My Favourite Books of 2022
Every year, it is time for my list of some of my favourite new Christmas albums as well as a couple of books I particularly enjoyed over the last year (see also the 2019, 2020 & 2021 editions). As usual, I did not get as much reading done as I had hoped to (as evidenced by the towers of unread books I have all around me), but I still managed to get through a couple of volumes, a selection of which features below. As for the Christmas albums, slim pickings this year I’m afraid, but I found some that I like and I hope you will, too — and as a bonus, you get Charles Mingus’s recipe for ridiculously strong eggnog to get you through the season.‘If Then’ is one of those history books that really read more like a thriller, with a hint of Tom Wolfe. Lepore, a professor of History at Harvard University, takes us along on a wild ride as she follows the ups and downs of the Simulmatics Corporation, one of the pre-cursors to Cambridge Analytica. She tells a story of big dreams, ambition, and arrogance against the backdrop of the cold war, involving some of the leading social scientists of the day. Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behaviour — but with computers that are outgunned by your modern high-school calculator and data that doesn’t even come close to what is available today. As every good story this one, too, ends in tears for most of those involved. What makes the book so interesting is that Lepore explores the birth of themes and technologies that still very much concern us today: attempts at manipulating voters and the public, scientific racism, the belief in the superiority of data, computing, and prediction, AI and, yes, data journalism — take your pick.
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