Tim Bray reports from the frontiers of hugging How to Hug. My family came to the hugging game late. Not to say we “weren’t hugged as children” or anything, but at some point in the last decade, there was a shift in airport greetings from a bat of the eyes and “hey there” to a festival of all-round hugging. I think my brother Steve, the most tactile of us all, might have brought this on. It stuck.