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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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Do science journalists have weird psychic powers? You might think so, given the near simultaneity of publications this fall on the touchy theme of studies that don't really prove what they're supposed to have proved.
Last summer I described how psychologists at Rutgers closed the usual gap between higher boys’ and lower girls’ scores on high-school chemistry tests. When the students used a textbook whose […]
Daryl J. Bem’s experiments on psi caught the world’s attention, as I posted last month, because he used standard psychology-lab methods to gather and analyze his data. Imagine what astronomers […]
If you were a sophisticated and up-to-the-minute science buff in 17th century Europe, you knew that there was only one properly scientific way to explain anything: “the direct contact-action of […]
Before shopping and football, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving to be a holiday for American solidarity.
Colonel Russell Williams is one of those double-life people—an able military commander who was also a rapist and murderer. The crimes for which he was sentenced last month were shockingly […]
If you’re a member of America’s anxious middle class, you can feel downtrodden one minute and privileged the next, just watching the news. Here’s some super-rich guy planning his run […]
You don’t move to a new town, take a new job, or make a new friend to stay the same. But you don’t want to lose your soul, either. The […]
Governments have been trying a lot of new tricks lately to get people to eat more healthily, from calorie-count labels to taxes on soda to banning fast-food outlets from whole […]
I’ve always thought New Yorkers lead a hermit-crab existence, with our dance clubs that used to be banks and our townhouses that used to be stables and our living rooms […]
Psi is psychology’s equivalent of the perpetual motion machine in physics. Claims in favor of telepathy, clairvoyance, premonitions or other extra-sensory perceptions were always considered the realm of looney-tunes who […]
Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has nailed the real problem with the deficit-cutting ideas floated the other day by the the co-chairs of President Obama’s Commission of Fiscal Responsibility […]
Psychiatrists see a lot of people who are, to use the technical term, screwed up. Psychiatrists’ talk, then, often turns around curing, or ameliorating, or at least preventing “bad” behaviors […]
Every time I see a row of seaside lampposts, each with a single seagull perched on it, I wonder: Do those birds think we built the highway system for them? […]
Low weight at birth is associated with all sorts of health troubles later in life, so it seems a great idea to give nutritional supplements to pregnant women in developing […]
Yesterday’s post ended by suggesting that a single-minded obsession with population actually distracts people from the difficult realities of the quest for sustainability in this century. Lest this sound like […]
For a few decades in the 20th century, it seemed as humanity’s triumphs of public health were turning into an ironic and deadly trap. Because more babies were surviving infancy […]
When an industrialized nation's population shrinks, fewer and fewer working-age people have to support more and more retirees.
A few weeks back, the old-school anti-fertility group Optimum Population Trust issued its index of “overpopulated” nations. It names 77 countries which, it says, are “consuming more resources than they […]
With all its inefficiencies, waste and contradictions, democracy may not be equal to our social problems. But it sure is a great model of the human psyche, as writers keep […]