What made telephone conversation so interesting to one of the main progenitors of “conversational analysis”—a discipline that looks for the deep structures in our everyday talk—was not that it represented some bold break from traditional human communication, but that it is, in essence, pure talk, not contaminated by the suggestive glance, the gesture of a hand, a person’s body torque. Sifting through hundreds of hours of actual recorded calls from an array of sources, Schegloff rigorously dissected the dynamics in play when two people who cannot see each other talk: the turn taking, the “forced position repair” (that moment in a conversation when one realizes there has been a misunderstanding—“I thought you meant . . .”— and the participants must go backward in time to “fix” the conversational thread).