You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice Audiobook

Quotes

• “A tour through the world of human preferences and the companies that try to divine them… [Vanderbilt is an] amiable and thorough guide.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• [A] lively, wide-ranging study… The footnotes have a David Foster Wallace-like wit as Vanderbilt calls our attention to such issues as whether people find donuts less yummy if they taste them in a salmon cannery and whether rats enjoy grape Kool-Aid more if it is infused directly into their stomachs… Convincing… Quite funny… Clear and engaging… He is to be commended for the sheer range of material he makes accessible.

  — Lisa Zeidner, The Washington Post  

• To answer an age-old question – ‘Why do we like the things we like?

  — Vanderbilt navigates philosophy, economics, psychology, neurology and data science… As Vanderbilt explores the enigmatic forces driving these decisions, he paints an engaging, multilayered… picture of taste.

• Bounces the insights of modern data scientists off the work of generations of critics, economists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Taste, we learn, is an extremely relative phenomenon currently swerving through an age of extreme relativity… [Vanderbilt’s] key takeaway is that taste remains a complex and erratic phenomenon that’s endlessly shifting according to environmental, physical, and social pressures… Vanderbilt is a skillful synthesizer, and You May Also Like is full of unexpected connections.

  — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg

• A tour through the world of human preferences and the companies that try to divine them… [Vanderbilt is an] amiable and thorough guide to a subject that can get either fussy or murky fairly quickly, and he has an obsessive determination to get to the bottom of something we exercise so often and unthinkingly we tend to take it for granted.

  — Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review

• Vanderbilt is an intelligent writer, and there is a lot of interesting material in “You May Also Like”… Intrepid…Vanderbilt is able to identify two factors that have repeatedly been shown to have a significant influence on taste. One is social consensus; the other is familiarity. We get attracted to things that we see other people are attracted to, and we like things more the longer we like them.

  — Louis Menand, The New Yorker

• You May Also Like sets out to understand this mysterious phenomenon of how our preferences change and come to be…the book moves on a whirlwind tour of taste across its many domains, from food and music to color and even cats… [Assembles] a constellation of insights that resonate with one another, each serving to reveal another joint or detail of the bigger picture… Passionate… Enormously refreshing.

  — Sheena Iyengar, Science Magazine 

• Essential for readers who are interested in getting a glimpse of the decision-making process at influential online media companies, as well as those who are interested in the processes that govern individual preferences and taste making.

  — Library Journal

• “Entertaining… Extremely convincing… There’s much to behold in this exhaustively researched, intellectual assessment of human preference.

  — Kirkus Reviews 

• An intensive investigation of what we like, why we like it and why some­times it’s so hard to decide… Vanderbilt delivers the explanations with ample docu­mentation and enough humorous asides to make his book deliciously palatable the whole way through.

  — Sheila M. Trask, BookPage

• The danger in reading You May Also Like is that when you finally put Tom Vanderbilt’s book down, you probably think he's just made you the most interesting person in the room.

  — Faith Salie, author Approval Junkie and panelist of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!

• “We live in an age of bewildering choice, yet we are the sum total of our decisions. You May Also Like is my favorite kind of book— surprising, smart, and superbly researched. It tackles that most mysterious of subjects: what make us tick.

  — Terry O’Reilly, author of The Age of Persuasion and host of CBC radio show Under the Influence

• A fascinating romp through the mysteries of taste.

  — Susan Pinker, author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect

• You May Also Like is the best kind of science writing — deeply reported and researched, a witty investigation that’s precisely to my taste.

  — Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think

• Vanderbilt's fascinating foray into the world of tastes and why they exist makes for a book that's well worth reading...a light, informative read, and one that's thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

  —  Sandy Clark, The Star

• Convincing…Quite funny…He is to be commended for the sheer range of material he makes accessible.”

  — Washington Post

• “[Assembles] a constellation of insights that resonate with one another, each serving to reveal another joint or detail of the bigger picture…Enormously refreshing.”

  — Science

• “Navigates philosophy, economics, psychology, neurology and data science…[and] paints an engaging, multilayered…picture of taste.”

  — Globe and Mail (Toronto)

• “A fascinating exploration of personal preferences in our digital age.”

  — BookPage

• “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.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “[An] exploration of how human preferences emerge…that takes readers into the offices of companies such as Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify.”

  — Library Journal

• “There’s much to behold in this exhaustively researched, intellectual assessment of human preference.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “Narrator Jeffrey Kafer’s natural articulation and documentary speaking style work well for a pop science title. He’s engaged without sounding overly passionate or promotional…His overall performance is so right for this material.”

  — AudioFile