Did I Finish This Book?

If you're a fan of big data, breezy writing, fun facts and sex and sex and sex and sex, then you'll certainly enjoy Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are . . . his theories and information are extracted from the digital confessional, the place where people are the most honest, the place where people think no one else is listening . . . he studied massive troves of Google and Pornhub searches; here are some of the things you'll learn about:

1) how racist America really is . . . and where the racists live (closer than you think)

2) the truth about Freudian slips and phallic dream imagery (neither means shit)

3) the six most popular story structures (as determined by an algorithm)

4) why 99 percent of teenagers who reported having artificial limbs on academic surveys were pulling the researchers' legs (pun provided by Dave!)

5) why parents wonder if their son is a genius and their daughter is overweight;

6) why were not as polarized as we think (Stormfront users love the NY Times)

7) how we are lying about how much we want to judge and keep up with our friends, how much we care where and how products are produced, how much we want to watch midgets having sex with porn stars, and how much we want to learn about political policy;

8) how most people are overestimating the amount of sex they are having per week (male and female estimations don't add up, and even more damning, the condom sales don't add up)

9) the ethics of using all this data . . . we don't want to end up like Minority Report, with precogs predicting crimes before they happen and then pre-crime units preemptively abrogating people's rights-- or . . . if we could avert something like the recent Manchester bombing . . . maybe we do;

10) why non-fiction conclusions don't matter (most people don't finish non-fiction books).