About Us

Psychgeist Media has its roots in a serendipitous connection forged almost a decade ago. In 2013, when Psychgeist Founder Dave Nussbaum was the editor of Character & Context (the blog for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology) his wife Jane was approached by a New York Times editor who happened to share her last name and had stumbled across her website by chance. He invited her to write about her research for the “Gray Matter” column that used to run in the NYT’s Sunday Review. Jane invited Dave to co-author that article with her, after which Dave would occasionally send strong Character & Context submissions to the NYT for consideration, thus beginning a long-standing relationship.

What started off as the occasional favor soon became a hobby, as Dave recognized that there was more research that belonged in front of a wider audience. More people also began sending Dave pitches and drafts. Soon, the relationship with the NYT expanded to other news outlets, because not everything could find a home at the Times. It quickly became clear that there was a need for someone who could serve as a bridge between scientists and the media—someone with a foot in both camps who could help forge connections and translate across the sometimes-diverging assumptions, backgrounds, and sensibilities of each side. And so, over time, that hobby began to grow into a full-time job, with dozens of pitches a year coming from hundreds of different scholars.

Eventually, the time came to think about turning this ad hoc undertaking into a more formalized non-profit—a sustainable platform that could support the Op-Ed pitching, while also catalyzing other modes of communication and involving more of the community in the process. With the help of Isobel Heck, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Joseph Fridman, who Dave met through NYT editor James Ryerson’s Op-Ed Writing Workshop, Beyond the Ivory Tower, and an incredibly helpful and supportive advisory board, Psychgeist Media was born. 

Psychgeist is a play on the German word zeitgeist, meaning the spirit of the times. The name aims to reflect our mission, in that we hope to capture the psychological spirit of the times in the writing that we help share with the public.

As we open our doors this year, we are deeply excited about the community we hope to build and about the work we hope this new organization will make possible. We invite you to be part of our story as it continues to unfold.