Last week Kate pointed me to this post about heroic stories of science saying "This seems relevant to your interests." And, in fact, a good deal of the post talks about Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History, the Union library's copy of which is sitting on my desk, where I had looked something up in it just that morning.
Editor's note: what follows is a lightly edited excerpt of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down, by Jonathan Gotschall, published by Basic Books (November 2021). In the mid-2000s I set out, along with my colleagues Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, and Dan Kruger,