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People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much
Your social life has a biological limit: 150. That’s the number—Dunbar’s number, proposed by the British psychologist Robin Dunbar three decades ago—of people with whom you can have meaningful relationships. What makes a relationship meaningful? Dunbar
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Natural Disasters Bring Married Couples Closer, at Least for Awhile
That’s according to a first-of-its-kind study that looked at couples in the Houston area before and after Hurricane Harvey. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, has implications for how best to help families as
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How Our Friends Affect Our Food
In 2013, Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show, set aside the program’s usual focus on politics to talk about something more important: pizza, specifically Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. “Deep-dish pizza is not only not better than
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What We Do and Don’t Know About Kindness
Since the pandemic began, people tell me they’ve been thinking a lot more about kindness. Maybe they’ve noticed the mutual aid groups that have sprung up around the world to help during lockdowns, or perhaps
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Making Eye Contact Signals a New Turn in a Conversation
What is found in a good conversation? It is certainly correct to say words—the more engagingly put, the better. But conversation also includes “eyes, smiles, the silences between the words,” as the Swedish author Annika
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The Point of the Cruelty
When a reporter asked Richard Daley, then the mayor of Chicago, whether his gun-control policies were effective, Daley pointed to a rifle and shouted, “If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective this
