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.
“Resist what resists in you,” the god Krishna tells heroic Arjuna in Peter Brook’s epic theatrical version of The Mahabharata. “Become yourself!” This is, as the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe […]
Among the appalling sights Primo Levi witnessed at Auschwitz was the fervent prayer of a prisoner grateful to be spared the ovens. “I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud,” […]
My mother had always been a suspicious and secretive person, but it wasn’t until I was 14 that she really went nuts—with many of the same symptoms described in Rachel […]
Newt Gingrich, the thinking man’s Glenn Beck, is said to be a viable Presidential candidate because he has fresh, creative ideas. Even if you accept that notion at face value, […]
“We might ask ourselves,” writes Noam Chomsky about the Bin Laden mission, “how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped […]
Among the many deplorable effects of reading this blog, according to old-school journalists, is that you can’t count on what The New York Times (here, scroll down to section B5) […]
Spring has sprung in here in New York City, stripping off our layers of winter clothes. The eye falls with pleasure on a pair of pretty feminine legs in a […]
Spring has sprung in here in New York City, stripping off our layers of winter clothes. The eye falls with pleasure on a pair of pretty feminine legs in a […]
When I was a kid, atheists ruled over large swatches of the world and mainstream conventional wisdom expected religion to die out. If Communism (not then acquainted with history’s ash-heap) […]
The first thing you hear from him is a complaint: He’s talking, but the other guy isn’t listening. The last thing he does is announce he’s not going to talk […]
My favorite lines of Shakespeare have no poetry about them, and no style. They’re simple words, uttered in desperate circumstances. They remind that life is not, for the most part, […]
A century ago, governments began to assert their authority over poor people and immigrants whose bad behavior was supposedly spreading epidemic diseases like smallpox, cholera and typhus. Cops in Boston […]
With unhealthy diets raising people’s risk worldwide for heart trouble, diabetes and other chronic diseases, the hunt is on for better ways to get us all to eat more vegetables and fruits. The answer could be in your nearest vending machine.
With koanic brilliance, Robin Sloan recently summarized the difference between last century’s old command-and-control journalism and today’s. It was, of course, a tweet: “The way to cover big news in […]
The other day I asked for examples of practical post-rationality—changes in law or policy that happened because institutions have stopped assuming that people behave rationally. A number of people wrote […]
This study just out in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin claims to have found a general societal prejudice against women who breast-feed. Reports about the work concurred. But I think […]
Thomas Nagel says that “devaluation of conscious reasoning” is a form of “moral and intellectual laziness,” and that David Brooks is guilty of same in his new book. Nagel’s review […]
Advocates of nuclear power say the rational choice is to keep licensing those reactors, despite the ongoing crisis in Japan. But a healthy fear of nukes might just be evolutionarily motivated.
It’s well known that New York City (and the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant) sits on fault lines, making an earthquake entirely possible. A geological paper says that the eastern seaboard might need to worry about tsunamis as well.
When people discuss “rationality” they can mean any of five different concepts.
Research on life extension is all about aging and death within a human body. Perhaps it should expand to encompass the effects of being run over by a car: According […]
The website Neurotree shows the biographical roots of ideas, mapping them like a genealogical chart—which mentors brought forth which proteges and who in turn mentored others.
Google the words ‘baby’ and “owned” and you’ll find a curious phenomenon: many people have put up vids of infants and toddlers getting conked, clobbered, whacked and tripped.
The mainstream is beginning to accept the “post-rational view of the mind, but what next? How do we rethink our societal assumptions and institutions? Join the conversation here with the After Thought Project.
“I believe in a forgiving God,” Newt Gingrich said the other day when he was asked to reconcile his public defense of “traditional marriage” with the fact that he cheated […]
Most of the nation’s people identify themselves first by tribe or religion, and are all too ready to spit on the cultures of others, says Firouz Folani.
A new study suggests that lefties and right-wingers both accept only the pieces of science that support their values.
What’s the matter with social psychology? Everybody in social science (including social psychology itself) has a diagnosis, because everybody thinks something is amiss (“it’s a terrible field,” an anthropologist once […]
While there are currently two dozen apps on the market designed to help people quit smoking, a new study says none of this software is likely to do the job.
The link between Super Bowls and heart failure is usually written in guacamole and beer. But we are a social species, whose feelings about group identity have a direct impact […]