ONE OF POLITICO'S BOOKS TO HELP YOU SURVIVE 2026 Blending the informed analysis of The Signal
and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak a fascinating
illuminating and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to
us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions with a foreword
by Steven Pinker. By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century human beings
searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of
information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears
desires and behaviors that drive us and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From
the profound to the mundane we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less
than twenty years ago seemed unfathomable. Everybody Lies offers fascinating surprising and
sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to
sex gender and more all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters
didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how
successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films
affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex
lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex men or women? Investigating these questions and
a host of others Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand
ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and
think he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is
indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing
he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases
deeply embedded within us information we can use to change our culture and the questions
we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of
us are touched by big data everyday and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies
challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
