Daniel collects documents nobody keeps: parking regulations, dress codes, queue signage, the laminated rules taped beside a staff kettle. Somebody wrote each of these. Usually because something went wrong once, and the rule is a fossil of that incident. He finds this a more reliable guide to how people actually behave than most things written about how people actually behave.
His beat includes psychology, which means he spends a good deal of time being careful. A great many famous studies are famous because they make a memorable story, and a fair number of those did not survive later scrutiny — small samples, conditions that were never really controlled, results that quietly failed to replicate for thirty years while the anecdote kept circulating. When he writes about a study he wants to know how many people were in it and what happened when somebody tried it again. If that second part is missing, it goes in the piece.
He is drawn to the moment a practice becomes invisible: when a workaround turns into procedure, and procedure into common sense, and nobody can say why the form asks for that particular piece of information. He is less interested in whether such things are irrational than in what they were originally solving.
He lives in Montreal, works in two languages, and has noticed that most of what he writes about turns out to be a story about somebody trying to avoid an awkward conversation.
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