Come Together

“Participants must pierce multiple parts of their bodies with needles and skewers and attach hooks to their backs, with which they then drag a cart for more than four hours. After that, they climb the mountain.” The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova on the studies that support the idea that “painful rites seem to be a way of engineering the kind of affinity that arises naturally among people who have suffered similar traumatic experiences.” (Still, why don’t we start by just meeting for coffee…)