For a lot of people, New Year’s Eve is an excuse to get highly intoxicated. For Worldview, it’s a reason to discuss how and why we drink. Dwight Heath, a professor of anthropology at Brown University and author of Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on Alcohol and Culture, describes how culture shapes drinking habits. Northwestern University professor Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern says history explains why alcoholism is so pervasive in Russia.