Why Read Taubes?

Why do we read biographies? Why do we want to know about other people? Emile Durkheim, the French Jewish founder of sociology, once said that he knew his grandmother was recovering from a bout of illness when she began asking for gossip about the neighbors. A curiosity about others tethers us to our own individual lives. My colleague Derek Duplessie argues in a similar spirit that gossip is the beginning of philosophy. We wonder how other people are the way they are, so strange and different from us, managing continually to surprise us and yet be somehow particular selves of whom it can rightly be said, “how like him to do that!” We begin thinking about what it is within us that takes interest in these forms of human difference.