I am an anthropologist and cognitive scientist who studies some of the things that make us human—but not the obvious ones. I am mostly interested in those things that may appear puzzling or pointless, but fill our lives with meaning and purpose. Growing up in Greece, I read National Geographic Magazine and reveled in the documentaries of Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, and Jacques Cousteau, which sparked in me a passion for exploration through the combined lenses of personal experience and scientific scrutiny. In my own research, I have spent two decades studying ritual by conducting several years of ethnographic research and bringing scientific measurements into real-life settings.
I wrote...
Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
Ritual presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Seemingly senseless acts pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now. A new science of ritual reveals that it is a primordial part of human nature, that helps us soothe our anxieties, connect, find meaning, and discover who we are.
This book relates to a lot of what I’ve learned in my own research about rituals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it argues that we humans are not hedonists by nature. Yes, we desire comfort and we pursue all kinds of pleasures. But we also often embrace struggle, effort, and even fear and pain, and those are in fact the things that make our lives truly meaningful. From watching horror films and climbing mountains to raising children and performing painful rituals, Paul Bloom argues that, in the right context, suffering can be part of a life well-lived.
“This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It’s an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
One of BehavioralScientist's"Notable Books of 2021"
From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives
If intoxication has so many negative outcomes, why do all human cultures practice it? In Drunk, historian Edward Slingerland puts forward a radical as well as fascinating hypothesis. He argues that far from being an evolutionary accident, the human penchant for alcohol (and other intoxicants) has played—and continues to play—important roles in human societies: it helps alleviate stress, boost creativity and innovation, and promote trust, bonding, and cooperation. Best read while mildly intoxicated.
While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place.
Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Drunk shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often…
Did you know that your friends have more friends than you do? This may sound strange at first, but once you realize how social contagion works, you will see its power to shape our lives everywhere. From obesity, smoking, and happiness to buying, voting, and sexual practices, we affect each other’s ideas, attitudes, and behaviors in never-ending ways. But it doesn’t stop there: our actions affect and are influenced by, those of our friends, our friends’ friends, and even our friends’ friends’ friends. We are deeply embedded in social networks, and they define every aspect of our existence. This is one of those books that have changed the way I see the world.
Renowned scientists Christakis and Fowler present compelling evidence for our profound influence on one another's tastes, health, wealth, happiness, beliefs, even weight, as they explain how social networks form and how they operate.
Ask any anthropologist and they’ll readily tell you that the secret of our success as a species is culture. But few—if any—will be able to offer such a comprehensive argument as to why and how. This book tells a tale of two forces, human culture and the human genome, which co-evolved to make us more successful than any other species, not by making us faster, stronger, or even necessarily smarter as individuals, but by making us better cultural learners and therefore allowing us to become wiser as a species.
Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in…
Why do we cooperate? To a highly cooperative species like ourselves, it might seem obvious that we do, but from a rational perspective, individuals benefit more from pursuing their own narrow interests. To answer this question, this book takes a step back, or rather a few million steps, evolutionarily speaking. From the level of the cell to that of complex societies, it examines cooperation as a driving force in nature, allowing us to see ourselves as part of a much bigger story.
Why cooperate? This may be the most important scientific question we have ever, and will ever, face.
The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. Cooperation explains how strands of DNA gave rise to modern-day nation states. It defines our extraordinary ecological success as well as many of the most surprising features of what make us human: not only why we live in families, why we have grandmothers and why women experience the menopause, but also why we become paranoid and jealous, and why we cheat.
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
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