Annals of Behavior

History & Human Behavior

The Merchant Who Lived Through the Black Death Described Your 2020 Neighbors Perfectly

A Florentine merchant named Gregorio Dati kept a detailed personal journal during the Black Death, and his observations about denial, reckless social gatherings, conspiracy theories, and caregiver collapse map onto documented American COVID-19 behavior with unsettling precision. The parallel is not poetic — it is scientific. Pandemic psychology appears to be among the most conserved and predictable features of the human mind.

Mar 12, 2026

Social Psychology

The Architecture of Anxiety: What Five Millennia of Border Walls Reveal About the Human Mind

Humans have been constructing monumental barriers at their borders for at least three thousand years, and the archaeological record is unambiguous: the walls consistently fail to accomplish what their builders claimed they would. If the engineering doesn't work, perhaps we have been misidentifying what problem it was ever meant to solve.

Mar 12, 2026

Politics & Power

Obstruction Is Ancient: What Roman Senators Knew About Killing a Bill Without Voting

The filibuster feels like a peculiarly modern American dysfunction, but Roman senators were weaponizing procedural delay two thousand years before C-SPAN existed. The mechanics have changed. The psychology never has.

Mar 12, 2026

Technology & Digital Culture

From Frontpage to Footnote: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg

Digg once stood as the undisputed king of social news aggregation, shaping how millions of Americans discovered content on the early internet. Its collapse — and the improbable rise of Reddit in its wake — remains one of the most instructive cautionary tales in the history of digital media. What went wrong, and can Digg's repeated attempts at reinvention ever recapture what was lost?

Mar 12, 2026