What is a "Thick Description?"

When we're talking about complicated political topics, we're talking about complicated questions of identity or the lived reality of people who might be different than us. What you need is something that sociologists call "thick description."
Thick description is the opposite of the flatness of a tweet. A tweet, a headline that tries to get you to click, the front page of a magazine, the thing that is trying to grab your attention, that's flat. It's flat; it's two-dimensional. It's trying to grab you.
Thick description, a term sociologists use, is to really inhabit the life-world of a culture, a group of people, or an institution. And to mine all the complexity, the internal contradictions, and the manifestations of that life world.
That's what good sociologists do; it's what good ethnographers do, anthropologists. And it's a really necessary skill at this moment precisely because of the flatness of the discourse and because the thing that we're constantly talking about, this show talks about, that our politics revolve around are people from different backgrounds trying to communicate to each other about what their identity is, where they're coming from.
And so what we have is this crazy mismatch of politics that demands that we're interacting and listening to folks that are coming from different backgrounds and a medium of communicating that is as flat as humanly possible.