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.
The other day commenter Cotdail took issue with a tossed-off aside in my post about religion and happiness. I said the hostility of militant atheists to religion borders on madness, […]
Maybe there are no atheists in foxholes, as William T. Cummings famously said. But who wants to live in a foxhole? Most of us would prefer a room with a […]
As it sheds the notion that people are rational pursuers of their own self-interest, society is slowly but surely reconfiguring itself. The changes usually fall below the radar of daily […]
Like a biblical parable, the typical human-behavior experiment is easily told and easily reduced to a message: People who pay with credit cards were more likely to have potato chips […]
In branding, the conventional wisdom says that using the same computer or cologne as, say, George Clooney will make you feel more like him and, therefore, good about yourself. Conventional […]
At the end of War and Peace Tolstoy compares belief in free will to medieval cosmologies where the Sun revolved around the Earth. To know the true cosmos, he writes, […]
Take two strapping young men. Give one of them a job as a lifeguard from May until September. For the same period, pay the other one to “farm gold” in […]
Dream of bashing in Michelle Bachmann’s ferocious grin? Ripping open the capacious gut of Gingrich? Frying that execution-lovin’ Rick Perry? Dissecting Mitt Romney to see if he’s as weird on […]
A recent performance of Anne Nelson’s moving 9/11 play The Guys introduced me to the concept of the “square rooter”—people on a team who are only out for themselves (when […]
When I hand my one-year-old son something to eat, he spends a short time looking at it and a long time looking at me: Is this good? Is it tasty? […]
The Social Security program, Rick Petty reiterated the other day, is “a Ponzi scheme for these young people.” The notion that Social Security pensions will be available for today’s younger […]
Don’t just kill that guy, says Paul Rubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Kill him a lot.“ It’s a funny line (a great line, really) because it plays with the […]
Cuba. 1527. “All hands labored severely under a heavy fall of water that entire day and until dark on Sunday. By then the rain and the tempest had stepped up […]
What did you do, really, when Irene struck? As you listen to people tell tales that make them sound more threatened, more casual-cool or more heroic than they really were, […]
The world’s leaders, financial and political, are disappointed in us. Around the globe, they’ve cut spending on our schools and roads and parks, raised our retirement ages, taken aim at […]
Observing how radical political ideas had become mainstream in only a few years, in 1888 the Victorian politician Sir William Harcourt is supposed to have said “we are all socialists […]
However you feel about the right way out of the U.S. government’s struggles over its debt ceiling, I think we can all agree that the week past has not been […]
Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. […]
They live in a parallel society, a world apart, where they obey an alien law and pray to an alien God. Their liberal allies foolishly promote toleration and claim these […]
We like to think the traits that make life sweet are those that make it long. But a recent long-term study of longevity over decades suggests that’s not so.
Carlo Maria Broschi, better known as Farinelli, was one of the most celebrated opera singers of all time, and the 18th century equivalent of a rock star (“One God and […]
New technologies bring forth new art forms, and those forms create new ways to understand life. The theater gave everyone his or her say (even the man the Queen’s grandfather […]
Disputes about evidence in social science can drag on for decades. I bet many a researcher has fantasized about the day when a world-famous panel of judges looks at the […]
People’s attitudes lag behind their times, as Hermann Broch observed. At the height of the European Enlightenment, philosophers who dreamed of universal rights accepted that men would be broken on […]
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is one of the most famous novels ever written about combat, in general and in the American Civil War, where the book is […]
There’s little doubt that sports are good for the bodies and minds of people who play them. For people who watch them, though, sports are a negative.
Six months out of the year I try to spend as much time as possible on the roof of my building in Brooklyn, where I’m cooled by a non-air-conditioned breeze, […]
Accidents happen. Their causes are physical, and it’s our actions that make them likely or unlikely, not the names we call them. I know this. Yet the inherent biases of […]
I’m nonplussed by Mary Elizabeth Williams’ comment today, over at Salon, that Anthony Weiner’s impending fatherhood “drastically changed” the Weinergate drama. Not that I disagree that “the timing of Weiner’s […]
A number of responses to my post on mental illness and civil rights deserve some further thought. A number of people have pointed to the variance in definitions of mental […]