Jeroen van Baar is a cognitive neuroscientist and psychiatric epidemiologist. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. He uses science to illuminate diverse social issues including political polarization and the mental health crisis. His work has been featured in Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Economist, among others. He has given invited talks at many companies and non-profits around the world, supporting them with evidence-based tools to promote wellbeing. He is writing a book about uncertainty and publishes updates and blogs at www.jeroenvanbaar.nl/newsletter. Get in touch: https://en.jeroenvanbaar.nl/contact.
by Jeroen van Baar Since the murder of UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson drew everyone’s attention to the insurance company, two reports on its dealings have made my blood boil. Background info: UHC’s parent company, UnitedHealth, also owns a service provider branch called Optum and a pharmacy branch called OptumRx. The Wall Street Journal wrote…
by Jeroen van Baar Humans are beings of staggering complexity. We don’t just consist of ourselves: billions of bacteria in our gut help with everything from digestion to immune response. In recent years, scientists have started to uncover how this ‘gut microbiome’ shapes a variety of health outcomes including obesity and depression. For instance, when…
by Jeroen van Baar In science, a good model describes one feature of the natural world well or solves one difficult problem. A great model, on the other hand, is often multipurpose. It serves as metaphor even where nobody expected it to. Take one keyword of our current society: busy. In a 2018 Pew survey,…
by Jeroen van Baar In the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History, British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss key events from the past at great length and in sumptuous depth. I was listening to their fourth episode on the French Revolution when a detail caught my ear. Part of the reason the Revolution…
by Jeroen van Baar Now that I live in Washington DC, I take every opportunity I get to sample the seafood sold at a floating market down by the wharf. It’s the oldest open-air fish market in continuous operation in the United States, dating back to 1805. But while the market is a local feature,…
by Jeroen van Baar Jonathan Haidt knows how to be a contrarian. In 2015, the NYU Stern social psychology professor founded Heterodox Academy, an organization that aims to bring viewpoint diversity to college campuses. He wrote an Atlantic article and book entitled The coddling of the American mind, in which he claimed that trigger warnings…