Behavioral Scientist Reads

The Camino de Santiago is an ancient pilgrimage that dates back over a thousand years and traces its roots back to medieval stories and miracles.

In the final episode of our Flights Summer Book Club, host Stephanie Tam shares her week-long pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Why have people been drawn to walk the Camino from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century? Why are more people than ever—over half a million in 2025, both religious and non-religious, with numbers steadily increasing—walking to Santiago today? What are they walking towards? And what are they walking away from?

And why did Stephanie decide to make the trek? What surprised her along the way? Did she find what she was looking for?

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Episode 5 was produced, edited, and mixed by Stephanie Tam with help from Evan Nesterak. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

What goes into translating a book from one language to another? How do you preserve something when your task is to change everything? What do translation and travel have in common? And why is translation, like travel, such an elusive concept?

In this episode, we speak with Jennifer Croft, the English translator of Flights, about the craft of translation and her work as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. For her work on Flights, Jennifer Croft won The Man Booker International Prize with Olga Tokarczuk in 2018.

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For a list of the authors and books discussed in the episode, and a look at some of the postcards from Jennifer Croft’s memoir, Notes on Postcards, head here: https://bookclub.behavioralscientist.org/episode-4-found-in-translation/

Episode 4 features translator and author Jennifer Croft. The episode was produced and edited by Evan Nesterak, and it was mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

In Flights, we encounter human anatomy in a number of ways—body parts in jars, wax figures, and the search for a secret preservation formula. Why did this kind of bodily preservation begin? How did it transform medical science and our understanding of where we come from? And what are the ways we can accurately understand and interpret this work from our modern vantage point?

• 00:00: Introduction to the episode
• 12:01: Interview with Sara Ray, the senior director of interpretation and engagement at the Mütter Museum, begins
• 12:01–54:51: The history of anatomical preservation
• 54:51–1:22:34: The past and present of the Mütter Museum
• 1:22:34 –1:26:48: Sara Ray answers the three traveler’s questions

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Episode 3 features historian Sara Ray, the senior director of interpretation and engagement at the Mütter Museum. The episode was produced and edited by Evan Nesterak, and it was mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

Is “travel psychology” a real thing? How have our definitions of where we’re from changed over history? What do highways, our passports, and the lines and lounges in an airport reveal about travel and movement in the modern world? And what happens when we shift from viewing humans as fixed in place to constantly in motion?

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Erratic
By Tim Cresswell
 
Sitting there for all the world
as if you owned the place.
An error. Bluestone among 
chalk. Wanderer. Heretic. 
Stowaway, suspended as the world 
warmed leaving you upended – 
culture-shocked and supersized. 
Your crystals milky,
opaque, glittering.
Brimming with another kind of 
winter. Fire and freeze. Ten 
thousand years of exile – 
now part of the scenery.

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Episode 2 features Geographer Tim Cresswell. The episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Stephanie Tam. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

Why did we choose this strange, fragmented novel for the summer book club? What do we know about its author, Olga Tokarczuk? And what are some “reading maps” we can use to start finding our way in this very different kind of story?

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Episode 1 was produced and edited by Stephanie Tam, and mixed by Phil Bodger. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.

Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.

Introducing Behavioral Scientist Reads, the podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture, and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become. 

This summer, we’re reading Flights by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature.

Flights explores the human impulse toward movement—the perpetual tension between traveling somewhere new or staying put. At times playful and surprising, at others morbid and mysterious, Flights offers us a chance to explore our own journeys—through space and time, in our minds, and over the course of our lives.

New this year, the Book Club will include: 

• A five-part podcast exploring themes from the book with guest experts
• Collaborative memory map of the places and travels that have changed us
• Live and asynchronous group discussions 

Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.

Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.