TED Talks Daily
Sunday Pick: How to love your hometown (w/ Hanif Abdurraqib & Sarah Kay) | How to Be a Better Human
23 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Happy Sunday, TED Talks Daily listeners. I'm Elise Hu. Today, we're bringing you another one of our Sunday picks, where we share an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. Up now, an episode of How to Be a Better Human, hosted by comedian Chris Duffy.
Loving where you live means caring for the people who make that place home, says writer and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib. He invites Chris and poet Sarah Kay to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to show off what makes it so special. From sneaker shops and record stores to public parks, Hanif talks about how he builds community and how home, as the saying goes, really is where the heart is.
This episode is part of a special series, the How to Be a Better Human bonus videos adapted for podcasts just for our TED Talks daily listeners. To watch the entire special series, head to TED.com. And if you want to hear more insights like this, listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts. That's coming up.
What is home? Lately, I've been thinking about that question a lot. Because home isn't just a place with familiar spots and corners. It's where you feel a sense of belonging. And as the world has gotten bigger and messier and lonelier, I have been feeling like it is more urgent than ever to have people and places that I can depend on. To really call a place home.
When I brought this up to my friend, the poet and educator Sarah Kay, she said,
We have to go to Columbus, Ohio and hang out with my friend Hanif Abdurraqib. No one is a better person to show us what it means to be from a place, to love that place and to love the people in it.
So today we are hanging out with Hanif Abdurraqib and learning about why he loves his hometown so much. Hanif Abdurraqib wears many hats, but I know him first as a poet and a writer, a cultural critic who writes about music in a way that makes you just want to listen to albums all day long. An essayist whose books about grief and joy and basketball make you ugly cry in public.
Every time I think I'm going to dodge it and then he gets me again, I am tearing up.
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Chapter 2: What does it mean to truly love your hometown?
Hanif spends a lot of time on the road, but he always returns to the place where he is from, the east side of Columbus, Ohio. And that is not just a place that Hanif loves. It is clearly a place that loves Hanif right back. So I sat down with Hanif in one of his favorite spots in town, a vinyl record shop called Spoonful Records, to find out why.
I've been thinking a lot about the idea of when the world is really overwhelming and there's so much going on, how one of the ways that we can ground ourselves is to be in a specific place, to be in a community and with people we care about, taking care of them and having them take care of us.
You know, we're filming this and recording this in June. It's like a massive heat wave that has gripped the city. And last night my neighborhood lost power, like my street lost power. And it's a funny thing happens when you lose power, at least for me, where I had like 10 solid minutes of being like, maybe this is just affecting me.
But I like gradually like peeked out my window and saw one of my neighbors gathering in a gazebo in the middle of our street. So it was wonderful in a sense to go out to this gathering point and have everyone kind of like, we all don't have power. What are the most immediate needs?
If I were to say, I am just like a small speck in this grand universe, I would very easily and quickly fall into this individualism. Instead of me saying, well, I step outside of my house and I see either a person or I see the results of a person's living reflected directly to me. Why do you love Columbus so much?
I tend to think that my most joyful experiences living in Columbus are mirrored by the fact that people just talk to me in a way that is also familiar and comfortable. We're in Spoon Cool Records in Columbus, Ohio. It's my favorite record shop. And Columbus is a great record town. In every city I would stop on tour. I would go digging. I would go record shopping. But it's kind of isolating.
I know my own taste. Left to my own devices, I would just be delving through the crates in search of whatever would satiate and satisfy my own taste. It requires someone, be it a friend you bring to the shop with you or a person behind the counter like Brett or Amy or Elijah here at Spoonful, who can say, I remember we had this talk about Sly Stone. I got these Sly Stone B-sides you want to hear.
That's so cool. Amy drew this. Yeah, yeah. Just the people who know you with a depth of curiosity and care. Thanks as always, y'all. Yeah, tell me I said what's up. And definitely email me the stuff you're working on. Hit me up. I think if I offer myself up freely and eagerly to others, it informs our collective, our shared interests in each other.
So that when we come across something that we think might delight the other person, we hold on to it for a while until they reenter our lives again. And that is beautiful to me. And I think that has really mapped itself out through my life in Columbus.
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Chapter 3: How does community shape our sense of belonging?
What's up, brother? How you been? Good, brother. Good to see you. Yeah, take a donut. I'm a big sneaker guy. And when I was coming up, sneaker boutiques were not as popular. Now there's sneaker boutiques everywhere. And Heat Archive is interesting because they're local guys. You have so many incredible shoes.
What's the most Columbus sneaker you have in the store? Most Columbus sneaker in the store. Like if you could sum up the city in one. Definitely these. Scarlet and gray. These would take it every time. And for those of you who are wondering why these shoes, well, scarlet and gray are the colors of Ohio State University, the Buckeyes.
They're so caring and thoughtful for our young folks. And they don't really talk about it that much, but like if kids come in with a good report card, they'll give them a pair of sneakers for free. Or if a kid comes in and doesn't have enough money for the pair that he wants, they'll like take care of them. It feels like as much of a community hub as a sneaker shop can be.
This is what we love to do and have a big passion for. So bringing this here, like growing up, It was like our dream.
I am someone who I grew up, born and raised in New York City, and I left. I moved somewhere else. You have such a deep connection to Ohio. You were raised here. You still live here. What do you think makes some people leave their hometowns and some people stay?
I think... The relationship with one's place of origin is, by definition, I think, a contentious one because you don't choose it. A place is something that happens to you. What keeps me here, I guess I can't speak to why people leave, but there is one woman on a street in East Columbus who has held onto her house no matter what.
She's been offered so much money, been offered so much to move out of that house because if she moves out of that house, it is... The entry point to kind of raise that neighborhood and make it something else. And she refuses to leave. And her refusal, I think, is an action that my work is pointing towards.
My very presence is stopping the worst designs of a city that has no idea who its population actually is. And my staying here means I'm actually keeping a history that existed before me and a history that I want to exist after me. Because what's the point of staying in a neighborhood if the neighborhood no longer feels like it's a place where you're welcome?
Or if you cannot be translated through the new population of that neighborhood?
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