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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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Jury selection starts this week in the trial of Scott Roeder, who has confessed to the assassination last May of George Tiller, a doctor vilified by pro-lifers for performing late-term […]
Plastic Logic finally released its much-anticipated QUE reader today, along with news of agreements that a forest full of books, magazines and newspapers will be available on the device. The […]
Pakistan’s Chief Justice has ordered the government to recognize a third gender, so that the nation’s 80,000-300,000 hijras may fully exercise their civil rights. Hijra is a term from a […]
Warfare’s effect and risk is unique to the person. Populations face war as individuals.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying blow up Northwest Flight 253 to Detroit, is in many ways the very model of a modern terrorist. Like many al-Qaeda […]
More cuddly holiday season news: According to two architects who specialize in sustainable-living solutions, it takes twice as much land-use in a year to keep a medium-sized dog fed as […]
Just in time for the holidays comes a study that says loneliness spreads like a disease through people’s social networks. In other words, that sad, isolated feeling is contagious. It’s […]
Didn’t see this one coming: I thought Shiites were attracted to Hezbollah for its fight against Israel, or its aura of piety, or its social welfare programs. Didn’t know that, […]
The U.S. Senate passed the health-care overhaul this morning, which means there’s probably only one very risky step left before some sort of reform becomes law: reconciliation of the House […]
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 […]
Psychologists often joke that their insights into human nature come from experiments with American university students, on duty for required credit or beer money. “So we see that human beings–or […]
Nearsightedness has become ever more common in rich nations, most dramatically in Asia–80 percent of young adults in Taiwan and Singapore are myopic, where a couple of generations ago only […]
I’ve always been fascinated by the Pedestrian Do-Si-Do, that dance where you dodge to your left on the sidewalk to avoid colliding with a person walking toward you, and she […]
“I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike,” wrote William Blake. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in […]