Cody Kommers

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Welcome!

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My name is Cody, and I’m a PhD student in social psychology at Oxford. I write about psychology, travel, and the creative process, especially in writing and science. I also host a podcast, called Cognitive Revolution. In each episode, I interview an eminent scientist, author, or academic about the personal side of their intellectual journey. My academic research focuses on when people are willing to put in effort to help, hurt, or understand people in different social groups. The best way to keep up with all my latest work is through my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my writing, I try to find an intersection between our theoretical understanding of the world and life as it’s actually lived. I believe that the point of life — one of them, anyway — is to appreciate as much of it as possible, as deeply as possible. When it comes to analysis and scrutiny, everything is fair game.

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Here are a few of my favorite recent pieces:

• For Free: On what it is about music that moves us emotionally

• As with a Harvest: A story about a killer in the Rwandan genocide

• Does Travel Reduce Prejudice?: A think-piece on intergroup contact theory

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I’ve also written a lot about graduate school, especially how to do it better and how it can be improved:

• The Graduate Student’s Guide to Podcasting

• Actually Against Academia

• Requiem for the Fuck-Around Century

• 24 Reasons Not to Go to Graduate School

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Some other miscellaneous pieces I love include:

• The Self-Help of T.S. Eliot

• A four-part biographical sketch of Gordon Allport (audio version)

• My favorite reads of 2021 (featuring Doors, Plots, Planets, and… Hungarians)

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As for episodes of Cognitive Revolution, you find can a list of my favorite episodes here. These were three of the most fun:

• Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize winning author

• Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist and author

• Nancy Kanwisher, neuroscientist and general purpose badass

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By far my favorite form of writing is the travelogue. In 2020, I released a season of podcast called Notes from the Field, featuring my travel writing. Three of my favorite episodes from that season are:

• The Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho

• Istanbul: The Permanent Market

• Christmas in Myanmar

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An example of a more recent travelogue is my piece on football pitches in Oxford.

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