On Being with Krista Tippett · On Being Studios

Jason Reynolds — On Hopelessness, the Virtue of Stamina, and Showing Grace to Ourselves

March 19, 2026·52 min·4 clips

The day after Trump's first election, Jason Reynolds flew into a small Illinois town and his driver explained exactly why people there voted the way they did.

Hope is not asked to perform. Krista Tippett introduces Jason Reynolds as a writer whose wisdom stays close to young people, public pressure, and the grace people need when certainty starts to crack. Reynolds will not sell easy brightness. The conversation begins on a 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival stage and keeps slipping into harder territory: fear, age, race, endurance, and what happens when people are worn down but still have to live together. Reynolds jokes about being forty-one. Then the room settles into the question of stamina. What does it mean to keep going when the world has made people tired and alert? His mother enters the story. After Trump was first elected, she worried about his trip to Olney, Illinois. She carried memories from rural South Carolina and the long pressure of racism in America. Reynolds went anyway. The man who picked him up from the airport named the fear almost before Reynolds did: maybe the town was racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, sexist, and misogynistic. He did not deny it. He said some of that was true. Then he described a small town with one stoplight, one school, one church, a Walmart, unpaved roads, crops, insurance adjusters, and economic abandonment. The story does not tidy itself up. Reynolds does not excuse harm, and he does not pretend slogans explain whole lives. He lets the encounter make the frame wider, with scarcity, fear, and daily life all visible at once. Tippett gives him room. The question becomes less about whether pain excuses prejudice and more about what kind of attention keeps people human to one another. Hopelessness gets handled softly. The conversation does not shame despair away. It lets despair be part of an honest life. Stamina becomes smaller and tougher than optimism. It is the act of showing up again when the future feels fragile and the young are still watching. Grace stays practical: self-forgiveness, listening before deciding, and holding contradiction without pretending it has been solved.

As heard by us

A patient conversation about hope under pressure, and the discipline of staying open to it.

Jason Reynolds comes across as a writer whose hope has been worked for, not styled. The conversation moves through grace, hopelessness, stamina, and the idea that age does not have to be the measure of wisdom.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play when you want Jason Reynolds's muscular hope and the grace to be hopeless.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from On Being with Krista Tippett