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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.
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Some time in the early 1960s, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot was asked by a university librarian to give his advice about some dusty journals no one consulted—should they be thrown […]
Last week’s New Yorker contained this mind-opening piece by Atul Gawande, who argues that muddling through with small-bore trial projects is not a bad response to the crisis in U.S. […]
People do many things without knowing why: buy stuff they didn’t think they wanted, vote differently when they’re in one setting than they would in another, order a different lunch […]
If you want to speculate about an alternate-universe world without intelligent primates (and who doesn’t?), then your thoughts must turn to the octopus. Because the octopus has a large and […]
A key assumption in many social sciences is that people have preferences, and that these are both knowable and stable. That’s the point of surveys on every subject from whipped […]
People who have suffered from major depression are significantly better than other people at seeing a metaphorical forest, while the non-depressed are more alert to the trees, according to this […]
In American folklore, testosterone is supposed to cause rage, lust, competitiveness, nuclear arms races, beer hats and other indicators of whacked-out excess masculinity. Andrew Sullivan, for example, wrote years ago […]