David Berreby
Author, Us and Them: The Science of Identity
David Berreby is the author of "Us and Them: The Science of Identity." He has written about human behavior and other science topics for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Smithsonian, The New Republic, Nature, Discover, Vogue and many other publications. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Paris, a Science Writing Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a resident at Yaddo, and in 2006 was awarded the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the first edition of "Us and Them." David can be found on Twitter at @davidberreby and reached by email at david [at] davidberreby [dot] com.
Imagine how different your life would be if next Earth Day a year from now, you supplied the power to this computer—by pedaling, churning or dancing. The way these students […]
If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are “harder,” more fundamentally “sciencey” sciences than hers. […]
Here at Mind Matters we strive to be your full-service source of octopus-cognition news. And in my last post on that, I described humans making videos for octopuses. So it’s […]
The other day I pointed out the conflicting motives of corporations that sell soda, snacks and fast food: They promote “wellness” because they want manageable health-care costs, but they also […]
The other night I was watching ABC’s remake of “V” and wondering: What if the space-boot was on the other foot? What if we human beings were the “advanced” species, […]
A rapidly forming stereotype about autistic people is that they can’t use stereotypes. In the words of this site about kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, for instance, “they are usually free […]
Seeking the hidden causes of behavior, some scientists work on the scale of brain regions and neurons, searching inside people’s heads. Others work on the scale of crowds, neighborhoods and […]
A while back I linked to a couple of studies in which scary public-health messages had the opposite of their intended effect: These anti-drinking and anti-smoking ads made people want […]
Iphone meets blender. Blender wins. Story of all our lives, isn’t it? I mean, given that we’re all heading for an inevitable blending of our constituent atoms with the universe’s flotsam […]
Organic chemistry’s an intricate subject. Media chatter about wellness, though, is an action movie, where “good” molecules (like Omega-3 fatty acids) battle “bad” ones (like LDL cholesterol). If they could, […]
The “Prisoner’s Dilemma” is one of game theory’s oldest, most influential and most poetic ideas. As in life, a player’s best strategy depends on the kind of game she’s in […]
Why use boring old bread to make your sandwich, when instead you can plop your bacon, cheese and sauce between two slices of deep-fried meat? It sounds like a sitcom […]
Here’s a story about balancing work and family, as recounted recently by Teddy Kennedy: One day in 1961 John F. Kennedy was comforting his crying daughter at the family’s Hyannis […]
There you are, minding your own business on the outskirts of Sydney, thinking about seafood, sex, getting ahead, whatever, when whoomf, the aliens’ ship has caught you. And now you’re […]
South of the Sundarbans mangrove forest, in the Bay of Bengal, lies one of those tiny flecks of land at the center of endless negotiation between two countries—a little patch […]
How do you get people in a democratic society to change their way of life? The theme has come up a lot at gatherings of climate scientists and environmentalists I’ve […]
Is it time to accept that plenty of cancer-screening in the developed world is motivated by psychological needs, rather than fact? Screening addresses our fears of statistically unlikely horrors, which […]
I am not one to endorse stereotypes based on ethnicity, nation or religion. Especially not the ones from the earliest Star Trek series, in which everyone in the galaxy either […]
This is my 100th post on Mind Matters. Hence the cake in the pic, which was made for a wedding by Seattle’s Jet City Cakes, using H.R. Giger’s designs for […]
It’s a truth universally acknowledged around the world that education is good. The higher a people’s schooling, goes the mantra, the better its economic progress, political prospects and gender equality. […]
In the 1960’s and 70’s, with Americans worried about Communist hordes and Nazism a living memory, many feared that people are just naturally sheep—all too ready to conform, cower and […]
In the 20th century, the greatest threats to civilization arose out of ecstatic emotions, especially when they united thousands of people. The last century’s true believers rallied, wept and sang […]
Solar panels aren’t born green. Their manufacture uses power, often generated in plants that burn coal or oil, and releases pollutants (including greenhouse gases) into the environment. The extent of […]
Then check out these guys. The “coffee party” had about 29,000 Facebook “fans” on the morning of March 1, according to this New York Times story. By the same afternoon, […]
Fear, guilt and shame often push people into coping behaviors, which ease the momentary pain, even as they hurt long-term. Smoking, for instance. Or binge-drinking. And one path to fear, […]
From the great Carl Zimmer comes a link to a beautiful video of a siphonophore. (Click through jump to watch.) It includes soundtrack from the scientist who has discovered many […]
Why do people so often fail to live up to their own standards?
When you’re an infant, the brain makes three dots and a line into a face; later in life, it turns a creak and a shadow into a ghost. Adults too […]
“I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins,” said the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, neatly summarizing the theory of “kin selection”: To predict how much one […]
Before there were abstract concepts, and probably before there were numbers, there were stories. She did this; it made him do that; then I heard her say this. According to […]