Cities quickly became crucibles of inequality, a process that was accelerated by the fact that within cities people were not bound together by the same intimate kinship and social ties that were characteristic of small rural communities. As a result, people living in cities increasingly began to bind their social identity ever more tightly to the... See more

But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because... See more

Like love, parenthood, music, and mourning, work is one of the few concepts that anthropologists and travelers alike have been able to cling to when cast adrift in alien lands. For where spoken language or bewildering customs are an obstruction, the simple act of helping someone perform a job will often break down barriers far quicker than any... See more

When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants, they dodge two obvious problems. The first is that often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it.

At its most fundamental, work is always an energy transaction and the capacity to do certain kinds of work is what distinguishes living organisms from dead, inanimate matter.

Many researchers interested in understanding our cognitive evolution have focused their efforts on revealing whether our closest primate relatives and other obviously smart creatures like whales and dolphins are capable of purposeful behavior in the same way that humans are. Being purposeful requires an intuitive grasp of causality, the ability to... See more

Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

The closest thing to a universal definition of “work”—one that hunter-gatherers, pinstriped derivatives traders, calloused subsistence farmers, and anyone else would agree on—is that it involves purposefully expending energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end.

By the end of the project, Takahashi’s team had observed 268 successful matings. To their astonishment they found no correspondence between mating success and any particular tail traits. The peahens mated as enthusiastically and frequently with males that dragged underwhelming displays behind them as they did with those that possessed the fanciest... See more