Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

This book by Barbara Ehrenreich was genuinely recommended once in the episodes we index, on Tim Ferriss. The people who vouched for it on air: Jonathan Haidt. It comes up in conversations about consciousness, psychedelics. Every quote below is verbatim, attributed, and linked to the exact second it was said. Sourced expert opinion, not medical advice.

"Cultural historian Ehrenreich explores a human impulse that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. She uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although 16th-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christianity.

• “A wonderful book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. She says, when the European explorers went out”

  Why it counts as a recommendation: “A wonderful book”
  Jonathan Haidt · The Tim Ferriss Show · Dec 202200:14:00

  Said during "The Coddling of the American Mind and How to Become Intellectually Antifragile, Jonathan Haidt". The episode features Jonathan Haidt: Social psychologist at NYU's Stern School of Business; author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind, and (with Greg Lukianoff) The Coddling of the American Mind; founder of Heterodox Academy. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt on antifragility, moral pluralism, why universities and kids are breaking, and getting smarter, stronger, more sociable.