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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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This paper in the current issue of the journal Neuron claims to add some MRI findings to the evidence that human empathy and kindness stop at the border between “our […]
Basketball games, elections and other head-to-head contests seem to affect the testosterone of people who care about them. Some studies have found that testosterone production goes down in fans of […]
At The Guardian site, Martin Robbins has nailed everything that’s wrong with science news on “general interest” websites in this pitch-perfect parody. It gets at the heart of the uneasy […]
As if this weren’t bad enough, Douglas Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth, is out this week with a new grievance against France. He says it bears much of the blame […]
Delusions of control seem built into the human mind, even when they aren’t comforting. More than a few people, for example, would prefer to think hurricanes are punishments for abortions […]
Your friends likely have more friends than you do. Please don’t take that personally. As the sociologist Scott L. Feld was first to point out, this is simply a mathematical […]
In the White House, can a white conservative do more to restrain anti-Islamic bigotry than an African-American progressive? Writing on the anniversary of 9/11, a couple of writers Saturday argued […]
People like to use categories for people (race, religion, nation, class, gender) as explanations for others’ behavior (for example, I was late because there was traffic and I have a […]
Why exactly do fights break out when people are drinking? You might think it’s simple biochemistry—alcohol molecules wreaking changes on brain cells, leading to behavior change, leading to a broken […]
Like any sensible person, I worry about the imminent arrival of Skynet and the Cylons, in the form of artificial intelligences that could be physically, intellectually and perhaps, as J. […]
Science and democracy are supposed to go together like Mom and apple pie. But in the American political arena, they aren’t naturally compatible: To show people Science, you have to […]
It’s a big holiday weekend here in the U.S., so there’s a good chance that before or after reading this, you’ll be driving around lost. If you are a man, […]
An information-saturated society is going to notice plenty of weird correlations, like the Blade Runner curse or the unfortunate fate of American presidents elected in years that ended in a […]
Props to my colleague Lindsay Beyerstein for this great catch yesterday: Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle’s campaign received a donation from someone who listed her employer as “husband” and her […]
Evolution is accepted as the fundamental theory of life because, well, we see evidence of it all around us. Not because it has been irrefutably, mathematically proved—at least not yet.
One of my enduring memories of New York City right after 9/11 was the absence or religious or racial violence. As we stared up at the planeless sky or across […]
Most people consider anonymous sex in public places to be a crude, rude and immoral act. But “all that is rude ought not to be civilized with death,” as Walter […]
“Vision,” Stanford’s Bill Newsome likes to say, “does not happen in the eye. It happens in the brain.” As I mentioned in my last post, this is a general theme […]
The other shoe has dropped in Harvard’s investigation into allegations of scientific misconduct by Marc Hauser, the cognitive psychologist. Harvard announced last week that it had found Hauser responsible for […]
“I don’t want to be married anymore,” writes Elizabeth Gilbert about the start of her pre-life crisis. “I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to […]