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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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Carlo Maria Broschi, better known as Farinelli, was one of the most celebrated opera singers of all time, and the 18th century equivalent of a rock star (“One God and […]
New technologies bring forth new art forms, and those forms create new ways to understand life. The theater gave everyone his or her say (even the man the Queen’s grandfather […]
Disputes about evidence in social science can drag on for decades. I bet many a researcher has fantasized about the day when a world-famous panel of judges looks at the […]
People’s attitudes lag behind their times, as Hermann Broch observed. At the height of the European Enlightenment, philosophers who dreamed of universal rights accepted that men would be broken on […]
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is one of the most famous novels ever written about combat, in general and in the American Civil War, where the book is […]
There's little doubt that sports are good for the bodies and minds of people who play them. For people who watch them, though, sports are a negative.
Six months out of the year I try to spend as much time as possible on the roof of my building in Brooklyn, where I’m cooled by a non-air-conditioned breeze, […]
Accidents happen. Their causes are physical, and it’s our actions that make them likely or unlikely, not the names we call them. I know this. Yet the inherent biases of […]
I’m nonplussed by Mary Elizabeth Williams’ comment today, over at Salon, that Anthony Weiner’s impending fatherhood “drastically changed” the Weinergate drama. Not that I disagree that “the timing of Weiner’s […]
A number of responses to my post on mental illness and civil rights deserve some further thought. A number of people have pointed to the variance in definitions of mental […]
“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 […]