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
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.
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.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
