentally,” Eilish said; the dream struck her less as a nightmare than as a grimly alluring fantasy. The next day, she approached her older brother, Finneas O’Connell, a songwriter and producer, and told him about it. They have collaborated on every piece of music she has put out, and she presented the dream to him as possible inspiration for a new song.