You May Also Like ― Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

From the best-selling author of Traffic, a brilliant and entertaining exploration of our personal tastes--why we like the things we like, and what it says about us.

Everyone knows his or her favorite color, the foods we most enjoy, and which season ofHouse of Cards deserves the most stars on Netflix. But what does it really mean when we like something? How do we decide what's good? Is it something biological? What is the role of our personal experiences in shaping our tastes? And how do businesses make use of this information? Comprehensively researched and singularly insightful,You May Also Like delves deep into psychology, marketing, and neuroscience to answer these complex and fascinating questions. From the tangled underpinnings of our food choices, to the dynamics of the pop charts and our playlists, to our nonstop procession of "thumbs" and "likes" and "stars," to our insecurity before unfamiliar works of art, the book explores how we form our preferences--and how they shape us. It explains how difficult it is, even for experts, to pinpoint exactly what makes something good or enjoyable, and how the success of companies such as Netflix, Spotify, and Yelp depends on the complicated task of predicting what we will enjoy. LikeTraffic, this book takes us on a fascinating and consistently surprising intellectual journey that helps us better understand how we perceive and appreciate the world around us.

TOM VANDERBILT has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine,The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Popular Science, The Financial Times,Smithsonian and The London Review of Books, among many others. He is a contributing editor ofWired UK, Outside, and Artforum. He is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) andSurvival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio programs, from the Todayshow to the BBC's World Service to NPR's Fresh Air. He has been a visiting scholar at NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation, a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space, and a winner of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.