From the bestselling 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 favourite colour, the foods we most enjoy, and which season of The Sopranos 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 to develop and sell their products?
In You May Also Like, Tom Vanderbilt dives deep into this complex and fascinating world. He explores the physiology of eating to reveal how our taste buds, which can only recognize five tastes, interact with our olfactory systems and our memories to create an astounding array of flavours. He shows how difficult it is, even for experts, to pinpoint exactly what makes something good or enjoyable, and how companies like Netflix can make or lose millions based on their ability to predict what we will enjoy. Like his bestselling book Traffic, Vanderbilt's new book takes us on a stimulating and surprising intellectual journey that helps us better understand our world and ourselves, and the things we so often take for granted.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 4, 2016

In his previous book, Vanderbilt (Traffic) wrote about why people drive the way they do. In this expansive follow-up, he takes a deep look at why people like what they like. Vanderbilt covers the topic exhaustively, examining varied social and psychological factors. He interviews, among other people, the vice president of product innovation for Netflix, the principal engineer at "music intelligence" company Echo Nest, and a Dutch psychologist who also happens to be a judge at a Paris cat show. In each chapter, he explores a different area of taste, including food, social networks, music playlists, and art. As he concludes (in a pithy "field guide to liking"), "Trying to explain, or understand, any one person's particular tastes including one's own is always going to be a maddeningly elusive and idiosyncratic enterprise." Reading this book will cause readers to think twice before clicking "like" on Facebook, rating a film on Netflix, or ordering what the server says is the menu's most popular item.

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