How to find belonging (w/ Hanif Abdurraqib)
How to Be a Better Human
TED
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Where do you belong and what does community mean to you? These are the central questions Chris asks poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib while visiting Hanif’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Hanif is a poet and essayist of many notable works such as They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, A Fortune for Your Disaster, and A Little Devil in America, among others. Hanif joins Chris to share his love for the city Columbus, what it means to be cared for by community members, and how spending time with others can show you how to love them better.
This episode is part of a series of bonus videos from "How to Be a Better Human." You can watch the extended video companion on the TED YouTube Channel and the extended interview on the TED Audio Collective YouTube Channel.
Watch
Hanif shows Chris and Sarah his hometown: https://youtu.be/xGJe_eRw2Ao
Extended interview with Chris: https://youtu.be/hl-5PGuwEBg
Follow
Host: Chris Duffy (Instagram: @chrisiduffy | https://chrisduffycomedy.com/)
Guest:
Hanif Abdurraqib (Instagram: @nifmuhammad | https://www.abdurraqib.com/)
Sarah Kay (Instagram: @kaysarahsera | https://kaysarahsera.com/)
Links
Humor Me by Chris Duffy (https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL)
Follow TED!
X: https://www.twitter.com/TEDTalks
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ted
Facebook: https://facebook.com/TED
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoks
Podcasts: https://www.ted.com/podcasts
For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. |
| 0:05.9 | Today on the show, we are thinking through something that seems so simple, but is increasingly |
| 0:10.6 | a huge challenge for many of us, how to be in community. How do you create roots in a place? |
| 0:17.2 | How are you influenced by where you are from? How do you care for your community? |
| 0:21.9 | And how does your community care for you? |
| 0:24.2 | These are really big, heady questions. |
| 0:26.0 | These are the kinds of questions that only a genius or a poet could fully answer. |
| 0:30.7 | And good news, because today's guest is both a poet and a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. |
| 0:36.7 | Hanif Abder Akib is a writer who proudly comes from and lives in Columbus, Ohio. |
| 0:42.0 | And to get us started in this conversation, I want to give you a taste of Hanif's work. |
| 0:46.2 | So let's set the tone with a clip from one of my favorite poems of all time. |
| 0:49.9 | This is a poem from Hanif's book, A Fortune for Your Disaster. |
| 0:53.0 | And this particular poem is called, It is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent, and |
| 0:57.9 | this is how we do it. |
| 0:59.1 | It is once again the summer of my discontent. |
| 1:02.7 | And this is how we do it. |
| 1:04.4 | It's creeping out of some open window. |
| 1:06.7 | Same way it was in the summer of 95, when my heartbreak was a different animal, howling |
| 1:12.1 | at the same clouds, and the cops broke up the block party at Franklin Park. |
| 1:17.3 | Right before the song hit the last verse, because someone from the right hood locked |
| 1:22.4 | eyes with someone from the wrong one, and me and my boys ran into the corner store and tucked the chocolate |
| 1:28.9 | bars into the humid caverns of our pants pockets, and later licked the melted |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of TED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.