Why does loneliness cause depression and anxiety? Human beings evolved in Africa, where we lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes. You and I exist for one reason - because they figured out how to cooperate. They only made sense as a group. And every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe.... (read more)
"A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day - or an entire life - mostly encountering complete strangers."... (read more)
Following our theme of reasons for optimism, here's the estimable Robert Wright with 19 outstanding minutes on "non-zero-sumness" - a concept that may explain all of our human accomplishments to date; and which gives us very good reasons to hope that things will continue to get better.... (read more)
So I recently had occasion to re-read Steve Pinker's How the Mind Works. It is, I genuinely believe, the most important book of the 20th century.... (read more)
And so in a recent correspondence with my editor, I laid out in some detail the particulars of my literary mission as I conceive it - an amplification of the ideas I put forward some time ago on my words page.... (read more)
So anyone who knows me well knows that Steven Pinker is one of my intellectual heroes.... (read more)
Our last night in the world, Paul sat us down before dinner, and gave us the scoop about the Delta: how to avoid becoming meat for any of the local Delta denizens.... (read more)
