On this week’s episode of Out Loud, Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, speaks with the psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova. In the past year, Konnikova has written numerous articles for this site about the science and psychology of everyday life, and this month she is launching her own blog. She speaks with Thompson about some of her recent and most popular pieces (on the science of yawning, why we eat and gain weight, and the problem with open-office work environments), explains how immigrating to the U.S. from Russia as a child sparked her interest in language and psychology, and describes the appeal of writing about scholarly research for a popular audience. “I can … see connections that I wouldn’t see if I were just reading deeply in one particular area,” she says. “Being able to conceptualize that, synthesize it … in a way that makes other people interested in the mind … I think that’s incredibly rewarding.”

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