I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, April 7th.

What's up with us? From the slap, and you know which one I mean, to the freakouts on airplanes and Marjorie Taylor

Greens and Lauren Beaubourts outburst during the State of the Union address, even just that they

were there having been elected to Congress, maybe, we seem to be embracing rudeness and more often

crossing a line into outright violence. Everyone is acting so weird,

as Olga Hazan puts it in the first sentence of her recent essay in the Atlantic. Her beat for the

Atlantic is science and health, and she knows a thing or two about weird. It's the title of her first

book that's just out in paperback. she's here to share some theories about what's

going on with us us meaning our society as a whole and we want to hear your theories and your stories

are you finding yourself behaving worse are you seeing it in others why do you think that is and for

our older listeners do you remember ever going through a similarly

crazy time as a society and how did that end? Or is this unprecedented in your experience?

As we welcome back to the show, Olga Hazan from the Atlantic. Hi, Olga. Thanks for coming on today.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

And really interesting article, very thought-provoking, and I threw the politics in there,

but when you wrote everyone is acting so weird, what egregiously antisocial behaviors did you

mostly have in mind? Yeah, well, I mean, so the slap was kind of at the Oscars, was obviously

kind of the most, the thing that everyone was talking about.

But, you know, you basically can't open social media these days without seeing another viral video of, you know, someone screaming at a flight attendant or a gate agent about a mask or, you know, some other reason. There were even some viral

videos of people freaking out at ski resorts. And on top of that, actually kind of more

serious incidents like violent crime is on the rise, in particular the murder rate. And just anecdotally,

I'm hearing from a lot of people that kind of disruptive behavior

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